Will The Real Joe Flacco Please Stand up

If anyone thought Joe Flacco was a controversial QB at the beginning of the 2012 season, they should have waited a year. With a Super Bowl win, Flacco now seems to have both more proponents and more haters than ever before. He’s a big game QB who comes up huge when his team needs him. No, he’s an average QB who had one great AND LUCKY postseason. So, which one is it? Is he the great franchise QB who brings his best when it counts the most? Or is he just another middling QB riding a strong team? The answer is both. And the problem is it can be difficult to predict which one is going to show up.

Flacco’s estimated* TAVA scores from his last four years of play are all pretty average. There’s not a single year that he posted a TAVA score that would place amongst the top ten in 2012.

YEAR	TAVA	TAVA RANK
2009	0.06	17
2010	0.05	17
2011	0.40	11
2012	0.05	17

But that by itself doesn’t settle it. Not to harp on that whole winning a Super Bowl thing, but Flacco was definitely not just riding an elite team for those four games. In the 2012 playoffs, Flacco dropped back to pass over 130 times, averaged 9 yards per attempt, and turned the ball over ONCE. It should be unsurprising then that he had the second highest TAVA of all QBs in the 2012 playoffs (1.93 and second only to Kaepernick’s 1.99). But this is still only four games, and a lot of QBs can get hot or cold. Look at the four games Flacco played directly prior to the 2012 playoffs. The Ravens were 1-3 with Flacco playing some not quite impressive football (earning him a TAVA score of -1.19 for that time span)

One thing that I look for when trying to identify which supposedly elite QBs are merely “game managers” who rely on their teams to win is to look at their performance across different support levels. Alex Smith, to use yesterday’s example, won 79 percent of the 2011 and 2012 regular season games that he started and finished. He was also putting up great numbers, but he had never won a game with QB Support less than 2.7, and most of his games (and nearly all of his wins) were clustered in very high QB support ranges. Well, let’s take a similar look at Flacco:

QB Support	Prob. Of Victory	Wins	Losses	TAVA
Below 0.9	0-9%	0	2	0.37
0.9 to 1.69	10-20%	1	2	1.15
1.70 to 2.7	21-40%	3	7	0.53
2.71 to 3.59	40-60%	2	5	-0.72
3.6 to 4.59	61-80%	14	3	0.00
4.6-5.39	81-90%	12	1	0.19
5.4+	90+%	11	0	0.15
TOTALS		43	20	0.13

So this is where things get weird. Flacco does have an impressive 43 wins over the last four years, but most of those and most of his games overall had him enjoying pretty high QB Support. Whereas QB Support is above 3.6 about 40 % of the time, Flacco enjoyed support above that number over 65 % of the time (going 37-4). What’s strange though is that his best TAVA scores are in the lowest QB support ranges. This is the exact opposite of what you would expect from a “game manager.” A guy who just manages the game should fall apart when support runs out and he’s asked to do a little bit more. Flacco, bizarrely, does his worst work in the “toss-up” games where the probability that a QB will win the game should, on average, be about 50 %.

How do we make make sense of it all? Well, looking back at some of the wins and close losses in low support games and at some of the “toss-up” or high support losses, a few things became clear. Joe Flacco is absolutely capable of putting his team on his back, leading the Ravens to victory only because he played exceptionally well. Take a look, for example, back at his regular season win against the Patriots last year or even how critical he was in the win against Dallas. What he is also capable of, however, is losing WAY too many games that the Ravens really should have won. Take a look at last year’s losses to the Eagles and Steelers or even how poorly he played in a near loss to the Chiefs. I recognize that all of those games were very close, but the point is that the none of them should have been. The Ravens shouldn’t have had a chance to beat the Patriots that week, but Flacco was just that good. Against the Chiefs, Eagles and Steelers, however, they should have won or run away with it, but Flacco's struggles made things closer than they should have been.

Now, Flacco has a ring, a $20 Million/year+ contract, and the question remains, is he really elite? The data shows that he’s fully capable of keeping his team in the game without much help from the defense or the ground game, which is not true for every QB in the league. Still, he needs more consistency if he wants to be included in the conversation of elite QBs after the glow of a Super Bowl win wears off. Well, the future begins tonight as the Ravens kick off the 2013 NFL Season against the Denver Broncos on Thursday night football. We’ll see which Joe Flacco stands up.