Quote
BearlyThere
Stafford definitely throws deep more which may affect the accuracy. Reading the Lions board, they feel like Stafford doesn't have a lot of touch on short range and dump offs. A lot of bullets.
I've studied deep passing numbers and trends over the years. Unfortunately no one has those stats anymore (espn used to). Now some people just do a simple over or under 20 yards and that's it. But when the stats were available, what I saw was that no one throws deep often enough for it to affect their overall completion percentage in any appreciable way. If someone was throwing genuine deep balls of 30 yards or more on as much as 5% of their attempts, that would be an unusually high number.
If it means anything, in terms of Stafford, we do have these stats:
Big play passes of 25 yards or more (though this stat doesn't separate YAC yards from in the air yards): Stafford ranks 12th.
On third and long he ranks 1st.
On yards per pass attempt he ranks 3rd.
On yards after the catch he ranks 7th.
That's not as good as what I used to find on espn, where you could actually look at the percentage of balls thrown--in the air--at or behind the LOS, 1-10 yards, 11-20 yards, 21-30 yards, and over 30 yards. You would get attempts, completions, and qb rating for each category.
....
