Quality Starts - QB

  Posted 7/27 by Jeff Pasquino - Exclusive to Footballguys.com

There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player give you a consistent performance week after week can be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is "quality" for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2008 season, I decided to take the #12 QB for the year (Tyler Thigpen, 257 fantasy points) and take that fantasy total and divide it by 16 for a per game average. Now a case can be made to argue against doing this. I did not account for missed games or a per-start performance metric, but I believe that the numbers will get averaged out by doing this method. Also, taking QB12 seems a bit arbitrary, but then again the Top 10-13 QBs are all within about 10 points of one another, but an even better reason is that if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 12th QB should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league.

So now we move on to the next question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a quarterback has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of QB performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 12th QB average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for a QB Quality Start.

Using the QB Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: QB Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges

We have one more issue in this study, and that is we need to sift through all the quarterbacks and only look at QBs that started an NFL game. That means if Tom Brady started Week 1 last year but gets hurt, Brady is subject to the study (in Week 1) and Matt Cassel is not. That's an important distinction, as several QBs had great games in relief yet they should not get counted. Before we decide on a fantasy lineup, we usually only know the starters for each week, not who might come in if there is an injury.

Pouring over the games week by week, we find 512 starting QB games. Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all 512 starts and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2008 QB Start Types By Player Sorted By Total Starts

That's a lot of info to digest, so let me help. First, we see that 211 of 512 starts fall in the middle - "Quality Starts" - and about the same number are in the Excellent Start and Bad Start categories. That means that our distribution is normal and that our baseline point range does make sense. Also, comparing them to the 2007 results shows that the numbers are pretty close across the board, with 186 in the middle, 158 Excellent and 168 Bad starts. That's nearly identical Excellent Starts and a 13% increase in Quality Starts from 2007 to 2008.

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, I need to define a valuable starting quarterback in this system. We want a QB that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given starting NFL quarterback. Here is the formula:

Starting NFL QB Value = Excellent Starts - Bad Starts

We neglect to look at Quality Starts because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average QB performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value:

Table 3: 2008 QB Start Types Sorted By Value

This is a lot of information once again, but some names leap out at us. For one, never ever think about Daunte Culpepper again. Don't do it. Secondly, there are some names towards the top and bottom of this chart that catch my eye. Shaun Hill and Matt Schaub scream "underrated" while others such as Jake Delhomme and Marc Bulger are enough to rip your hair out if you are forced to start either one.

Lastly I will sift through it for you and get right to the heart of the matter with our final table. Here we have the results sorted by value for the Top 30 QBs on the 2009 ADP list.

Table 4: 2009 Top Drafted QBs Sorted By 2008 Value

Note that Mark Sanchez and Matthew Stafford are absent for the simple reason that they did not start any games last year. Judging form last season, it would appear that Jay Cutler is a nice value amongst the Top 10 QBs going off the draft board, but given all of the offseason movement it would be hard to expect similar results for Cutler in Chicago.

Looking for value plays based on the numbers above and Shaun Hill leaps off the chart. He has two young WRs in Josh Morgan and Michael Crabtree, and if Vernon Davis ever gets his head screwed on the right way then Hill could prove to be a huge steal for 2009. That brings up an important point, which is that this is based solely on last year's results. There is no reason to believe in these numbers as indications of 2009 performance, but having this information available should give you more to think about when deciding who you will have leading your fantasy team this year.

As always, feedback is welcome at pasquino@footballguys.com.