Measuring NFL team performance by quarterback stats

A neural networks approach

By David MichligEC 539

Teams (and fans) want victories! The quarterback is the leader of the team Typically, the quarterback stays with a team

to play if they have a good season A neural network approach to determining

how the performance of the quarterback affected the overall team performance can make the decision of who to play easier

How important is the quarterback, anyway?

Data used Collected stats from 46 active quarterbacks in

the league Game played, completions, attempts, completion ,

yards, yards per play, touchdowns, interceptions, fumbles, passser rating, rush attempts, rushing yards, rushing average, rushing touchdowns, and first downs.

Number of wins was used as the classes Used seasons where quarterback played in 10

or more games In total, over 200 individual seasons were

used

Project procedure I plan to use pattern classification methods to

determine relationship between quarterback performance and team wins Nearest Neighbor algorithm Maximum Likelihood

Is the quarterback truly the leader of the team, or just another factor?

Initial results

Very low classification rate, which doesn’t look promising.

The confusion matrix, however, shows that although it’s not usually an exact prediction, it is often within a few games of the true record

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12kNN testing rate (no normalization)

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Future results There are many outside factors that need to

be considered Injuries Quality of the team overall Defense Protection

The quarterback does not have a say in these things!

Based on initial results, however, it seems that although exact classification may not be possible, estimates may be made.