Follow Stathole Sports
Is Tom Brady going to fall off the face of the quarterback earth this year? For yet another year this has been a talking point regarding the soon-to-be 42-year-old Super Bowl champion.
For some reason, a lot of people actually believe this Flat Age Theory. The idea that every quarterback has a certain unknown age, encoded in their DNA, where they fall into the abyss. Nothing round or even curved about it. Just a flat drop. Luckily, truthers like Max Kellerman have alerted society of this reality and have warned us all in 2016 that this day would soon come for Tom Terrific.
But is there any scientific proof of this Flat Age Theory? Does every quarterback just have that age of total decline imprinted in their genes? Maybe for one guy it’s 38, and another it’s 42? Or, are you the reader picking up on the fact that I’m comparing the intelligence of such an argument to that of Flat Earth Theory? The answer to one of these questions is yes.
Well, since Dr. Kellerman’s pronouncement of Brady’s death in 2016, Brady has only been to all three of the Super Bowls and even lost one of them. But hey, according to theory, for any particular quarterback, you never know what age will be the edge of the cliff.
And I know a lot of NFL fans are salivating at the thought of Brady falling right off the face of the earth into a galactic oblivion of worthlessness never to be heard from again. For you, Flat Age Theory has quite the appeal. So, come with me haters. Let me show you the best of the evidence I could muster supporting your Flat Age Theory in all of its half-page-of-text length glory before the chem trails kick in and I abruptly push out deep state propaganda.
“4 GRAPHS THAT PROVE INDISPUTABLY THAT OLD QB’S FALL OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH IN ONE YEAR: GRADUAL DECLINE-HEADS HAVE NO ANSWER!!!!”
Historically speaking, NFL quarterbacks have nose-dived after turning 40 in many of the major quarterback metrics. The graph below charts yards per attempt for all quarterbacks who played at 40 (min 100 attempts per year) since the late 1980s and backtracks to show their performance across their entire career. By only looking at those who reached 40, crappier quarterbacks who sucked at the end of their short careers are weeded out and only those good enough to play while gray were analyzed. These quarterbacks include Tom Brady, Vinny Testaverde, Warren Moon, Brett Favre, Matt Hasselbeck, and Doug Flutie. As you can see below, age 41, – Tom Tom’s current age – looks to be about the time the roller coaster makes its big drop. I can only imagine how bad Tom is shaking just seeing this. A simple “systems” quarterback may as well just retire with some dignity.
But it’s not just yards per attempt. Take Quarterback Rating for example:
Look above at what happens from age 40 to 42 (TOM BRADY’S AGE RANGE!). Quarterback rating at age 40 falls harder than Bob Kraft on a massage table.
SAME THING FOR COMPLETION PERCENTAGE!!! THERE IS NO MISTAKE!!
How about interception rate? Look below at what the 40’s does to you! More and more interceptions thrown per attempts. There is no debate!
So, there you have it gradual decline-heads. All the metrics show that without a doubt, age ruins quarterbacks in their 40’s and Tom Brady should just find himself a hole to rot in.
Chem Trails Kick In
Man. That was some pretty compelling stuff. All of it was indeed accurate. Not only were all graphs real and correct but most pertinently: don’t mean jack fucking shit. In flat earth fashion, the above graphs give only a surface level view of the data.
An even more elaborate study for this theory was performed by ESPN statistician Brian Burke in his blog in 2011 in which he basically proves my point until he cut out said proof in a shorter commentary with ESPN in 2015 peddling this crazy theory. In that ESPN piece, Burke claims:
The final year of a quarterback’s career averages a decline of .75 yards per attempt… the last year of a quarterback’s career falls off by an equivalent of about six years of average age-related decline.
He drops the mic with:
The bottom line is successful quarterbacks – players such as Manning – …don’t become worse slowly. All of the sudden, one year, their numbers just seem to fall off a cliff…
So the argument here is that in their final year, older quarterbacks decline six times more than the expected gradual age decline, thus giving an argument for a “cliff”. Time to enter the stathole and see what the hell is going on here.
Stathole Original Analysis: Debunking Flat Age QB Decline Theory
Basically, the problem with the “cliff” argument is that the year-over-year variation of an established quarterback’s yards per attempt is just about equal to that .75 yard figure Burke rested his case on. I found this by charting all quarterbacks since the late 1980s who have played until 28, 29, and so on until age 40. This way, we’re only looking at bona fide starters here. To be considered, each quarterback must have thrown at least 100 passes a season to qualify for that year. So, all quarterbacks that threw over 100 passes at age 28 or older were grouped together to compute their combined average year-over-year difference in yards per attempt. The process was repeated for all those who qualified at age 29, and so on to age 40 in which only six quarterbacks remained (Brady, Favre, Vinny, Hasselbeck, Flutie, and Moon).
Here’s a fun real world example. Jeff Feagles threw a pass at age 40 during the 2006 season. Feagles didn’t qualify to make the 40-club not because that pass was incomplete, but because he needed 99 more passes to show a reliable average. Also, but less importantly, because Feagles was a punter. It wouldn’t make any sense to plot his 0.0 percent yards per attempt average from one pass. We all know that one pass attempt doesn’t mean anything so judging his passing career based on one attempt would be entirely unfair. In his 19 year career, Feagles attempted a grand total of 8 passes and successfully completed exactly zero of them. Not even an interception.
Anyway, here are the results for the actual quarterbacks:
| Age | Average Year-Over-Year Variation in Yards Per Attempt (up or down) |
|---|---|
| 40+ | .646 |
| 39+ | .676 |
| 38+ | .678 |
| 37+ | .710 |
| 36+ | .716 |
| 35+ | .725 |
| 34+ | .740 |
| 33+ | .744 |
| 32+ | .738 |
| 31+ | .733 |
| 30+ | .719 |
| 29+ | .720 |
| 28+ | .722 |
As you can see, whether it went up one year or down the other, the average year-over-year difference is strikingly similar to Brian Burke’s supposedly significant .75 decline in yards per attempt. This is called natural variation and you learn it in statistics before you even get the syllabus. Some years’ yards per attempt will be around .75 above what you expect, some .75 below. On the above years, quarterbacks tend to say “damn, I’m good”, and play another season. On the down years, quarterbacks tend to say “fuck it”, retire, and fool ESPN statisticians into believing Flat Age theory.
I think I made my point here so let me continue to make it by beating this dead Flat Age Theory round. Here is a progression of seasonal yards per attempt averages for all six 40-year-old starting quarterbacks included in my research:
For reference, the horizontal dotted line represents the average yards per attempt for modern day NFL quarterbacks (2018) and the vertical gray bar reflects the age Tom Brady is about to surpass this fall.
After careful study, the astute graph reader will notice this graph reveals what a professional statistician would call a shit show of lines. As my earlier table suggests, each color you try to follow uncannily goes up and down close to Burke’s .75 year-after-year variation as a general norm regardless of their age. You’ll notice those in the 40-year-old club that surpassed Brady in age (Moon and Testaverde) seem to have fallen off their “cliff” but when you look at the whole picture of their careers, you see just how common such a “fall” is.
Take ole-Vinny for example. Same graph focused on him:
While not qualifying in the analysis at age 43, the difference between ages 42 and 44 was pretty drastic. It should be noted though that he was on a new team at age 44 and wasn’t even the mainstay starter (Jake Delhomme). Even so, a similar drop also occurred for him at age 28, 34 and 37. Vinny didn’t hang up the cleats because he fell off some cliff. He just had a down year well within what one might expect and looked back at this year as any of us would and said: “fuck this”.
Truthers of Flat Age Theory get to hide behind the fact that we’ll never truly know if the final year of a quarterback’s career was a cliff fall because…well… it was their final year. But if a cliff exists, and quarterbacks inevitably reach it… wouldn’t there be a trend of quarterbacks who stubbornly try and try to get back up a few years before giving up? Why is it the case that all quarterbacks quit once falling off? Showing sufficient evidence of this is how my claim that this is all bullshit is falsifiable – a concept truthers would never consider for their argument.
I looked for evidence of quarterbacks falling off the cliff and stubbornly trying to get back up and quite frankly, I didn’t find shit. The eldest 32 quarterbacks (age 37+) in the past few decades career yards per attempt are shown below with simple linear regressions for each player:
So what about these graphs exactly would support Flat Age Theory? Basically, in order to suggest a quarterback fell off “the cliff” and failed to get back up we need to see a graph showing a significant dip followed by, let’s say two additional years with no sign of recovery. Looking at the graphs above, I see no such evidence. Not one quarterback who fell off “the cliff” was too stubborn to quit. Sure, you might argue that if a quarterback dropped off the cliff they got replaced, but many of these quarterbacks are high end veterans who would have earned the chance for a comeback. Still, not a one made that climb. How convenient for the truthers.
OK, let’s circle back to Brady:
As you can see, after his peak at age 34, Tom Brady fell off the cliff at age 35 with a full yard drop in yards per attempt and dropped off another .7 yard cliff in 2013. He was never heard from again. Except when he climbed back up both cliffs and led the Patriots to four out of the next five Super Bowls and sorta, kinda won three of them. But what would have happened if he retired after 35 or 36? I’ll tell you what. Truthers would have used that as evidence of some mystical edge of the quarterback earth. Instead, Tom Brady climbed the fuck back up that “cliff” and is currently taking a piss off the top of it.
The point is this: Tom Brady’s final year may very well be .75 yards per attempt fewer than his prior year, but the idea that with age inevitably comes a cliff is what the great Jim Mora would describe as “diddly-poo”.
Stathole Prediction:
If Brady does decline by around .75 yards per attempt in 2019 and returns in 2020 and 2021, he will make up for a majority of that drop in one of those two years. If he fails, I’ll consider my argument against Flat Age Theory busted and the truthers can rejoice. I’ll even go a step further. Let’s add this year’s newest member of the 40-year old club, Drew Brees, to the mix. Same goes for him.
There is no such thing as a quarterback age cliff. The quarterback world is round, just like the earth, and quarterbacks decline with age much more gradually than truthers would suggest. It doesn’t matter who you are. The gradual fall will come. Unless, of course, you have nowhere to fall from. If that’s the case, then your name must be Jeff Feagles.
-El Jefe
