Mac Jones may not be one of the NFL’s elite passers, but the New England Patriots quarterback did a nice job of running the team’s system in his rookie season. And a recent model from Pro Football Focus supports that assessment. PFF’s Arjun Menon and Judah Fortgang evaluated how often quarterbacks made the best decision on any given play.
The idea was to look at whether the quarterback was targeting the receiver who projected to make the most of each play. (They break it down into much greater depth, which you should check out.) Ultimately, Jones landed at 13th in the NFL. Unsurprisingly, former Patriots quarterback Tom Brady ranked No. 1.
Introducing QB decision making: execution is crucial to QB play, but how QBs set themselves up for success by throwing to right receivers is half the battle. @arjunmenon100 and I quantified QB decision making, setting up a new way to evaluate QBs
Article: https://t.co/dIi8gPgFe5 pic.twitter.com/TbDyA8iqIG— Jrfortgang (@throwthedamball) July 6, 2022
The next phase of this model was a ranking of the execution of those decisions. Jones may have targetted the correct receiver — meaning the one most likely to create a successful play — with great regularity. But the folks at PFF dove deeper to see how well Jones’ decisions went. Did the quarterback throw a completion or an incompletion? Did he throw an accurate pass or an inaccurate one?
That’s where Jones’ ranking isn’t as flattering. He fell to 22nd in those rankings — shockingly just one spot behind Brady at 21st. Because Brady is far and away the best decision-maker in the NFL, it doesn’t matter that he is a middle-of-the-road executor. For Jones, who is slightly above average in decision making and below average in execution, he will need to improve in one or both categories before joining the tier of elite QBs.
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