From the FanPosts. -Chris

About a week ago, I presented some statistical analysis to shed some light on the unofficial data for NFL dropped passes collected by third party vendor STATS LLC.  Specifically, I was interested in determining how dropped passes related to other mainstream receiving statistics, and trying to get an idea what kind of standards STATS uses for counting dropped passes.

Of course... this statistical category is of much current interest to Chiefs fans because three Kansas City receivers - Dwayne Bowe, Bobby Wade and Mark Bradley - are among the league leaders, and we are told the Chiefs as a group are on the verge of setting an NFL record for the season.  So I was also hoping to learn more about where Chiefs receivers stood.

Unfortunately, the data available to me at that time was incomplete, and I couldn't draw very many conclusions from it - other than my own suspicion that the data is mysterious, because it doesn't seem to line up very well with other, official NFL receiving statistics.

I received many nice compliments for the work, but also some valid criticisms of my methods.  In hindsight, I probably should have abandoned the project when I realized I couldn't easily obtain drops data for all NFL receivers.

But since then - quite by accident - I've discovered that you can get this data.  It's just that unless you are a subscriber to the STATS service, it's a hell of a lot of work to assemble it.  So please remember that if you're interested in having me do some additional analysis of this data after the season's final week - or in... say... week 9 of the 2010 season - I'm pretty sure I'll be busy washing my hair!

There's a lot of data to go through here, but it's very interesting.

First, a few notes about where the data was obtained.  STATS does not provide drops in their league breakdowns of NFL pass receiving data, except for a 25 man leaderboard that covers all types of pass receiving positions.  But it turns out that in statistical breakdowns for individual players, drops are included as a footnote.  However... this footnote is shown for wide receivers only - not tight ends, running backs or fullbacks.  So if you already have a database of regular receiving data - which I had for the number crunching I did in the previous post - all you have to do is add the data from these footnotes to your database.

You just have to do it one wide receiver at a time.

(It may very well be that the IT department at the Washington Post - the STATS subscriber from whose web site I got all this data - is wondering why they've had a big jump in page views from Kansas City during the last few days.  I could explain it to them very easily!)

So this analysis will include wide receivers only.  But for our purposes, that's OK, because it's the Chiefs' wide receivers who are on the hot seat about drops.  In addition, I have compiled data only for those wide receivers who have had 40 or more balls thrown to them this season.

First, a revised Wide Receiver Hall of Shame:

NFL Wide Receiver Drops Leaderboard

Yep... this is even worse than the one in the last post - the one that included 49ers TE Vernon Davis (who currently has 11 drops) and other non-WRs like Dallas Clark, Jerome Harrison and a couple of others.  Three Chiefs at the very top of the list!

Ouch!

However... other than the fact that three Chiefs are on top of this leaderboard, what's wrong with it?

It doesn't show how many passes were attempted to each of these guys.  If two guys have the same number of drops, but one of them had twice as many balls thrown to them as the other, then one guy has a drops problem twice as large as the other.  So let's factor that in, and create a new leaderboard that is based on this percentage, rather than on the raw number:

NFL Wide Receiver Drop Percentage Leaderboard

Quite a different spin, isn't it?  Now Mark Bradley becomes the guy with the biggest problem.  Oakland's Heyward-Bey rockets up the list, as do several others ranked in the 50s on the raw number alone.  Yet there are still three Kansas City Chiefs in the top four - and that's bad... right?

But those three guys all have one thing in common: they're all catching passes thrown by Matt Cassel.

Now... don't get upset, Cassel fans.  This isn't the beginning of an indictment of our shiny new #7.  This is simply recognition of a fact: when a pass is dropped, there are many factors that can come into play.  Sure... it could be simple.  The ball can hit the receiver right in the hands, and he can drop it because he isn't concentrating on what he's doing - or simply because he has hands of stone.  But the ball could also be early or late... thrown slightly ahead or behind the receiver... slightly underthrown or slightly overthrown.  Any of these things can contribute significantly to a drop - and could easily be completely invisible to everyone except the coaches watching the tape later - and, of course, the quarterback and receiver involved.

So here's the next question that drove me to this project: what happens if you break down drop percentages based on the overall quality of a team's passing game?  Are the guys with the most drops playing for teams that have relatively poor completion percentages across the board, or are they scattered equally among good passing teams and bad?

Figuring this out would have an additional benefit: it would make it easy to see if standards for dropped passes are being applied pretty evenly across the league.

I realized, though, that this data might be a little tough to comprehend in print.  So to make it easier to absorb, I first decided to send all NFL teams to school, and assign them a letter grade based on their team completion percentages:

NFL Passing Grades

I even graded everybody on the curve, awarding two As and two Fs, six Bs and six Ds, and sixteen Cs.  Take a look:

NFL Wide Receiver Drop Percentage Leaderboard
Including Team Passing Grades

Well, that's pretty much what you'd expect, isn't it?  Most of the guys with the highest percentage of dropped passes are on teams with average (and in most cases, below average) completion percentages.  This would suggest that the quarterback - along with the pass protection he receives, the quality of the running game to complement the passing game, and so on - are all contributing factors for players with higher percentages of dropped passes.

But let's be sure, and look at the data from the other direction:

NFL Wide Receiver LOWEST Drop Percentages
Including Team Passing Grades

This time, the guys with the lowest drop percentages are the guys who play on teams with at least average (and sometimes above average) overall completion percentages; only a few play on teams at the other end of the spectrum.

This data has also convinced me that my original worry - that standards for counting dropped passes are not being applied evenly across the league - was without merit.  I'd still love to know what those standards really are, but I am now willing to accept that whatever they happen to be, they are being applied fairly.  I stand corrected, Satchmo.

However... we're not done yet.  And this is where it gets interesting.

For just a moment, let's step back and look at the big picture.  What, exactly, is a dropped pass?  It's an incompletion.  Nothing more, and nothing less.  Sure... a drop hurts more at a critical point in a close game - a lot more - but the critical thing isn't really how many passes a receiver drops, but how many passes he catches.

So how can you measure how good a receiver really is? Let's see if we can figure out a way.

What if we compared a receiver's completion percentage to his team's completion percentage?  But let's add a twist: when we figure the completion percentage of the team, we'll remove that receiver's contribution.  So, for example, when we compare Dwayne Bowe's completion percentage to the team's percentage, the team's percentage will include passes to everybody except Dwayne Bowe. 

We'll call this the Completion Differential Percentage, and if we figure it for all the wide receivers in the league, here's what we get:

NFL Wide Receiver Lowest Completion Differential Percentages

Wow.  What happened?  Only one Chief is in this Hall of Shame: Mark Bradley.  He's already been released, of course - and now, perhaps, we know why.  But how about the list of the 25 best?

NFL Wide Receiver Highest Completion Differential Percentages

Why... lookee here!  There's a Chief on this list, too: Chris Chambers.  Not the Hall of Shame, mind you... but the 25 best in the league.

But look who isn't on either list: Bobby Wade and Dwayne Bowe.  While he's out of the top 25, Bowe is actually a bit above average in this comparison - ranked 38th out of 99 WRs with 40 or more attempts.  That puts him ahead of Larry Fitzgerald, Vincent Jackson, T.J. Houshmandzadeh and Chad Ochocinco, among others.  Wade, on the other hand, is a bit below average at number 55.  Lance Long - who only has 38 attempts for the Chiefs this season - would likely fall just a few spots behind Bowe if he had a couple more balls this season.

In my first post on this subject, I said that I wouldn't dream of suggesting that drops haven't been a problem for the Chiefs this season.  I am not changing my position.  They have been - particularly for Dwayne Bowe.

But let's not get carried away, shall we?

I remember that during his first two seasons, there were plenty of people commenting on Dwayne Bowe's propensity for dropping easy catches - and then turning around and making spectacularly difficult ones two plays later.  These, of course, were the same two seasons in which he gained over 2000 yards and scored a dozen touchdowns as part of an incredibly anemic offense.

And during those seasons, I don't recall a single person ever suggesting that the Chiefs should offer Dwayne Bowe as trade bait.

Yet now - largely, in my opinion, because people have become so emotionally invested in whether the Chiefs' signing of Matt Cassel is going to pay off - Dwayne Bowe is suddenly Public Enemy Number One.  Not because he's not any good, but simply because he's... well, because he's still Dwayne Bowe.  He still muffs a gimme sometimes, and then catches an amazing TD pass in traffic with two toes just inside the boundary.  That's always been the Bowe Show.

Dwayne Bowe is not the reason Matt Cassel hasn't led his team to a winning season, as he did in New England last season.  That hasn't happened because the Chiefs have been in a whirlwind of transition since the opening week.  That's going to settle down in the second year of Todd Haley's administration.  We're already seeing how much difference a solid running game can make to Matt Cassel's performance - and in the performance of his receivers.  Last week, Bowe was targeted in a dozen plays - and caught nine of those balls.

So let's not go off half-cocked and offer Dwayne Bowe to anybody who'll give us a draft pick for him.  Find another solid guy - somebody better than Bobby Wade, and younger than Chris Chambers - to line up on the other side.  With that kind of a lineup - and a full offseason with everybody working together out of the same playbook - we won't have to be talking about the passes Dwayne Bowe dropped any more.