It has been a statistically superlative season for Lamar Jackson, who seems to reach new milestones weekly.
The next significant record to fall will likely be a quarterback’s career rushing yards, as the Baltimore Ravens signal-caller is only 108 yards behind Michael Vick and his benchmark of 6,109.
Jackson is currently second on the list, with 6,001 career rushing yards, so he is just one excellent game away from being crowned the new king of this statistic.
Getting it done against the arch-rival and division-leading Pittsburgh Steelers in a game of this magnitude would make it even sweeter. If not, it should come on Christmas Day at the Houston Texans. According to StatMuse, Jackson dominates the rushing yards per game statistic among quarterbacks.
He has averaged 60 yards per game rushing for his career, well ahead of Vick’s 42.7 ypg. Among the top 25, there is only one other quarterback in the top 50 ypg, and he’ll be on the opposite sideline this weekend.
Justin Fields, 23rd all-time in QB career rushing yards, averages 50.2. Of course, Fields is not even remotely in the same universe as Jackson as a passer, who enters this game with a 34-3 TD-INT ratio.
One of the significant keys to Jackson’s success has been his ability to manage the football and be a more “cautious” passer. RG conducted a study of “Quarterback Caution,” which included data from January 2018 to November of this year. The methodology was intense, including over a dozen statistical categories encompassing individual and team metrics.
The study covered all quarterbacks who played 90 games over those seven years. Jackson had a 13.21% “aggressiveness” percentage, making him the third most cautious quarterback behind only Patrick Mahomes (10.17% aggressive), who is the face of the NFL, and Jared Goff (12.31%), who has led the total turnaround of what has traditionally been one of the league’s worst franchises.
As expected, Lamar is in an elite company regarding quarterback caution. The study showed that cautious quarterbacks win games and put up big numbers. According to the RG study, Jackson has the fourth-best red zone career scoring rate, at 58.8%.
Much of that is due to the reigning NFL MVP perfectly embodying the definition of “dual threat.” He is every bit an elite passer as he is an elite runner. Being equally able to make plays with his arms and legs makes it impossible for him to game plan against them.