From the article, at the risk of getting in trouble:
How do you evaluate college football’s next great quarterbacks?
Inspired by Kevin Cole’s work investigating NFL QBs, I built a model that attempts to capture how a lot of us think about quarterbacks and turn it into predictions about their future performance, specifically their success rate. We can use this model to rank the projected starting quarterbacks in college football’s Power 5 conferences and illustrate the floor and ceiling for each player.
I define success rate as the percentage of plays that generated positive Expected Points Added (EPA), which I’ve also adjusted for down and distance and strength of the opposing defense. For those unfamiliar with the concept of EPA, a helpful analytics primer can be found here.
(And then there was a link to another article)
By using data such as recruiting rankings, size and a player’s conference, I can incorporate many of the common beliefs we all have about these quarterbacks to produce a baseline career projection before they set foot on campus. From there, I update this projection as they begin to play and slowly place more weight on their actual performance than priors.
My model splits out passing and rushing into two components with their own projections. I then calculate a weighted score from the median projections, with 85 percent weight on a quarterback’s passing and 15 percent on their rushing to produce the rankings.
The model is hardly infallible and should be considered a starting point for debate, rather than the be-all and end-all. Players expected to break out who have fewer career snaps (Drew Allar, Joe Milton) will be ranked lower because the model has more uncertainty about them. The model also doesn’t have knowledge of schematic differences, athleticism or scouting reports. Despite these limitations, I believe this model is a useful tool in evaluating quarterbacks because the starting quarterback’s rating has shown to be a good predictor of future individual success and has a strong relationship to winning games.
Now, let’s get to the rankings, which here are limited to projected Power 5 starting quarterbacks. These will be fluid through the season as more data is added. After the ratings, The Athletic’s David Ubben weighs on who the model underrates and overrates and who we can expect to move up and down the rankings as the 2023 season progresses.
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