Over the 2019 and 2020 seasons, Gardner Minshew completed 62.9 percent of his passes, threw 37 touchdowns against 11 interceptions, and posted a 93.1 passer rating as Jacksonville’s starting quarterback, according to Pro Football Reference. That reads as a respectable young quarterback. His touchdown-to-interception ratio of 3.4 to 1 was well above the league’s 2.1 to 1 over those two seasons, and his passer rating was a shade above the league’s 92.4, by our calculation from the public nflverse play-by-play data. But his completion rate was below the league’s 64.6 percent, and by expected points added per dropback, the metric analytics departments use to evaluate quarterback performance, Minshew came in at about 0.03, 26th of the 41 quarterbacks with at least 300 dropbacks across those two seasons. The exact rank moves a place or two depending on how EPA is defined. The graphic and the model were not telling the same story.
Expected points added works by comparing what actually happened on a play to the scoring outcome an average team could expect from that down, distance, field position, and time remaining, so a five-yard completion on third-and-3 counts as a real success, while an identical five-yard completion on third-and-8 usually counts as a failure, even though both look the same in a traditional stat line. Sacks count too, and a passer rating ignores them; Minshew was sacked on about 6.4 percent of his dropbacks, a little above the 6.1 percent median for those 41 quarterbacks. Game context mattered as well. Jacksonville was trailing on 81 percent of Minshew’s dropbacks, against 54 percent for the league, and 24 percent came when the team’s win probability was below 5 percent or above 95 percent, against 16 percent league-wide. It is tempting to blame garbage time for the gap, but removing those plays leaves his EPA per dropback essentially unchanged and his rank at 27th of 39, so the explanation does not hold up.
The concept traces back further than most fans realize. Virgil Carter, then a Cincinnati Bengals quarterback, and Northwestern professor Robert Machol published “Operations Research on Football” in the journal Operations Research in 1971, and Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn’s 1988 book The Hidden Game of Football brought a systematic statistical approach to the sport.
None of that history makes it onto a Sunday broadcast, and that absence is the investigator’s actual entry point. A broadcast has to narrate a game in real time, which rewards stats that can be read instantly off a graphic: completion percentage, touchdown-to-interception ratio, yards per game. EPA requires a play-by-play model running in the background, and while public projects like nflfastR and the nflverse now make that data freely available to anyone willing to look it up after the game, nobody is putting it on screen during a two-minute drill. The gap between what the broadcast narrates and what the underlying data shows is not a conspiracy. It is simply a format mismatch, and it means the audience that only consumes the broadcast’s framing is working from a materially different picture of the game than anyone checking the numbers afterward.
The investigator’s version of watching football is not complicated, but it requires resisting the broadcast’s preferred shorthand in real time. Ask whether a completion actually moved the down-and-distance chances or just padded a stat line in a lopsided game. Ask whether a quarterback’s win total reflects his play or his defense and his kicker. Ask whether the announcer’s praise for a “gutsy” fourth-quarter drive happened while trailing by three scores against a defense that had stopped trying to get the ball back. None of that requires building your own model. It requires treating the broadcast’s chosen numbers as one input rather than the verdict, and checking the free public data that already exists the moment the easy story stops adding up.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.