Stratified Excellence

Wrapping up the 2025 season of meaningless football analytics.

The 2025 football season roared to a glorious close yesterday with a late-night thriller between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Two missed kicks decided the game between two traditionally strong teams that consistently shot themselves in the feet all season. Look at this glorious plot of win probability.

We were all entertained.

But this isn’t my favorite story of average teams this season. No, I am enamored with the NFC South, where three teams tied for first by all finishing 8 and 9. The winner was decided by typically esoteric NFL legalese, which uses an elaborate decision tree to pick a winner. The first step looks at the records of the teams against each other. The Panthers were 3 and 1 (lost to the Bucs once), the Bucs were 2 and 2 (lost to the Panthers once and the Falcons once), and the Falcons were 1 and 3 (lost to the Bucs once and the Panthers twice). So Panthers it was.

It’s fitting that the Panthers advanced despite a miserable loss to the Bucs in the final game of the season. The lone highlight of that depressing matchup was a forty-yard pass on fourth down from diminutive quarterback Bryce Young to rookie standout Tet McMillan.

Bryce Young, the number one pick of the 2023 draft, has been as decidedly mediocre as his Panthers this year. But he seems to have one astounding fourth-down play a game, making it hard for the Panthers to move on from him. Mike Tanier has been tracking Young’s aberrational abilities all year. On fourth down this season, Young has completed 15 passes on 20 attempts, for 285 yards, 3 touchdowns, and zero interceptions. If that were a standalone statistic in a game’s box score, it would be one of the best performances of the season. In terms of one of the venerable statistics of football, that would be a 156.3 passer rating, just shy of a perfect game.

Passer rating is one of my favorite NFL statistics. It’s easy to write down the formula, though annoying to describe the details. It takes pass attempts, completions, passing yards, touchdowns, and interceptions, and combines them into a single number on a scale that embarrasses Fahrenheit. Roughly speaking, if you have a high completion percentage, with many yards per attempt, a lot of touchdowns, and very few interceptions, you’re rated highly. When conceived, 100.0 was supposed to be good, like on a test. The rest was extra credit, with a maximum being 158.3. The number is always reported with a single decimal point. Sure.

Like all football statistics, QB rating is very imperfect at capturing quality. But 150+ usually points to something interesting going on. There were only two games this year when a quarterback had a passer rating greater than 156.3: Drake Maye’s dismantling of the hapless Jets in week 17 and a rare offensive juggernaut performance by Jalen Hurts and the Eagles against the Vikings in week 7.

If we restrict to only fourth-down plays, Young has the highest passer rating in the league. The next highest are Patrick Mahomes (145.1), Drake Maye (141.7), and Jared Goff (132.0), all excellent quarterbacks.¹ The first is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. The second is in the running for league MVP. The third has been to multiple Super Bowls.

But passer rating on 4th down doesn’t really mean anything, because 4th down is a very special down. QB rating heavily penalizes interceptions, but on 4th down, an interception is strategically better than an incompletion if your team tackles the defender before they get back to the line of scrimmage. A deep ball that is intercepted with the defensive back ruled down by contact is affectionately dubbed an “arm punt.”

Matthew Stafford, the other quarterback in this year’s MVP race, had one of these in week seventeen’s Falcons-Rams matchup. If you remove that pick from his stats, his 4th down passer rating jumps to 147.0, putting him 2nd behind Young.

If you look at all the other downs, the situation completely changes. Young has an overall QB rating of 87.8. That ranks him 33rd out of 58 starting QBs. Middling, which is a better description of his performance this season. In actual QB rating, Drake Maye is 2nd in the league (112.9). Stafford is third (108.8), and Goff is fourth (107.0). The Packers’ Malik Willis is impossibly in first place, starting a single game this season and achieving a 145.5 rating in a loss to the Ravens.

4th-down QB rating looks like it might at least correlate with QB rating, EXCEPT for Bryce Young, the king of 4th downs. It doesn’t. The R-squared between QB rating and 4th down QB rating is 0.06. If you remove Bryce Young, the correlation is 0.1. For the opposite side of the correlation, Aaron Rodgers has been atrocious on 4th down this year. He has a QB rating of 95.3 on the year, but a horrid 17.5 on fourth downs.

So much of the fun of football is in these weird statistical quirks. Football is a game of stupid missed field goals, inexplicably broken coverages, and terrible calls by the refs. We just can’t resist quantifying the narratives of our bizarre systems of legalized violence.

But maybe Bryce Young is special on fourth downs. I didn’t even mention that Young ran for two first downs on the six running plays the Panthers called on 4th down. We need someone to hypnotize him into believing that every down is 4th down. In the name of science.

1. These numbers are only through week 17, because the good folks at stathead football haven’t updated their database yet. Given yesterday’s games, these numbers aren’t going to change much.