Matt Ryan Is A Defense Destroyer

Check out this dandy from Pro Football Focus. It's a new series of stats that has to do with the amount of time a QB takes to throw or get sacked. These are stats I can get behind. They're not complicated, unexplained (potentially biased) stats.

(Somewhat) to my surprise, Matt Ryan is a destroyer when it comes to quick passes. But not just any destroyer. THE destroyer of defenses.

Matt Ryan's about average when it comes to the time he takes to throw at 2.73 seconds.

The fastest is Tom Brady at 2.49 seconds on average. On average!!

At the bottom of the same page is an average time to get sacked. For Matt, he's below average (as in gets sacked faster) at just 2.84 seconds. That's ranked 24th.

What does this mean to me?

To me, this says that Matty is using just about every lick of time possible to calculate his throws. Not only that, but this suggests our pass protection isn't as good as someone like, say, Tom Brady, who gets 3.26 seconds on average before he is sacked. In the grand scheme of things, that's a ton of time! This also accounts for mobile QBs, so Russell Wilson, Vick, etc. are at the top with 4 seconds because they can evade people.

This also suggests to me that Matty is getting splattered as soon as he releases the ball.

On the next page breaks down how many passes required less than 2.5 seconds and how many required more than 2.5 seconds.

Matty is 14th in the league with 52.3% of his passes occurring in less than 2.5 seconds. In such passes, he's completing 75% of his throws. SEVENTY FIVE percent, which is insane! He's taken 2 sacks in less than 2.5 seconds, one of which came against Dallas. That's good for a 112.2 rating, the highest in the league, which puts him up there with Rodgers, Big Ben, and, surprisingly, Josh Freeman.

Matty is 20th in the league with 47.7% of his passes requiring more than 2.5 seconds. In such instances, he's completing a "pedestrian" 61%, taking 17 sacks, and posting a 90.6 rating.

One thing I noticed that was interesting was the correlation of high ratings in both instances usually ended up being one of the renowned "good quaterback"s.

Rodgers and Peyton were the only two QBs able to hold more than a 100 QB rating in both instances of passing. The average dropoff in rating for good to really good QBs appeared to be in the 17-23 range, when going from below 2.5 seconds to above 2.5 seconds.

Brees, Rivers, Ryan, Big Ben, Cassel, Romo, Dalton, and E. Manning all fall into this category.

There were a couple anomalies, for instance Cam Newton's rating increased by nearly 28 when taking longer than 2.5 seconds to throw, but that can be attributed to his mobility, as >2.5 seconds occurs on 65% of his dropbacks.

That's just a little piece of the puzzle, I'd say, but that does give a little bit more insight as to how Matty works. Most of the better QBs were throwing on average before they were getting sacked, but sadly I don't have the time this evening to really examine all the numbers.

Thoughts?