Fantasy
4/19/23
6 min read
Lost Paradox: Importance of TDs for Fantasy Football Quarterbacks
Having set the stage for the importance of touchdowns to fantasy production in the introductory piece to this series, we’re now ready to take a theoretical, statistical and analytical approach to the areas of predictability and variance associated with touchdowns at the quarterback position.
This piece will mark the end of our exploration into the importance of touchdowns at the four major positions in fantasy football. We’ll first look at team tendencies and expectations moving forward for major statistical outliers at the quarterback position before scrutinizing the data from the previous three seasons.
All data discussed is pulled directly from Sports Info Solutions.
Other Parts: Running Backs | Wide Receivers | Tight Ends
Outliers, 2023 Outlook
Before we get into the major statistical outliers at the position, it is essential to understand how vital touchdowns are to quarterback scoring. There are numerous reasons why this is the case. First, teams are only allotted so many possessions in a standard game, making the decreased scoring per yard for passing meaningful.
Most fantasy formats award four to five points per 100 yards passing, whereas a running back would score 10 points per 100 yards. Second, quarterbacks do not accrue points for receptions. Finally, quarterbacks have a hand in most touchdowns scored throughout the league. We'll continue to drive these points home in later sections.
Top Tier
Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts and Joe Burrow are in a tier of their own as far as scoring touchdowns go. Those four offenses all ranked in the top seven in scoring this past season. All four offenses are built to maximize their respective quarterbacks’ skillset in and around the red zone. Unsurprisingly, this tier makes up the top four quarterbacks off the board in early best ball drafts.
Kirk Cousins
Kirk Cousins has recorded 31 or more touchdowns in four of five seasons with the Minnesota Vikings. The change to former quarterback Kevin O’Connell at head coach (and offensive play caller) saw the Vikings increase their red zone pass rate in 2022 and led to Cousins amassing the second-most pass yards of his professional career.
All signs point to another more than 30 touchdowns and 4,500 passing-yard season from Cousins, putting him in the top eight in expectation for 2023. He is being drafted as the QB11 in early best ball drafts.
Justin Herbert
You’re not getting a significant discount on Justin Herbert compared to the top tier at the position. Still, Herbert is the closest to breaking into that tier of all remaining quarterbacks. He has averaged 34 combined touchdowns over the first three seasons of his professional career.
He gets a significant coaching upgrade for the 2023 season in offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, at least as far as red zone touchdown rate goes. Herbert should be ranked ahead of Justin Fields in best ball format, the latter of whom is being drafted ahead of Herbert in early best ball drafts.
Daniel Jones
Daniel Jones managed a respectable 22 combined touchdowns in 2022 but offset the requirement for a high touchdown rate with his legs. Jones quietly added the fourth most points with his legs in 2022, behind only Fields, Allen and Hurts. Jones’ New York Giants ranked fifth in red zone scoring rate, behind only Dallas, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Detroit. The problem for the Giants wasn’t scoring once in the red zone; it was sustaining drives to get to the red zone.
That should change in the second full season under coach Brian Daboll and offensive coordinator Mike Kafka. We don’t know the team’s plans to address the lack of pro-caliber pass-catchers, but things can’t get much worse after the Giants played the 2022 season with a less-than-ideal pass-catching group. The team could also benefit from improved health after Wan’Dale Robinson and Sterling Shepard missed significant action in 2022.
Russell Wilson
Sean Payton getting hired as the Denver Broncos coach should give Russell Wilson a huge boost. The Broncos ranked last in points per game in 2022 at just 16.9 and now get an offensive coaching duo that ranked at least fifth in scoring during their shared tenure with the New Orleans Saints.
With a better offense comes more touchdowns. With more total touchdowns comes a higher share of Wilson and his primary offensive skill position players. The best part is Wilson is being drafted as the QB16 in early best ball drafts, a position that extends an unbalanced upside profile for the 2023 season.
The Data
As shown in the table above, touchdowns accounted for more than 40 percent of all quarterback fantasy scoring during the previous three years. Compare that to the roughly 20 percent of tight end scoring from touchdowns in PPR formats, 16 percent for wide receivers and 23 percent for running backs, and we start to see just how valuable touchdowns are to quarterback scoring.
It might appear from the table rushing prowess is not important to quarterbacks. Let’s squash those thoughts now. This study was not meant to prove the efficacy of mobility at the position. That has been proven in numerous other studies around the industry.
To quickly illustrate that fact, although only 6.91 percent of overall quarterback scoring resulted from rushing scores in 2022 (as per the table above), a massive 37.51 percent of all points to come on the ground at the position in 2022 were scored by five quarterbacks – Fields, Allen, Hurts, Lamar Jackson and Jones.
So, it’s not that it isn’t important; it’s simply that there aren’t many “Konami code” quarterbacks in today’s NFL game that provide enough on the ground to offset the need to find the end zone and an elevated rate. While that might seem obvious, it's an important distinction to make.
Backing up the data on the percentage of quarterback scoring to come via touchdowns during the previous three seasons, the above chart compares total quarterback scoring and combined touchdowns (rush and pass).
The r-squared value of 0.974 is almost unheard of in NFL statistics (the closer to a value of one an r-squared value is, the higher the correlation), providing an extremely correlated outcome between total touchdown production and fantasy scoring at the position. The r-squared values for the other major positions, you ask? 0.814 for running backs, 0.714 for wide receivers and 0.669 for tight ends.
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