The Great Equalizer: Regression, Fantasy QB Edition

Last week, we discussed offenses that regressed. This week, we’re going to talk about regression, but from a quarterback’s perspective. 

A lot of people will discuss touchdown regression for pass catchers or running backs, be it through outlier TD rate from big plays, red zone usage, or a lack thereof, or just an efficient offense in general.

But quarterbacks regress, too. And sure, to an extent, you can overcome regression with more passing attempts, but that’s not a gimme. Sometimes there’s not much more passing you can do, and teams with an already high pass rate likely can’t go much higher. Take the Bengals, for example. They passed the ball on 60% of their offensive plays. Or the Raiders with a pass on 59.6% of their plays. It’s hard to go up much more from that. The 2023 Bucs and Chargers had pass rates above 60%, but that’s been very much the tip top of pass vs. run ratio.

So there’s only so much room to go up for some offenses in passing volume. That fact alone could hurt several QBs this year. 

But let’s examine quarterbacks' touchdown rates, shall we? What happens after a quarterback has an above-average season in TD rate? What about a below-average season?

Study Boundaries

For this study, I went to Stathead and looked at every quarterback since 2015 who had at least 200 passing attempts in a given year. That gave me 347 quarterback seasons. Not all of them have next season data, be it due to injury, being rookies in 2024, or being backups who stood in for an extended period and went back to being backups the following year.

From there, I grouped players who had a TD rate at or above 6% and those below 3.5%. For what it’s worth, 4.5% was the overall average. In the above-average sample, we have 43 quarterbacks. In the below-average sample, there are 50.

Regression Hits Hard

In the high rate group, 88% saw a drop in TD efficiency the following year. The average decrease was 1.7%, which is a huge change! So if a player had a 6.2% TD rate, they would be looking at the 2024 league average of 4.5% the next season.

🔎 Just to put that in perspective, a quarterback who passes 500 attempts with a 6.2% TD rate would throw 31 touchdowns. If he keeps the passing attempts the same and drops to 4.5%, that’s 23 touchdowns! In order to keep up the same number of touchdowns despite the drop in efficiency, he would have to throw 689 times! Since 2015, that’s only happened three times: Tom Brady twice in 2021 and 2022, and Justin Herbert in 2022.

In our first group, the number of players who saw a decrease in efficiency was 38. In our second group of 50 low TD rate QBs, do you want to guess how many saw an increase? If you guessed 38, you were right! That equates to a 76% increase in their efficiency.

Among our second group of quarterbacks, the average increase in TD rate after a below-average year was 1.25%. Half of those who saw an increase saw their rate go up by 1.5% and 34% had a 2% increase!

🔎 Like we did in the previous example, let’s put this in perspective. This quarterback also attempts 500 passes in a season. With a 3% TD rate, he’s only throwing 15 touchdowns. He stays in average offense, but has a 4.25% rate the next year. He’s now throwing 21 touchdowns! Six touchdowns doesn’t sound like a lot for a QB, but it can be the difference from bottom of the barrel to a viable streamer, and he’s got a reasonable shot to achieve much more than that. Some guys who threw 20-23 touchdowns last year were: Brock Purdy, Matthew Stafford, and Geno Smith. No, those guys weren’t fantasy gold, but they were fine QB2s last year.

Like I did in the previous newsletter about team touchdown regression, I wanted to put things in perspective here as well. An astute follower of the NFL might know that, on average, teams passed the ball an average of 556 times last season. The numbers I used are far less than that. While only four teams passed the ball fewer than 500 times in 2024, only 13 individual quarterbacks actually crossed that threshold. That could be due to injuries (like Dak Prescott), starters being replaced (Justin Fields to Wilson, the Browns and Saints QB carousel), rookies taking time to develop before being inserted (Drake Maye and Michael Penix), etc.

The reason I went with 500 attempts vs something closer to average is that it gave me a nice, easy math baseline to go off, it’s easier for any single QB to reach, and it still gives you a decent idea about what per-game production can look like. ✅ 

But what about fantasy points scoring?

Of the 43 high-TD rate QBs;

• Only 19% saw a PPG increase 😬 

• 81% suffered a decrease, 63% went down 2.5 PPG or more 📉 

• 42% went down by more than 4 PPG. That’s like Baker Mayfield going from tied-QB3 to the QB11 in PPG 📉 📉 

Among the 50 QBs in the low-TD rate group:

• 64% increased their PPG 😄 

• 44% increased by +2.5 PPG, 30% by +4 PPG. Add 4 PPG to one of Caleb Williams, Drake Maye, or Bryce Young last year, and they become a Top-12 QB in PPG. Amazing what a points boost can do. 📈 💰️ 

• 36% decreased their PPG 🤷‍♂️

One grain of salt to take with that info. That is the general info. There are some outliers in the data from players who may have suited up or played a minor role in a game (say, Brian Hoyer, who dropped 7.5 PPG after a low TD-rate year) but only started a few. That does throw off the sample some, but nevertheless, not enough to throw off the general trend. Quarterbacks generally regress towards the mean, be it positive or negative.

Now with all that information, here are the quarterbacks who fit the high rate threshold in 2024: Jared Goff, Baker Mayfield, Joe Burrow, and Lamar Jackson.

It’s harder with the low-rate guys, as not many who were below 3.5% are currently starters. But two guys who are relevant to us for 2025 who fit that criteria are Daniel Jones and Anthony Richardson. Yes, the duo that is battling it out for a starting job in Indy. I’ll give an honorable mention to Caleb Williams and Geno Smith, who both ended up at a 3.6% TD rate in 2024.

This has been a fun and interesting study for me, and I hope it was for you as well. Thanks for reading, and I will see you again soon!