QB Performance Plots for Week 13: Romo Nearly Perfect

December 5, 2012 - by Gregory Matthews

This is a guest post by Greg Matthews (Twitter: @StatsInTheWild), 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.

Tony Romo shined this week as he led his Dallas team, who did everything possible to make their betting fans miserable, to victory this week over the Philadelphia Eagles. Romo completed 22 of 27 passes for 303 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions, averaging 11.2 yards per attempt. That performance was good for a nearly “perfect” passer rating of 150.5.

Romo was closely followed by Brady Quinn and Cam Newton, who clashed head-to-head in Week 13, with the Chiefs ultimately prevailing for their second win of the year. Quinn and Newton compiled passer ratings of 132.1 and 121.2, respectively.

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


Quinn completed 19 of his 23 passes for 201 yards while Newton went 15 of 27 for 232 yards through the air, adding 78 yards on the ground, and the two combined for five touchdowns. While this game featured a quarterback match-up where both players had very good games, Week 13 also featured one of the worst head-to-head quarterback performances of the season.

By a scoreboard shattering score of 7-6, the New York Jets beat (in the loosest sense of the word) the Arizona Cardinals, a team that is currently in the midst of a cringe-inducing 8 game slide after starting the season 4-0. The game featured (again, in the loosest sense of the word) Mark Sanchez versus Ryan Lindley.

Sanchez completed only 10 of his 21 passes for 97 yards and three interceptions. For those of you scoring at home, that’s a passer rating of 21.4.

The truly impressive part about this performance, though, is that Sanchez managed to amass his impressive interception number in about 40 minutes as he was removed from the game in favor of Greg McElroy who ultimately was responsible for the game’s only, winning touchdown.

Not to be outdone by his rival on the other side of the field, Ryan Lindley, the current contestant on “Who Wants to be a Cardinals Quarterback,” managed numbers nearly as woeful as Sanchez. Lindley completed 10 of 31 passes, which at just over 32% is literally off the charts. He finished the game with no TDs, one pick, and mere 72 yards, good for 2.3 yards per attempt.

That stat line is good for a slightly-better-than-Sanchez passer rating of 28.0.

Finally, here’s what I find most impressive about the performances of Lindley and Sanchez last week: Drew Brees threw FIVE interceptions in his Week 13 game and those two still managed to accumulate a lower passer rating than Brees.