With That Said...

Look, big picture I think everyone needs to take a deep breath, let McNabb prepare with his first healthy offseason in three years, and give him a chance to show what he can do next year.  However, this is just more statistical sleight-of-hand designed to defend the indefensible:

The chic new theory to explain why the offense has sputtered suggests that it is McNabb's refusal to throw the ball deep that has grounded the passing game...

The numbers really don't suggest that McNabb has been overly-conservative this season. In fact, they suggest that he really hasn't thrown downfield all that much less than he has throughout the rest of his career.

In the 11 games in which he has played this season, McNabb has attempted 38 throws that traveled 20 yards or more in the air. That means that on the average Sunday, he throws 3.5 deep balls.

Since 2000, McNabb averages 4.2 throws of over 20 yards per game – a difference of less than one full attempt.

In fact, following the 2000 season, McNabb finished as the runner up to Marshall Faulk in the league MVP voting, and that season he had attempted only 3.9 passes of 20 yards or more per game. In 2001, he attempted only 3.5.

There are multiple problems with this argument.  The first and most important is that you can't compare McNabb's current pace to his career numbers and call it a day, because this didn't used to be a big play offense.  In fact, back in McNabb's early days the common criticism of the Andy Reid offense was that it was too "dink and dunk" with no big play threat whatsoever.  It wasn't until the jerk arrived in 2004 that we saw the truth -- Reid's offense was bomb-happy when he had the personnel to run it. 

Unfortunately, I don't have access to the same stats the guys who work for PE.com do, so I'll have to make do with the public numbers.  Here's a table with big plays of 20+ / 40+ yard plays as a percentage of total attempts:

As you can see, there's a clear difference between McNabb's early and later years.  (And it's truly a measure of just how sputtering the offense has been at times this year that McNabb is on course to post the second-lowest big-play percentage of his career.)  And while we can't say for sure that there's a tight relationship between long attempts and long completions, thanks to that article we know that McNabb attempted 3.9 "deep balls" per game in 2000 and 3.5 in 2001 -- both of which are lower than his 4.3 career mark. 

It's also worth nothing that 2000 was the year McNabb attempted 569 passes, a figure he's never come close to reaching again.  The difference between 3.9 and 3.5 can be almost entirely attributed to the fact that McNabb simply threw fewer passes in 2001.  This is why deep pass per attempt would be a much better number to use.

The second problem with the argument is that it's only given us one piece of information.  Even if it were true that McNabb was trying almost as many passes over 20 yards, I'm willing to bet that his percentage of passes that travel at least 10 or 15 yards in the air would also be lower than in years past.  Maybe I'm wrong, but the six-yard checkdown seems to be a larger part of the offense than it has been the last few years. 

In fact, if you really want to make the case that McNabb's not just checking the ball down all the time ... why don't you give us the percentage of passes that travel fewer than 10 yards in the air?  Let's compare that to previous years and see where things stand.  (And since we're making requests, please control for the frequency of called screen passes, which seems to have declined this year as opponents started game planning to take away this important part of the offense.)

The last bit of evidence we have comes from this fantastic statistical website I linked to a couple weeks ago.  He has access to Yardage-After-Catch (YAC) numbers that allow him to back out what he calls "air yards" for every quarterback in the league.  If you compare his numbers through week 12 of this season to the numbers for last year you can see that McNabb's average completion is traveling only about six yards through the air this season.  Last year the number was almost seven.  That's a difference of about 15 slots in the QB rankings for that stat. 

The other reason things seem so much tougher this year?  McNabb averaged 7.8 yards of YAC per completion last season, by far the highest number in the league.  This year (through 12 games) the figure is about 5.9 and the difference doesn't seem to be related to any dropoff in the receiving production of Brian Westbrook, the human YAC machine who is on pace to catch even more balls this year than last.

Right now this is a station-to-station offense, with no home run threat and too few base stealers.  It does no good to pretend otherwise.