QB Performance Plots For NFL Week 6: Peyton Makes His Mark

• 2 comments - NFL - posted by Gregory Matthews on October 18, 2012

This is a guest post by Greg Matthews, founder of Stats In The Wild, a blog focused on sports analytics and data visualization. If you’re interested in guest posting on TeamRankings, email us your post and we’ll consider it.

(Just click on the graphic below to enlarge it…)

Aaron Rodgers threw 6 touchdowns, no interceptions, and 338 passing yards to lead all quarterbacks this past week with a passer rating of 133.8.

Peyton Manning also turned in a fantastic performance leading his team to an epic come from behind victory over the Chargers on Monday night. Manning threw for 309 yards and averaged 10.3 yards per attempt along with 3 touchdowns to only 1 interception. Perhaps most impressive of all is that he completed 24 of his 30 pass attempts for a completion percentage of 80%.

One other interesting aspect of the graph is how similar the performances of Josh Freeman and Russell Wilson where this past week. Their passer ratings were similar, 124.7 and 133.7, but there are many different ways to achieve similar passer ratings. They did it with remarkably similar stat lines this week.

Some of the week’s worst performances were Andrew Luck, Brady Quinn, Philip Rivers (and his 4 interceptions), and, surprisingly, Alex Smith. Smith’s passer rating in week 6 was 43.1 (worst of all quarterbacks with at least 20 attempts) which is a drop of over 100 points from his week 5 passer rating of 156.2 when he led all quarterbacks.