Yes, I did listen to the radio broadcast of Thursday night’s football game at work and watch the highlight reel afterwards, and yes a lot of the blame for the Packers embarrassing 34-20 loss to the Lions at Lambeau after falling behind 27-3 at halftime was on an offensively line that couldn’t block, a run-first offense that gained a total of 27 yards rushing even with Aaron Jones back on the field, and a defense that either can’t stop the run or isn’t allowed to.
But Jordan Love’s performances over the past two games—notwithstanding the comeback win against the Saints that still should have ended in a loss—have been much less effective than in the first two games if you just go by QB rating. His ratings over the past two games were barely half what they were the first two games, although throwing 6 TD passes and zero interceptions on just 50 passes would inflate those ratings, and in the past two games he has come back down to reality, throwing only 1 TD pass and has been intercepted three times.
Isn’t a young quarterback supposed to “improve” over time? The opposite seems to be happening at the moment. On a Packer fan page, acmepackingcompany.com, Paul Noonan notes an oddity revealed by the statistical website https://rbsdm.com/stats/stats/. After the first two weeks of the season, this graphic…
…caused him to ask the question: “The man is first in EPA per Play but last in CPOE. What gives, and what’s going to regress first?” EPA is defined by Noonan is
Expected Points Added, it’s a measure of how many points, on average a team was likely to score before a play given down, distance, and time in the game, versus how many points, on average, a team is likely to score after a play given those same factors. Subtract one from the other and you get an approximation of just how impactful that play was. EPA is in truth a team stat, not a QB stat, but the QB is so important on passing plays that it serves as a decent proxy for value added.
CPOE is
Completion Percentage Over Expected, tells us how many more (or fewer) passes a quarterback completes compared to what a quarterback throwing the same distance per pass would complete. If a QB throws a lot of short passes, their expected completion percentage is much higher than a QB who throws deep a lot. This metric helps to tell us whether or not a check-down artist is completing as many passes as a checkdown artist should, or whether a deep ball gunslinger is completing as many passes as your typical deep ball gunslinger.
The above graphic seems to show that Love after two weeks was “last” in the “expected” pass completion percentage for the type of passes thrown (most notably on short passes), yet was first overall in the average effectiveness of plays. What the graphic should indicate is that if the quarterback is not completing passes in line with the norm, the general effectiveness of the average play should be down similarly:
It’s WEIRD to not have these numbers sync up, and upon first glance, it doesn’t seem great for Love’s prospects going forward. The obvious explanation would be that in the small sample of two games, Love has hit on a disproportionate number of high value throws, and that over the season, his incompletions will reach a more even distribution, and his efficiency will tank.
Perhaps Love was merely “lucky” his first two games with high ratings. If a quarterback is completing 50 percent of his passes, his overall effectiveness could still be higher than a quarterback completing 70 percent if a higher percentage of the completions are “impactful.” It was noted that deep pass interference calls, while not technically completions, still inflated the effectiveness of the play more than, say, two pass completions that did not net 10 yards. If Love continued to rely on “luck” it would inevitably run out, and he in fact currently has the lowest expected completion percentage (although no longer with the largest gap between "expected" and actual), so his general effectiveness would also inevitably decline.
After four games (but not including Sunday’s games overall), this updated graphic does indeed show Love dropping in overall efficiency:
Love is no longer last in CPOE, but his EPA has fallen considerably, although still about “average.” Plenty of people are still giving Love a pass by blaming the "catch radius" of a particular receiver, or despite the issues with the offensive line he on occasion throws a good ball with pressure in his face. Noonan said after Week 2 we should be “skeptical of a huge regression from Love,” although he admits that
Love is just a much better intermediate thrower than he is a short or deep thrower. That’s not ideal, but so far, it seems to be almost certainly true. He’s a feel thrower, at his best when he can let it rip. Short throws are more “footwork and mechanics” throws, and it’s still a weak spot for him. It’s also an area that can be improved on with practice. The deep ball is a different story, but with reps and chemistry, that will improve too.
We did see Love complete a couple of deep balls against the Lions without the aid of DPIs; but even though both Jones and Watson returned, and although the latter caught a TD pass, neither player was utilized much, and it remains to be seen if they will be going forward if they are injury-prone, especially when opposing teams have a better understanding of Love’s limitations. We see him making those deep drops on pass plays, which indicates he has no trust of the offensive line, but also that he is incapable of making quick reads and getting the ball out of his hands quicker. That is not good, and can’t be expected to get “better” when playing better teams like the Lions. The Packers could be 1-3 as easily as they could be 3-1 at this point, and it isn’t clear which way the team will go now.
The only “silver lining” in this is that Aaron Rodgers also won his first two games in 2008 and lost the next two, with his “rating” similarly decreasing after two 115+ performances; although the Packers finished 6-10, 8 of those losses were by 4 points or less. A year later Rodgers threw for 4434 yards, 30 TDs and just 7 Ints and made the playoffs, and the Super Bowl in his third season as a starter; I’m not ready to put Love out of the Brett Hundley class just yet.
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