Dissembling With Statistics: MOAR TEBOW! Edition
By Defending Tim Tebow’s NFL performance requires some remarkable feats of illogic. In a classic of the genre, JfL provides the most tendentious statistical argument this side of Reinhart/Rogoff:
It’s hilarious to read people citing Mike Vick and his awesome passing skills in order to dismiss Tebow.
His passer ratings his first three years with the Falcons were 62.7, 81.6, and 69.0.
Tim Tebow’s ratings for his first three years were 82.1, 72.9, and 84.9.
Because he just doesn’t have Vick’s talents as a passer, apparently.
To deal with the most obviously embarrassing part of the argument first, the two decent looking “seasons” cited in defense of Tebow include one “year” in which he threw 82 passes, and another “year” in which he threw 8 passes for 39 yards. To cite these stats to show that he has NFL ability is like citing Willie Bloomquist’s season in 2002 as evidence that he’s a budding superstar. In his only real season as a regular he had a rating of 72.9, which is terrible.
This brings us to the slightly less obvious statistical fallacy. It’s true that 72.9 isn’t radically worse than the 81.6 posted by Vick in his first season as a regular. But the NFL has changed a great deal between 2002 and 2012; the average QB has much better numbers, and we have to adjust for that fact when comparing players in different years (unless you want to claim that Dante Bichette is a better player than Roberto Clemente because he has a higher OPS.) If you look at the QB rating+ — which adjusts the ratings to league norms, with 100 being average — you’ll note that Vick’s 2002 season is a little above average (104), while Tebow’s performance in his only season as a regular was replacement level (85). Particularly considering that Vick was 22 in his first full year and Tebow was 24, Vick (a pretty overrated player in his own right) is far ahead of Tebow. It’s not even close.
Is there any reason to think that Tebow is better than his terrible Qb rating suggests? No. As is well known, his throwing mechanics are poor. Under more advanced metrics than the QB rating he looks even worse. And looking at the two games where he faced the same defense twice — a 20.6 rating against a decent but no more than that KC pass defense, and a 52.7 rating against an awful New England pass defense — suggests that what little success he had was the result of the novelty of running a quasi-college offense in the NFL; once coaches have the chance to adjust it’s likely to be even worse than his already poor overall numbers suggest. He also has limited value as a longshot development project backup because having him on the roster is a massive pain in the ass for the coaching staff.
Essentially, the only argument you can make in defense of Tebow’s NFL performance is that HE JUST WINS FOOTBALL GAMES. And, once again, if that’s your metric, if you like Tebow you must love Mark Sanchez, who when he was 24 played in his second consecutive AFC title game. The Broncos went 8-5 under Tebow because they got extremely lucky in some close games in which Tebow played badly, and if you think that winning will hold up I have a ticket to Steve Stone’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony to sell you. And while the comparison is still a little too generous to Tebow, he’s a lot more comparable to Chad Henne than Michael Vick.