Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Arif Hasan answers random Vikings questions and talks clutch QBs

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Matthew Coller and Arif Hasan of WideLeft.football talk about why kicking is harder in the NFL, whether there was a draft pick that could have gotten the Vikings over the top and whether QBs can be provably clutch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here, along with Arif Hassan of WideLeft.Football. Now, it makes it very easy to get to your Substack newsletter, Arif. So great to have you back. And this is kicking off a series where I answer only completely random questions from Vikings fans. I put it out there. If you ask me who's going to be wide receiver three or the starting left guard, this is not your podcast series. This is for stuff that you would never ask at any other time than June 21st in between mini camps and training camp. So are you ready, Arif? And also you've written a great article about quarterbacks and the idea of being

clutch that I do want to dive into in a little bit. But are you ready for total randomness? You never can be. So I'm fully prepared. That's a great point. That's really the point of it being random. Well, let's start this out from Organism46B asks, do you have any logic to why kicking in the pros is harder than college? The hashes are wider and the fields are generally worse in college, so pro should be easier, shouldn't it? Arif, do you have any logic to why it's harder to kick in the pros than it is in college? Well, there's a couple of reasons. One is the timing, right?

You don't have forever to set up a kick. The guys coming off the edge are a lot faster, so you have to get that timing and footwork down as opposed to working out whatever footwork and timing is best for you so that's like one i think the second is because a lot more is demanded of kickers in the pros if you can't kick from 45 plus in college that's fine you could still be a top 10 college kicker in the fbs right um but fact, we actually saw the guy who got drafted in the second round, Roberto Aguayo, couldn't kick from 45 plus. He was the top kicker in college. If you can't kick from 45 plus in the NFL, bye, you're gone. Good luck in the UFL. So that's like,

those are, I think, the two biggest factors is that we just demand a lot of professional kickers because, you know, they're professionals. And in just demand a lot of professional kickers because, you know, they're professionals. And in college, you can protect the kickers. You can, if you miss, you just say, ah, college kickers. But in the pros, it's like that kicker, God, that kicker has ruined my week. So it's a higher level of consistency, more that's demanded of them, and a smaller margin of error on all the operational aspects of kicking. I do think that your theory about the speed in which you need to do it is really, really important here. Because think about it in basketball.

If you are a good three-point shooter in college basketball, you probably can get yourself set up and you'll have time to rise up. You probably jump higher than everyone. And so you've got more time to rise up above everyone and get your pretty clean shot. Where in the NBA, if you watch a lot of the great three-point shooters, the ball is in and out of their hands so quickly. I don't think that we watching on television or even in the stadium can really put ourselves down on that field for how fast those players will get there and block your kick if you don't get it off super, super fast. I wonder about

the whole like kicking from the wider hashes is interesting as far as like you would think that would be harder, but maybe even a better angle is a little easier in some ways. I don't know. Like some guys might kick it better having, you know, not to have to kick it straight on. I'm not sure about that. The pressure you also would think, well, okay, well, you know, there's a lot of pressure in college if you're playing for Alabama and you're in the national championship or something. But how often does that actually exist? I mean, in weeks one through six, are you playing anybody in college that you're going to feel like, Oh my gosh, if I miss this field goal, it's over. No, we're up 37 on Toledo and dupe.

I just kicked in a 42 yarder. It's never like that in the NFL. The games are so much closer. Almost every kick that you have is going to be in a tight situation and the percentages to be the best kicker because college kickers are not that great. If you kick 82% in college, you might be in the top echelon of all college kickers. If you kick 82% in the NFLfl you're probably a journeyman and if you kick that's the margins are super thin if you kick 85 you probably keep your job but they're thinking about other people and if you kick 90 then you get in the pro bowl and you get a huge contract and that's only one out of every 10 kicks is the difference so i i think that all of those things probably play into uh why it's different.

And I also think, Arif, that projecting college kickers, as impressed as I was by Will Reichard, is almost impossible because of all this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, well, first, I mean, you just have such a small sample of kicks to work off of. But yeah, the kicks occur in an entirely different context. And so even the sample that you have is so limited, which is actually why I'm like really sympathetic to when a special teams coach just gets into whatever their business is. I just assume that they're correct, but gets into when they talk about like the mechanics of the kick and all that.

I'm like, that's actually probably a more reliable way to evaluate these guys than to look at their kicking percentage. Although they did mention matt daniels did mention the evaluating just the kicks going straight down the middle as opposed to a little bit to the left a little bit to the right and finding kickers with that level of precision like that that was intriguing to me because it creates a new much smaller margin of error data set to work off of and i guess guess, well, Reichert was really good at that. So, you know, hopefully that's meaningful.

But yeah, it is, it's hard. Low sample, the context is completely different. Very, very few true pressure situations because it's not just, you know, you're up against good opponents. You're only up against good opponents for maybe half the year. And you're only in high stakes games

for maybe half of that to a quarter of the year. And then when you're in high stakes games, you only have high stakes kicks, maybe one out of every three of those games. And now we're parsing a third of a, like one twelfth, maybe, if your team is good. Not even if you're good. If your team is good, like, okay. Right. And a lot of times, and this is one thing that Will Reichert has going for him,

but a lot of times kickers might be drafted off of one or two years because there's someone in front of them and that guy's the kicker and then he transfers and you're the kicker and you end up with 50 kicks in in a career and you might just have gotten hot in those 50 kicks or they might have been favorable for you with reicher though i I believe he was over a hundred kicks and I looked at kickers who were drafted that were over a hundred field goal attempts and they did seem to be more predictable than the small sample size guys. Uh, but they, they looked into everything. The Viking scout told us the S teammates, does he fit in the locker room? And they talked to people about his mentality and, and all those types of things. And they could still be wrong,

but I think they've probably done everything they could do to get the right guy considering he's made more points than anyone at Bama. But I, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. The answer is it's just harder. Everything in the pros is harder.

Next random question for ethic. You'll like this one. This is from Brett. Oh, zero zero eight. If the Vikings drafted Derek Carr and joe mixon instead of teddy bridgewater and delvin cook would they have won a super bowl under mike zimmer now i'm not sure as much what joe mixon has to do with it although you know cook got hurt in 2017 so maybe

that's kind of what that reference is derrick Carr, actually, Derek Carr got hurt in his best year as well when they had a chance to go. So I guess we're assuming that Derek Carr never gets hurt like Teddy Bridgewater. The 2017 team has Derek Carr and Joe Mixon, two players that the Vikings could have drafted. Everything else goes exactly the same because you just put one player in for the other, which isn't preposterous considering where those guys were all drafted do they win the super bowl i suppose it would be in 2017 but 17 through 19 all were good enough teams yeah i when i read this question i was like this isn't a derrick car better than teddy question it's a 2017 question right? Okay, this feels real bad to say. I think so, which now I'm envisioning Derek Carr Super Bowl winning quarterback,

and that feels wrong. I don't like saying that. Yeah, I guess. I hate this question, actually, now that I think about it. Yes, sure. no one's gonna hold me accountable to this answer yes they win the super bowl in either 17 or 18 with derrick car they don't spend so much money on kirk cousins presumably actually slightly less money on derrick car when his extension comes up which would be like in 2020, I suppose, or 2019.

But like, unless he won the Super Bowl, in which case you don't care. Yeah, I hate this. Yes. Yeah, I think so. So the, well, on the extension point, if you want to go down that road even a little bit, one of the issues with Cousins in terms of his extensions or contracts is that they were also short. So what we see from someone like Trevor Lawrence is it's $55 million a year. Wow, that cap, it's going to be tough to work around.

What is it? $16 million. Wow, it's got to be next year. $18 million. Oh, what is it? 14 years from now. Oh, then it's expensive. Like he never gave them the option to do the spreading out of the cap hits and the stuffing money underneath the couch cushions and stuff that some of these longer deals end up doing. So there's that part. I'm going to say no here. And here's but the way in which he did it was to play the most ludicrous form of football that I remember seeing which was just

drop back must be down there somewhere and throw the ball in the direction of Adam Thielen and Stefan Diggs and including the Minneapolis Miracle they caught literally everything everything that went their way for a year. And that's why they didn't bring Case Keenum back because they didn't think it was going to happen again. Derek Carr doesn't play football that way. Derek Carr plays in a very conservative manner. He is an underneath, a check down type quarterback. Him and Kirk are the Spider-Man meme a little bit. They just sort of very similar quarterbacks. And I'm not sure that he was aggressive enough to do the silly things that case Keenum did that year.

We almost have to grade Keenum in a, in a different way. Not as if we know anything else about him entirely, just what it was that season. I think he was a top 10 PFF quarterback that year, top 10 in quarterback rating. They were top 10 in passing EPA is Derek Carr, recreating all of those

same things. And here would be my winning argument for why they don't win in the running game was fine, by the way. I don't think it needed 17 running game was fine with Latavius and Jarek McKinnon, but here's why I don't think they win the Superbowl. Uh, the Philadelphia Eagles beat Tom Brady in the Superbowl. That team was so unbelievably stacked that I don't think slightly better quarterback play is working there. It would have had to have been miraculous quarterback play, even if they just straight up beat the Saints with Derek Carr and then go to the NFC Championship in the same way and face the Eagles.

They wrecked the Vikings defense that day. I just don't know that Derek Carr would have been the guy. When I think of, wow, somebody's going to have to go nuts against the team, I don't think Derek Carr. Okay, I'll say this before we move on. First, I think it was really fun interviewing Keenum about some of these plays because we're like, hey, did you see Adam Thielen? He's like, no, I had no idea what was going on. He's like 6 right like that's not shocking um but like he would constantly be like i had no idea where anybody was which is just such an awesome thing for a quarterback to reveal um but also like here's a crazy thing so yeah i've been doing this clutchness thing right we'll talk about it but

in in total fourth quarter comebacks since like 2020 derrick Carr is tied for fifth in fourth quarter comebacks uh of course number one's Kirk Cousins who else would it be right but it's like Kirk Cousins Justin Herbert Patrick Mahomes uh and then actually he's tied for fourth with Tom Brady of all people Derek Carr uh and obviously it's different right Tom Brady has fourth quarter comebacks when it's necessary Derek Carr is constantly in a fourth quarter comeback scenario because his defenses have been bad and he is not the level of quarterback that Patrick Mahomes is. So he's had more opportunities, right? It's a little bit different, but I will say like he has been able to lead comebacks. I just think the reason that

I would pick him and say yes is because you just don't need that many crazy plays with a higher quality of quarterback. You're not, you know, getting blown out by the Steelers, right? You don't have to score 30 against Tampa Bay by doing the craziest stuff. So I think that just generally you would have fewer late game situations where you would have to have like a Minneapolis miracle. Because, I mean, that defense was beating the crap out of the Saints, right? Obviously that Eagles game, you're going gonna have to score 30 plus right but a lot of the scores were

given up because of poor field position and maybe you don't have to deal with that so yeah the Tom Brady point's a pretty good one maybe they only make it to the Super Bowl but at that point you've got home field advantage right so you know who's to say I also think that Derek Carr is a little bit built in a lab for a mike zimmer quarterback because of his conservative nature i think that's what he wanted was somebody who would protect the football check it down move on end every drive with a punt and so forth i mean i'm not saying that it's impossible i probably would have just leaned no because i thought philadelphia was so strong uh the week before against atlanta though they had to barely survive on a bad attempt to catch

a ball in the end zone by julio jones so i yeah i don't know that that team was that strong and you do get three shots at it with derrick carr because it would have been 2018 2019 it's hard to say but they they would have yeah, they would have had a possibility there. Uh, two more questions for it. No, three, three more ones. Fun and silly. Um, Zach says, uh, if you could have any active player at any position on your team, I'm going to say non quarterback, non quarterback. Uh, how many would you take over Justin Jefferson? So how many non quarterback players would you select over the Minnesota Vikings top wide receiver? Uh, I mean, I can't think of any, actually, if I'm being 100% honest,

like he plays perhaps the most important non-quarterback position. He is the best at it um that resolves the whole that's a one-two process right there um i like maybe micah parsons possibly or miles garrett you know pick your poison there uh if sauce garter's second year was as good as his second year was very good but if it was as good as his first year you know maybe him maybe because it's like really hard to find a quarterback. But I think default, I'm just going to say no. I don't think so either. I came up with some of the same players you did. Trent Williams also has a unique impact for a left tackle.

Left tackle is already very valuable, but he's on a completely other level. They put him in motion a couple of times. That's just a different human being altogether. Outside of that, though, the list I came up with was less than 10, and that's even to have a discussion about. Because we have to look at the total value that Justin Jefferson brings to the quarterback, and the quarterback's performance is what's going to determine your success.

If you look at since Peyton Manning did the thing in 2015, so we've got a big sample now. Every team that makes the Super Bowl is an elite passing team or has Patrick Mahomes. So they weren't an elite passing team in the regular season, but they have Patrick Mahomes. Right, but they have it, yeah. Right, right.

So they just do by default of having him. So aside from that, the next best thing you can have is another human being who makes that quarterback the best possible version of themselves and it's funny we were just talking about case keenum and what he was able to do with two top notch wide receivers you got the best one but it's not just it's not just the best as in he catches the most has the most yards it's the most complete it's the underneath intermediate deep every coverage every area of the field there is no solution there's no defense that just works where teams get so well if we just double him if we just play too high if we just

cloud coverage if we just whatever nothing works against justin jefferson even having nick mullins play quarterback will not bring this man down. And so I think that the answer is probably him. You could also make a case maybe for Tyreek Hill would be up there. I was thinking about making some sort of extreme case of Dexter Lawrence that if you have a defensive tackle who pressures the quarterback, it's so unique and challenging that maybe that guy is there, but probably not just because it's on the defensive side. And even Dexter Lawrence plays for bad defenses sometimes, whereas his position across all of these guys that we're talking about,

because as a nose tackle to generate more pressures than almost every three technique is. And he's a great run defender. Like, just crazy. That uniqueness has a ton of value, but I don't think it approaches the value of Justin Jefferson. But I'm glad you brought him up because he definitely deserves a lot more appreciation. But if someone said, we'll trade you Dexter Lawrence for Justin Jefferson, you would laugh them out of him up because he definitely deserves a lot more appreciation. But if someone said, we'll trade you Dexter Lawrence for Justin Jefferson, you would laugh them out of the room.

It's just like, correct. It's just the right. And that goes for almost every player here. Miles Garrett is probably the closest in my mind of anybody. Sorry, Steelers fans who want me to say it's TJ watt. He's also good.

I promise. Very good. They get very worked up about that on the internet. Okay. Two more quick ones uh bigger threat this from coming from kingalo8291 i always bungle everyone's name so i apologize for that it's your twitter you did it uh bigger threat to the vikings long term the packers or the bears long term arif um So I think it's King Leo, by the way. See, I said. Yeah.

Well, he's King Leo now. Right. King Leo. Maybe his name is Leonard or something. OK, all right. Good job reading. Sure. Better than I.

It's tough and maybe it's unfair to evaluate an organization based off their history, but I just have to go with the Packers, right? I have expressed a lot of skepticism about Jordan Love's quality as a passer just because I think that we're putting way too much weight on a smaller sample of games for him. He could be very good, and there's a lot of evidence that he could be, but I just don't think it's set in stone yet. That said, I like getting halfley as defensive coordinator we know about matt lafleur as an as an offensive play caller um we know that that receiver core is deep we don't know exactly how talented the top end talent is because it's so young but i

expect it's going to be quite good um we know about all of that plus everybody is young on that team like maybe not defensively everybody but like essentially everybody uh with the bears it's like oh i'm glad that they built some stuff around caleb williams i'm glad but it's like keenan allen and dj moore were very talented but how long will they be talented versus like if jayden reid or don tavian wicks go off if christian watson you know out, you know, there's a lot going on where the Packers can just be consistent. I didn't even talk about the two tight ends that they have that are really young, right? Like there's a lot going on with the Packers that I think if we're talking long term, it's not just this quarterback question.

It's all these questions. And we have a little bit more evidence. And I'm saying, including the evidence about how well number one picks generally do, we have a little bit more evidence that Jordan Love is going to be more of a threat than than Caleb Williams a guy that I like a lot I think the logical answer should be the Bears because they have the cheap quarterback contract to work with and also they probably have the two most talented wide receivers, not necessarily the best receiving core, but they, I mean, even with Keenan Allen, if there's anything less there than they do have the better receiving core,

but just the two and DJ more, I think will be good for several years to come. And if Roma dunes a works out the way that he did in college, then you have rookie quarterback contract, quarterback as special talent we don't know if that's going to come to fruition yet and then on the defensive side we saw them grow pretty quickly as a defense from yeah the joke that i was making last summer was i've never heard of any of you outside of jalen johnson i just don't know who these people are who are in their front seven and now i do uh because they got montez sweat and then like they've got dudes over there the biggest question to me might be is matt iberflues able to do this like is he

able to take a team to somewhere special i think matt lafleur at least we know can have special regular seasons the postseason gets a little more dicey for that team but still i mean such a big sample of success and doing it with another quarterback that's not aaron rogers last year seasons the postseason gets a little more dicey for that team but still i mean such a big sample of success and doing it with another quarterback that's not aaron rogers last year really says something about his coaching that's that's one of my major reasons to buy jordan love is that his coach and him have this connection that is sort of the you know andy reed and patrick mahomes type of connection where he's going to just work to that guy's strengths and mitigate his weaknesses.

I don't know if they're going to bounce around offensive coordinators, if they even have a good one now, or if Matt Eberflus knows how to pick one or knows how to manage a game. Like there's so much to be answered there. So I guess I would, I would say that logically speaking by the metrics we tend to use for is this team on the rise and going to be good for a long time the bears deserve this but the packers make a little more sense because of that coaching thing is that fair yeah i think so one last one this one's fun this one's from jordan i didn't try to do his twitter name i don't know why uh says uh was the best era for football player aesthetics

college and pro or what is the best era for football aesthetics i would vote early 2000s will smigahee ricky williams randy moss with the vikings and so forth uh was the early 2000s the best for aesthetics in football you did still have neck rolls going on a little bit also a little bit early no early 2000s those fullbacks were still around with their neck rolls the linebackers because i am envisioning ray lewis and his big miami yeah so early 2000s but you also had the dark visors coming in and some crazy face masks that may or may not be banned right now uh that that used to be just i was gonna i was gonna bring up the face masks i think those

probably in the late 2000s got just slightly because i love how crazy they were but they were slightly a little bit too much but right before they got banned um which if they were banned for aesthetic reasons maybe i'd understand but they were banned for like yeah you'll break your fingers whatever um i i like it i just i like the eye black stuff from the 90s like you just didn't you didn't get access to that anymore. Unfortunately, I really like, you know, the way that they accessorize like the socks and the bands. So I think they did a little bit of a better job with that in the late 90s. And I just the higher prevalence of neck roll usage in the 90s, like you get like your tight ends and your edge rushers sometimes.

I think I would prefer the late 90s in terms of football aesthetics, but I do like the 2000s a lot. I just, the dark visors are so good. And I wish I could port that into, you know, a lot of the 90s stuff. But the eye black. The eye black is great, but there was also much more going on in the hands, wrist, elbow type of area.

Uh, how about, I mean, who could argue for the nineties with, uh, Brad Johnson, although he's early 2002, Brad Johnson's elbow pads. I mean, I guess he applies to both cause he played through both eras. There is an argument for the 70s into the early 80s being the best aesthetic, but it was so dangerous. Just with single bar helmets. Somebody said on a podcast, I can't remember where this,

it comes up on the internet sometimes, that the helmets were squishy is sort of the joke. And you're like, yeah, those helmets were awesome looking, but they could not have protected you from anything shoulder pads flying all over the place falling all over but there's such a classic look to that guys would have no teeth they would have long hair coming out of the helmets it just all seemed very barbaric and i think of like the way the raiders looked alone in the 70s yeah you would just if

you were making this argument you would just raiders i just present you with the raiders and that's all i need to say i'm just gonna walk away it's never looked as cool as that uh but also kind of scary for everyone so um i think that there's a strong argument for the 2000s we might be in the worst era now though it just see everything's a little sanitized i don't think it's too original yeah i think so i mean the so there's like two problems i have one is that the helmets look awful they're safer it's better we should have them they look awful whether it's the ones with like the bulb at the top or or the ones that like sweep a little bit to it they look so. Obviously the face mask issue,

they've gotten rid of the dark visors unless you can prove that you like have astigmatism or something. So that sucks. But like also like there's less and less separating the football player silhouette from like a dude silhouette. The shoulder pads are so much smaller.

People are getting rid of like all of the other pads in the other areas. And the reason for that is good. It's that the technology is a lot better. You don't need pure masks in order to help you. That's fine. But the aesthetic sacrifice here is that we're losing the silhouette in a lot of ways. And that kind of sucks.

So, yeah, I think this is probably – I don't think this is a kids these days type argument either. The uniforms look so bad, right? Like, one of the other strong arguments for the 70s is those uniforms are great. They look so good. Yeah. And now the uniforms look, like, at least we're out of, like, what the Tampa Buccaneers were doing with the alarm clock stuff. Like, we're out of the worst of it. But they still generally look pretty

bad i really love what the broncos did keep that stuff in college you know um but yeah or like the jets with their all blacks look very college i don't like it um the uniforms look bad the helmets look awful and ugly we've eliminated a lot of the accessorizing that's cool we've eliminated a lot of the stuff that makes a football player stand out as a football player this is probably the worst era yeah and they have the horseshoe neck thing that they wear that's not it's not a neck roll and i'm not convinced it does anything right like the idea is that it restricts the flow of blood out of your brain so that there's more blood to protect you from a concussion and like the guy championing this um linebacker carolina i'm you know i'm so bad with names um oh uh yeah yeah i

know i know who you're talking about uh yeah um what is his name keekly luke keekly keekly luke keekly yeah one of the greatest linebacks of all time that guy yeah um uh he like championed this because he had a lot of concussion issues and then he retired because of concussion issues which is not to say it didn't work but is this anecdotally feels like strong evidence that it probably isn't that helpful i don't know we you and i get a bunch of emails from a bunch of cranks that are like this is the next big thing in technology for football and 99 of the time it's all BS. And sometimes teams and players get sold on it. I mean, the Vikings have been sold on it with like the VR stuff to make

Teddy a better quarterback. And it's like, yeah, he could just play football. I don't know why we got to do this. So, um, yeah, I, I don't know, but it looks bad and it seems stupid, which is not a great combination. I'm not a scientist. I'm just very skeptical of anything that says we reduce concussions. I mean, there was concussion reducing mouth guards. I don't know if that's how that works and stuff like that. So, yeah. But from a looks perspective where I can just use my eyes and give an opinion, not a not not a good look um and also anything that gets us closer to the nba and how every jersey is exactly the same color of dark blue and how they took a dallas mavericks or a

minnesota timberwolves and they look just great like let's let's just make it black or dark blue so you don't even know which team is playing the the nfl has done that you mentioned it with the jets i don't like that at all and just the the sheer presence of the tennessee titans is enough to bring this down for many other aesthetic nightmare good worse the world they had one of the coolest aesthetic players derrick henry and dressed him in garbage it's just wrong all right let's move on so those are your random questions gonna keep doing them i them. I have about, I'm not even kidding, like 30 more that are so good from Vikings fans. So thank you so much to everybody who has sent those, but you wrote an awesome article that if you have four or five hours, you can make your way all the way through it about quarterbacks and clutch. You

put in a ton of effort into investigating the clutchness of quarterbacks you know you started out with Eli Manning so why don't why don't we just sort of begin there because the narrative around Eli Manning is that he was clutch and that he won two Super Bowls with clutch drives and you can never take those away from Eli Manning and I think that the stats for his peak career don't really tell the story because he was so aggressive. He threw a lot of picks. People didn't use the PFF data as much then to kind of formulate how being aggressive impacted him. And we just don't see quarterbacks that aggressive anymore because they don't like to turn the ball over and so forth.

So I've always leaned toward giving Eli Manning a lot of credit, especially if you cover the Minnesota Vikings and you go, I don't know, you win two Super Bowls, man. This franchise has had 100 quarterbacks and nobody can do that. So I give him a ton of credit. But I think he is a great example of how the results will always be what we reverse engineer around. And not only just the results, but the results that we see if someone is clutch on a Sunday afternoon and we

catch it at the very end of, you know, whatever highlight show, we're not going to weigh it as much as Monday night football, Sunday night football, a playoff game where somebody has a great drive. But I think that you really, you really captured how difficult it is to pin down the proof that someone is clearly significantly better than someone else at clutchness at quarterback. So explain that. Yeah. So it is a tough, difficult question. I asked a bunch of people to define it. I read

studies, which feels like a lot of busy work, but fine. But I read studies and all these researchers had difficulty defining clutchness. And Chase Stewart, I asked him at Football Perspective, and he's like, look, I mean, I can answer the question for you and I will. But primarily, you got to understand this is about telling stories like that's what it is. And so we will define it however it is convenient for us to define in order to best tell the story that we want to tell. And that's true. Eli Manning is a great example of that. Tony Romo on the other end is a really great example of that. Tony Romo has like the eighth best comeback percentage of all time, of quarterbacks going all the way back to 1966.

Like two spots above him is Peyton Manning. Right above that is Joe Montana. Like he is in esteemed company of over like 150 quarterbacks, you know, that, and, and people are like, that guy's a choker that guy chokes and it's like okay well why do we think that well it's you know he he choked in the playoffs okay well how often did he do that well he did it one out of every every five opportunities he could or he got a comeback one out of every five opportunities well that seems pretty bad well the average is one out of five and also it's better than aaron rogers and peyton manning and troy acheman like oh that that's weird he's had he has a higher rate of comebacks in the playoffs than these guys that are known

to be known to be clutch right and so it's really just well those guys ended up with the ring tony romo didn't and so that's clutch and it's like well then why do we need a word for that we already have a word for super bowl champion it's champion right so that's what ends up happening but if you take a look and try and see who's the best when it quote-unquote matters most right when it's the highest leverage late in games when it's close right either you've got a small lead and you need to preserve it or you're behind and you need to score who's the best at that and can they reliably do it from year to year if we find out who's the best from you know know, 2015 to 2018, can we find out if they're going to be any good at it in 2019 to 2020, right?

If you take a look at that, and it turns out the people who are best in those scenarios are the people who are best in all of the other scenarios. The key is to be good at football, and then the rest kind of follows. There are some edge cases here and there. Lamar Jackson's a really unique one that kevin cole over at unexpected points pointed out which is that he's a really great quarterback in a lot of ways and he's not a bad passer but relative to elite quarterbacks he's not as good at throwing the football he makes his way especially when they need you to throw the football like when when you can choose between

running or throwing he's phenomenal right but late game situations, if there's one score, he's just not as good, right? And I hate it because I think Lamar Jackson gets too much slander, but this is a fact that you need to be very good at throwing in situations that require you to throw, and he's not up there with the other elite quarterbacks of which he is a member of, right? And so that is kind of the one caveat, is that if your skill set is unique in some way, then there are some issues here. You probably need to be relatively aggressive, which is why among the elite quarterbacks,

Patrick Mahomes shows up at the top. Justin Herbert actually, despite the recent reputation he's built, shows up near the top and stuff like that. And so, yeah, but I looked at the data and I weighted it and I tried to see, well, what's more important? And it seems like being good at football versus your ability to raise your level of play in the final moments, just being good is like seven to 11 times more important than the specific ability within that moment when it comes to predicting your future ability within that moment. And so clutchness seems to exist, but it seems to be a lot smaller than the weight that we

give it. And also some of it is just being very good at strategy. It's less the psychological resilience because you've gone through a lot of tests once you're a starting quarterback of psychological resilience and you've passed them all, right? You've played in the biggest games in college you've won these college competitions you have fought for your scholarship you've done stuff under the biggest lights at that point your psychological resilience is fairly high um so really it's your ability to just perform too so i tested it against two minute situations at the end of halves when there's a lot less you know situational pressure but it's the same strategic consideration and it turns out that's just as important as the fourth quarter when it comes to predicting your ability in the fourth quarter so it might not even be a psychological resilience

thing it might just be that you're good at the two minute drill which we know that kirk cousins wasn't until he was and then it turns out as soon as he got good at the end of the first half, you also magically got good at the end of the second half as well. So, yeah, clutchness exists, but it's a lot smaller. And it's not even the ability to get better. It's the ability to not get worse. It really is what it is. Because every quarterback, all 46 quarterbacks I have enough data for, get worse late in games in the fourth quarter.

Probably because you have to change your style of play, the style of play you're not used to. You have to be more aggressive. That makes sense to me. But the guys who get least worse are people that are also still good. Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow, who is beginning to develop a reputation for not being clutch despite what he did in college,

which also shows you the narrative, whatever, of it all. But he also performs at a really high level, and then his defense doesn't return the favor, just like with Josh Allen. But yeah, all of these quarterbacks that are aggressive late in games, they get a little bit worse because they have to change their play style. But Josh Allen gets the least worse. Joe Burrow gets the least worse.

So that's what I found, is that it matters, but it matters a lot less than we say well and there's so much context to every single thing that happens in a late game situation josh allen's a great example if you give your team the lead with 13 seconds to go in a playoff game because you had a sick unreal drive that you finished like with a touchdown or whatever to get that it was an obscene drive yeah and then your defense gives up so many yards that they're able to kick a field goal i don't know how josh allen was supposed to be more clutch than that uh we also saw this even with kirk cousins who should have had a game-winning drive against the chargers but tj hockinson had the ball bounce off of both mitts

and into the hands of the Chargers defender. We also saw the defense have a guy have the ball hit him right in the face and turn into a touchdown for the opposing offense. All these things, these random events or these other reliant events that require someone to catch the football, sometimes with their head in the case of Eli Manning it's not particularly accurate pass but I think that there's a few things to this that we can learn a little bit more about the styles of the quarterbacks I mean one of it is I think

the quarterbacks who I would trust the most have an answer they have a cheat code they have something that they can do that sets them apart, which Patrick Mahomes is the ultimate cheat code with this because there's no defense that can stop his ability to be creative. And this would go for John Elway too. When you watch the drive with John Elway, first of all, he scrambles like five times on this drive, which was always a Kirk Cousins thing. If you can't scramble in those late game situations, it is going to be harder. And then the other thing is that John Elway

had the best darn arm that has ever been gifted to any human being to ever exist. And in the drive, he puts a BB on some dude that is just wild. Like he puts everything into it. The camera cannot keep up with the football and it just drills the guy like a spear in the chest for a huge first down.

You go, all right, well, what's your answer to that? And I think Eli Manning's big thing was number one. He had an arm. He had a great arm. That throw down the sideline in the Super Bowl is outrageous. It's a number one overall pick arm. He also just had this dgaf like i am going to make a play i'm gonna throw it i and and sometimes that cost him with interception

sometimes it cost him in playoff games and other playoff games outside of those two years but as we were talking about with case keenum if you're willing to put the ball up in the air you will have a chance to succeed and the kirk cousins thing for so long was and became at the end the check down on fourth and eight why it was so definitive of his time in minnesota because it felt like there were so many instances of that even though he had tons of comebacks but also comebacks drive me a little crazy because you're losing and so it's's like, well, if you got a lot of losing, that's probably not great. If you have a ton of fourth quarter comebacks, it means you're

down all the time. And one more point on this is I think that clutchness can show up in places all over. It can be in the third quarter. And this was a 2022 point third quarter of a game. All you need is a field goal here. And the other team is going to pack up their stuff and of a game. All you need is a field goal here. And the other team is going to pack up their stuff and head back home. And you, you check down on third and seven and you punt and the other team scores. And now it's a one score game. And then they take the lead and then you have to do something else.

You have to turn the jets back on. And there were so many moments during cousins time where I thought, just make one more play. Just be a little more aggressive here. Just scramble for a first down here. And that can be clutch in the third quarter to put a team away. It doesn't always have to be that final drive type of thing. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Actually, Nate Silver makes this point when he's talking about clutchness in baseball. For people unfamiliar, Nate Silver started as a baseball analyst. And it would have been interesting if he stayed there i'll say that but um you know he talked about questions he's like look you know close late game scenarios that's great you got to be clutch there i guess but if we're looking at the highest leverage scenarios in a game that can occur in the seventh inning or it incur even late in the sixth inning or whatever, right? Because if there's a runner on third and there's one out and you make it out, then now the batters have fewer options, right? There's no sacrifice fly to get that guy home, right? And so that's a clutch scenario that doesn't show up in a lot of our clutchness studies, but that has an enormous

impact on, you you know whether or not you end up winning the game right as a pitcher as a batter even as a fielder right and what's interesting is baseball is is replete with these examples because a the sport has existed forever uh but b because statisticians got there first um but baseball is full of these examples of guys that are clutch in some scenarios and not in others. Reggie Jackson, who just gave a beautiful interview just the other day at Rookwood Field about racism in baseball, he's known as Mr. October, right? And there is something to be said about him elevating his level of play in the late months of the season into the postseason.

But he didn't elevate his play in close and late games was he's known as clutch because he did it in more important games, but not in more important situations. Bill Buckner is one of the most clutch hitters of all time, period. There's actually not much of a day he just is, right? That's, we know that's not what he's known for. He's known for a choke and it's a fielding choke. Right. But like that's a type of clutchness. And so you could be clutch in some areas and not in others. You just mentioned, you know, putting the game away in the third quarter so that we treat the entire fourth quarter as garbage time. Well, you got to do it. Otherwise, that's just as high leverage situation as that one score scenario.

But people, you know, now that red zone has run out of stuff and you're the last game on red zone, now that's what everybody's watching, right? And so, yeah, like we over-focus on a very small sliver of what we consider to be clutch scenarios, but there's high leverage points throughout the entire game. You know, your ability to convert a two point conversion doesn't show up in a lot of these stats.

That is an insanely clutch scenario. You've only got one opportunity unless there's a penalty, right? And that's the difference between a two-score game and a three-score game. And the difference between a two-score game and a three-score game is monumental in football. It's so enormous, right? And you don't convert that, but that doesn't show up in the statistics. So now your adjusted net yards per attempt or passer rating clutch scenarios is like really great but honestly you kind of beefed it but that's on you right and uh timo risk pointed this out when i or timo risque pointed this out when i talked to him about it he's like well we talk about quarterback

clutchness and obviously quarterback's the most important player on the field but there's 21 other players on the field they could all have various levels of clutch if you don't have a clutch receiver or if they have a clutch corner or if your center's not clutch i don't know man that sounds pretty bad right so so like that that's that's really important too it's not just all of these like you talked about all these luck-based factors like you know whether or not you catch the ball or drop the ball whether or not you catch the ball after it bounces off your opponent's helmet like that's definitely luck and not the quarterback's fault. But then there's also these other non-luck based factors that the quarterback has no control over. Whether or not your teammates are any good

is one of them, but whether or not your teammates are also resilient to these psychological pressures is another really good one. And so it's really difficult to measure. They occur already in very small samples. We don't tend to always measure the samples that have the highest leverage points in a game. And we build our narratives out of like two or three drives for a guy's entire career. And, you know, it tends to be guys that are already good. Chase Stewart pointed this out too. Mark Sanchez, undeniably clutch when you compare him to his baseline level of play. He showed up bigger in latent games that were close. He showed up bigger in postseasons than he did during the regular season.

But he's fundamentally a bad quarterback. And so we don't think of him as clutch. So we identify all these good quarterbacks. Some of them succeed and we call them clutch. And of course, we're right, because in order to be clutch, you already have to be good because the way that we talk about it. So I think it's fascinating. Again, that's the only reason why i wrote so much about it i looked at a bunch of other sports baseball basketball golf tennis um there's like a bunch

of ways that people have looked at clutchness and it's it's fascinating it's fun but ultimately it's i i mean timo said it best if i had a clutch clutch Zach Wilson and a non-clutch Peyton Manning, I'm taking Peyton Manning every time. Right. You know what really solidified it for me in baseball is if you look up Derek Jeter's slash line for the regular season, it's the same. It's the same in the playoffs as it is. And so, but if you hit 315, I mean, you're going to be pretty clutch.

There's going to be a lot of situations where you're pretty darn good. So I think that choking is probably a little more real than the actual elevation of someone's play, that there could be players whose play goes down because of anxiousness or whatever it might be in those situations. But as you mentioned, by the time you get there in the NFL on the biggest stage, you've probably gone through that a number of times. And even with Eli Manning, he was poor early in his career in the playoffs and then got better, which we also saw from the other Manning as well. So like this is, this has been a thing through the years that a lot of quarterbacks don't win early in their playoff career. Ben Roethlisberger was not great in his

earliest playoff career and then he got better.berger was not great in his earliest playoff career, and then he got better. So, yeah, all these things. But let me finish on this, though. How do we figure out if J.J. McCarthy is going to be clutch or not? Is it as simple as saying that J.J. McCarthy, if he's good, then he'll be fine when it comes to being clutch? Or is there something, because I do feel like it's a little baked

into his analysis of he is a winner. Look at what he did against Bama. it comes to being clutch or is there something because i do feel like it's a little baked into his analysis of he is a winner look at what he did against bama at the end of the game and all that sort of stuff where he was very good in that and they relied on him in a lot of big situations and said hey go win us the game we're gonna run and and so forth uh can we include that do you think in the analysis of jjJ. McCarthy? Because I want to make an argument for yes, but I want to know what you have to say. I think that if we're evaluating all of the factors that go into whether or not a quarterback can be clutch, I would say McCarthy has probably answered a lot of them, psychological resilience being at the top of it.

Again, the thing that matters most is, is he good? And we don't know that yet. But all of the other stuff, I would say that he probably has, right? Like some of it is your strategic flexibility to win in two-minute situations and those unique considerations, like what the defense does, what the offense does, and stuff like that. And he's shown that he's got improvisational capability, adaptability, that he can throw in two-minute situations, that he's got the situational awareness to throw past the sticks on third and fourth down um it very much seems like that's who he is as a quarterback so i would say that the stuff that is not your baseline level of talent it seems like he has again whenever you get to the next level these things are different your ability to evaluate a situation and read a defense and say that guy is open is just different in college than it is in the nfl so we'll see if that endures but

i do think that he's got flexibility adaptability and resilience psychologically and so he'll he'll pass that filter one last note one thing i've noticed in these studies is that people who exhibit a repeated tendency to choke, the opposite of clutchness, were already bad at their job. And it's probably because they don't have the psychological resilience to deal with all of the stuff that I don't. This is not a huge insult, by the way. I do not have the psychological resilience

for this kind of stuff. But if you could be emotionally affected by a fight with your girlfriend that you had before the game and suddenly you're a bad kicker. And that's the same kind of lack of compartmentalization that's characteristic of most humans, but also will impact you in high leverage, you know, big situations. And so that's why, you know, some of these studies found that if you're in the bottom quintile of kickers,

actually all of this stuff matters to you, but only you. The other 80%, you've already, you could fight with your girlfriend all you want. Don't, but you you, the other 80%, you've already, you could fight with your girlfriend all you want. Don't, but you know, you're fine. So you've already learned to work that out because nobody has nothing that, you know, you know, there's all kinds of, yeah. So where you went with the McCarthy thing was where I was going to go, which is that situational awareness is so vital to playing in the NFL, just period. And understanding where to throw to the sticks, when you could take risks, when you can't take risks, and also being able to improvise, make plays with your legs. Those things are going to correlate to succeeding in a situation where they're going to drop

seven guys into coverage and you might have to roll around a little and find something there as opposed to just checking down or throwing the ball away or whatever it might be so those things play in his favor i also think that when the talent gap is wider that something like that someone having those abilities to rise up their play at the most important part what would i think show up more in that? Like, okay, well, we've got this guy, so he's going to take us there because he's more talented than everyone else in the NFL. There's only a couple of guys ever that are so much better than everybody else. But that's not, you know, something that happens all the time. Also, Kirk Cousins did have a cheat code. His name is Justin Jefferson, who is, you know, so that's the other, the other point. But I think that it's sort of like how pressure and performance under

pressure correlates from college to the NFL, but in the NFL, unless you're Jared Goff, who's always bad at it, most people are kind of up and down with that. Some years Kirk was good under pressure. Some years he wasn't, it's a small sample size thing that doesn't really tell us much in one year but in college if you are terrible under pressure you should be really worried about right because there's something there so i think that it does work in his favor and you'd much rather have people say your guy's a winner than your guy's a loser it's just right yeah it's not like a bad thing right exactly exactly is he a winner means nothing I don't know. Like it could be worse. I mean, Jay Cutler was a loser, right?

And he got drafted in the first round and I don't know, that didn't work out. Yeah. I think the flaws, that's what it really comes down to a lot of times in the choking, by the way, it's just the fundamental flaws. Great, great piece though. And you should go check it out. Wide left dot football. It is super easy to find now that you've made it.football. So go check that out. I'm sure everyone already follows you on Twitter and you've tweeted it out 11 times.

So if you want to read this, you're not going to struggle to find it. Anyway, Arif, always great to get together with you. And I am sorry about Cameron Brink getting hurt. You know, and we went toink getting hurt uh you know and we went to the game and you're like okay i get to see cameron brink exciting rookie she gets four fouls before she's four fouls yeah just it's terrible it's just been a tough go but you know you're more resilient than you say ari i appreciate your time man we'll do it again soon yeah thanks for having me this was fun