Shifting the Perspective of Rookie Quarterbacks in Fantasy

Last week, we talked about whether or not rookie/second year receivers who break out at the end of the year can carry the momentum into following years. I then teased we would be doing something similar this week.

And we are, sort of. We’re talking quarterbacks. But we’re not quite discussing breakout quarterbacks. While it’s kind of a thing, it’s usually not quite as noticeable as a breakout stretch by a receiver, for example, unless you’re Bryce Young in the final weeks of 2024.

The main thing I will be looking at is this. Are rookie quarterbacks improving during the second half of the season? Like I discussed last time, we see people talking about receivers in that way all the time. But do rookie quarterbacks do the same? And what might we learn from it?

This is the second part of my “Ballout or Fallout” series. If you’d like to read part one about receivers, please do! It’s packed with a lot of useful info.

Now let’s get to it!

What are we looking at exactly?

First off, we’re looking at rookies only. Surprise! But secondly, they had to start the majority of their respective team's games that season, as well as starting at least four games from Weeks 1-9, and four games in Weeks 10-18. So while guys like Trevor Lawrence, Davis Mills, and Daniel Jones fit into this study, Justin Fields and Will Levis do not. 😥 

I also filtered out starts with few pass attempts to take out outliers, such as Mac Jones during the snow bowl in his rookie year where he threw three passes the entire game, or games where the QB was injured early on in the game. Sadly, it meant that a couple of guys who met the start’s qualifications at first, were disqualified when adjusted. I do think that it improves the accuracy of the results, however.

Another key thing to note is raw stats aren’t important here. Those numbers can be greatly swayed by personnel, playcalling, and offensive style. I wanted something that was a little less dependent on that and more on the quarterback himself. I think looking at efficiency and per-game stats, while not perfect, does help balance things out. So I didn’t look at raw passing yards, I looked at yards per attempt. Instead of purely passing touchdowns, it’s touchdown rate. And the same for interceptions. And so on.

In total, I compared first half and second half:

• Completion percentage (Comp %)

• TD rate

• INT rate

• Yards Per Attempt

• Sacks per game

• Poor passes per game

• Fantasy PPG (FPPG)

I went back to 2015 for this study, which was as far back as some of the advanced data from FantasyPros would allow me to go. In total, we have a sample of 23 quarterbacks.

How do rookie QBs improve?

What’s interesting, is that at a high level, quarterbacks just kinda stay where they are. Of the 25, 44% improved their Comp %. 48% improved their INT rate, poor pass per game, and Y/A. Only 44% improved their sacks per game.

So far, it doesn’t look like we’re learning much. But then something interesting happens. 70% of rookies improved their TD rate, and in turn, 65% of them improved their FPPG (15 of the 23). But that’s not the full picture either. For some, that increase was only marginal (five improved by less than one PPG). For others, it was a sizeable increase (eight improved their PPG by three or more). So there were varying amounts of improvement. For what it’s worth, only three QBs improved their PPG without improving their TD rate.

Of the 8 who didn’t improve their PPG, five were already averaging at least 18 PPG in the first half of the year. For reference, that would have been the QB15 in PPG last season (with the QB12 averaging 18.6 PPG). Of those five, all of them maintained at least 16 PPG in the second half of the season (those five? Marcus Mariota, Dak Prescott, Kyler Murray, Justin Herbert, and CJ Stroud). ✅ 

During the 2024 season, I wrote about how streaming the quarterback position might be the way to go in the future. In that article, I detailed that in a streaming option, you’re aiming for at least 16 points to feel ok about your choice. Should I use that same parameter of 16 points for this study, that means 22 of the 25 rookie QBs in our study, or 87%, improved or stayed “just fine”. It’s manipulating the numbers a bit, but sometimes it’s fun to do that.

Even if we abandon the adjustment, a 65% rate is not bad. But what exactly can we take away from this?

Diving Deeper into the PPG

I wanted to see why exactly we saw a 65% rise in PPG. Granted, fantasy PPG includes rushing scores, so that is part of it, not just passing. But either way, what might we take away from this?

So I dove a little deeper. Surprisingly, there’s not a massive decrease in games where rookies bust from first half to second half. They’re inconsistent like rookie QBs are expected to be. There also isn’t an increase in games where rookie QBs put up 16 or more points from the first half to second half. The same goes for 18, and 20 fantasy points. 🤔 

But that changed once I looked at games where a QB scored 24+ fantasy points. It’s not a life-changing margin, but I think this is why we saw that overall PPG increase. In the first half of the season, our sample of QBs managed 17 games of 24+ points. In the second half, that number jumped up to 28. That’s a 65% increase in boom games!

➡️ What is important to keep in mind here, is that while that increase sounds great, we need to compare it to the total number of games played in our two time frames: first and second half. In the first half, rookie QBs only hit 24+ points 10.3% of their games. In the second half, that number jumps to 17.5%. Put in a different way, that means a chance of a blowup game goes up from roughly 1-in-10 to 1-in-5.7. 📈 

And just so you have a point of reference, among qualifying games for QBs in 2024, the average rate of a 24+ point game for any given QB (elite or not) was 18.5%. For QBs outside of the top-6 in 2024, that rate went down to 13.1%.

So What Now?

Rookie quarterbacks can improve throughout the season, but they don’t always improve across the board. They may improve in some ways and regress in others.

This study wasn’t meant to look at how rookies improve year over year, though that’s not a bad idea for a future newsletter. The main thing was to see how quarterbacks improve during their rookie season, if at all, and what that means for us in fantasy.

While we can’t be sure whether a QB will improve their passing accuracy or escaping sacks, what we can be fairly confident of is their ability to score more efficiently. Not only that, but the increase in blowup games in the second half of the year does lead to one interesting takeaway: streaming. 

Rookies aren’t really busting less or putting up good games more in the second half of seasons. But they are putting up ceiling games at an increased rate, sometimes at even higher rates than veteran QBs. When streaming the position, you don’t know what you’re walking into any given week, whether using a veteran on a youngster. But if the matchup lines up, maybe you should consider picking up a rookie and shooting for the moon rather than playing it safe with the veteran who might lack upside.

We play this game to win after all.

P.S. Want to see the full list of all 23 players who were part of this study? Click the banner above, or click here to join the RotoBanter discord to find out!