2023 Weapons Review: Mahomes is still the best quarterback in football
Evidence that the Dolphins and Eagles support their quarterbacks, the Patriots and Giants don't, and the 49ers are break our metric the first time out on the street.
Two weeks ago we released the Weapons metric, a measure of how good a team’s offensive skill players are. That is: how good a team’s weapons are. This week, we’re putting the metric into action as we look into how the 2023 QBs and Weapons are doing.
As a refresher, the Weapons metric is calculated as follows:
Where i,j, and k are the first, second, and third best receivers on a team, by number of targets.
By incorporating data from the top 3 receivers, the measure balances top-end talent and depth. Targets—as opposed to receptions or yards—is a good measure of a quarterback or coach’s willingness to “spread the wealth” and get more players involved—suggestive or broader weaponry.
The Best Weapons
The teams with the best weapons this season are Miami, Philly, Dallas, and Detroit. This should be no surprise. Miami, in particular, has seemed head-and-shoulders “faster” than everyone else this season. And Philly has two of—arguably—the top 10 weapons in the league in AJ Brown and DeVonta Smith.
Philly and Miami also have young quarterbacks who we think we know are good—but their weapons scores suggest we might not have the full story. How long, for example, will Tua be throwing to the best receiving corps in football? How long will Jalen Hurts have two #1 receivers? And what will their numbers look like when they don’t have these resources?
We already have questions about Hurts. The difference between a quarterback with a 40% P(100) like Hurts and a 50% P(100) like Jared Goff is substantial, considering the constellation of things one is trying to align to create a Super Bowl winning team. We consider quarterbacks between 25% and 45% P(100) to be long-term starters that you feel okay but not great about, e.g., Ryan Tannehill, Jimmy Garroppolo, Andy Dalton, Derrick Carr.
Houston also features highly on this list, with their rookie QB C.J. Stroud the beneficiary of a strong receiving group. It’s hard to say what to make of this, as Stroud and the Texans’ pass catchers are growing together. Tight End Dalton Schultz has the most NFL experience, serving as a starter for Dallas—another elite pass catching unit—for three years prior to joining Houston.
Lastly, the Chargers and Bills round out the top 10. Their palcement in the top 10 is unsurprising, but finding themselves as at the bottom of the top 10 versus higher up the list—where we might have expected them in previous years. This is, no doubt, a consequence of their $45-million-plus salaries.
Something that the Eagles can look forward to in the near future. Hurts now makes $51 million per year.
The Worst Weapons
On the opposite side of the spectrum, the teams with the worst weapons are also the usual suspects, namely New England and the Giants—neither of which has anything resembling a competent offense this year. This was on full display in a recent matchup between the two teams, which concluded as a 10-7 Giant’s victory.
Besides the Patriots and Giants, the other bad teams are only “moderately bad”. We might feel tempted to feel sympathy for Russell Wilson and Jordan Love, Desmond Ridder here—but consider just how big the gap is between even Russell Wilson at 33% P(100) and Patrick Mahomes at P(100). Mahomes probability of playing well enough to win the Super Bowl is double that of Wilson at this stage in Wilson’s career—there’s more going on their than weapons.
Lamar Jackson is an interesting case here. Jackson has taken up running again in full force this season. And, like in years past, Jackson’s running has the Ravens winning a lot of regular season games. The concern about Jackson is always when he needs to throw, can he? His P(100) of 27% is a borderline backup number—and that’s up 9 percentage points from the start of the year when he was getting a backup grade.
One of our favorite bets is a short on the Ravens this playoffs.
Most Potent Offenses?
Of course, there’s no reason we need to consider P(100) and Weapons separately. If we consider them together, we get the Dolphins, followed by the 49ers as the top passing offenses. And in fact, there’s good reason to believe that San Francisco is being under weighted by the Weapons metric.
Weapons considers only the top three receivers on a team. But San Francisco is actually a four-headed monster. The 49er’s foursome—Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk, George Kittle, and Christian McCaffrey—can all be found in the top 50 of the league in terms of yards. Consider that, uniformly distributed, 14 teams would lack two receivers in the top 50 in yards. San Francisco has four.
And of course, there is the opposite: Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Mahomes’s Chiefs have the lowest Weapon score of the top offenses—and it’s not particularly close. Mahomes is 20 points below a grouping containing: Seattle and Cleveland. The receiving talent in K.C. is much closer to Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Arizona then it is to Philly, Detroit, and Dallas.
That Mahomes is chugging along at a 62% P(100)—a measure that other quarterbacks don’t sniff with much better talent—speaks to how he is still in a league of his own as a quarterback. This 62% is actually a meaningful drop from where Mahomes was last year at 70%.
Kansas City may have the best player in the NFL, but—as we saw in New England at times with Brady—a quarterback can only do so much on their own.
As we also saw with Brady: these ebbs and flows of good personnel groupings and bad personnel groupings can be weathered. A few draft picks and a trade turn a bad receiving corps into a good receiving corps.
Notes on Weapons: Philly, San Francisco, and Baltimore
Having applied the Weapons metric to the 2023 season, there are three things worth noting.
First: The Weapons metric works really well where intended. Philly, Miami, and Dallas have built very traditional, receiver-heavy teams, and the metric identifies that these teams provide their quarterbacks good weapons. This is a success.
Second: The Weapons metric has an obvious gap for less traditional teams. San Francisco, for example, has had injuries at wide receiver (Samuel) and uses their tight end and running back extensively in the passing game. Using four players aggressively in the passing game means that there is significant talent that the Weapons measure is not capturing.
Because most teams cannot get four good pass catchers on their roster, I do not expect this to be a common problem. Most teams have a hard time finding two. But it’s a pitfall to watch out for nonetheless.
Third, the Ravens have a really good running game, and a good running quarterback. They lead the league in rushing yards and attempts. Does that translate to postseason success? We don’t think so. But nonetheless it’s worth noting that between P(100) and Weapons, we don’t make any attempt to measure the impact of quarterback running.
We’ve done that for the simple reason that it hasn’t mattered… yet. Lamar and company hope to change that, I’m sure.