More On The Deep Ball

I'm running what I guess amounts to something of a guest column today.  Jason Hutt is an Eagles fan and also part of the game charting project for Football Outsiders.  He's been doing it longer than I have, however, so he has more Eagles games under his belt and has charts going back a couple of years.

Coming out of last week's discussion, Jason went back through his charts and pulled out every deep pass he'd charted over the past two years.  He then went into the official play-by-plays and grabbed the rest, to give a complete picture of where the ball has been going when they air it out.

The results look something like this:

 

With all the receivers, it's a huge file, so rather than posting it as a series of images, you can just download the pdf of his work here. 

Here's Jason's take on the numbers:

I had a chance to do tonight what I was hoping to look into last night.  I went through my game charts and the play-by-play for ’07 and ’08 and compiled data on all passes over 20 yards.  To be clear, I’m only focusing on passes that travel more than 20 yards in the air, not passes that have a lot of yards after the catch.  My goal was to try and see how the receivers were doing getting open and making receptions deep.

I’m missing 1 game in ’07 and 3 games in ’08.  The numbers still offer some interesting insights.  Of course a lot of contextual data is missing here, you can’t tell the defensive coverage, who the primary receiver was, and if there were any mitigating reasons for a throw being off target [Derek's note:  As Jason mentioned in a separate email, this is an important point.  "Off target" can mean there was a miscommunication or the receiver slipped or any number of things.  It doesn't necessarily mean the throw was bad.]  On halves I charted, I was able to document a reason for the incompletion.  On uncharted halves, I just listed incompletion unknown.

Kevin Curtis’ ’08 season was derailed early because of injuries, but the Eagles seemed to have learned in ’07 that he was not a great deep threat.  In two seasons, he’s caught only 2 of 14 passes over 30 yards.  If it was just a matter of getting the timing down with McNabb, you would think that Curtis would have had a better catch rate in the latter half of ’07, instead it seems as if they stopped throwing to him really deep.

Desean Jackson was the Eagles best intermediate route receiver out of the last two seasons.  Nobody comes close to his 56% catch rate on those routes.  However, he was only 1 for 11 on routes over 30 yards.  Getting a burner opposite him who can push the safety back and stretch the middle zones may help Jackson next year as defenses try to key on him more.  It’s also interesting that McNabb was picked off targeting Desean on these routes more than any other receiver.  I wonder if that’s due to trying to squeeze the ball into Desean, due to Desean’s smaller stature, or to him being a rookie.  It will be interesting to see if that changes next year.

Greg Lewis filled this field stretcher role in ’07, but there really wasn’t anyone to take advantage of that.  In ’07, Lewis was the target on the second most passes over 30 yards behind only Curtis.  His 33% catch rate in that area was best on the team.  He was targeted less in this area in ’08 but there’s no telling if he actually ran fewer deep routes.

Reggie Brown was abysmal on the intermediate routes in ’07 and that no doubt factored into his decreased workload this year.

Thanks to Jason for putting this together.