Of Fumbles and Quarterbacks (Part 4)

So, David Carr fumbled a lot. Not exactly shocking. As his apologists probably said any number of times during the years he was starting in Houston, of course he fumbled a lot, he was getting killed back there. And so Peyton Manning doesn't fumble much? Again, big surprise. Peyton gets hit only slightly more often than his backups. It's all well and good to use pass attempts as a way of getting a bead on playing time, but when you're looking at fumbles, 99.9% of pass attempts are by definition not potential chances for the quarterback to fumble. We can get a pretty good idea of how often a quarterback actually fumbled in games with the numbers we looked at before. Can we get an idea of how likely these guys are to hold onto the football when they actually do get hit? We can try.

Quarterback fumbles, as far as I can figure, break down into the following categories:
1) Botched center/quarterback exchanges, always charged as fumbles to the quarterback.
2) Botched handoffs, charged as fumbles to the quarterback.
3) Rushing attempts by the QB.
4) Sacks. (Including defensive strips of the QB, which are also sacks by definition.)
5) Plays where the QB is credited with a reception, either by design, or a batted pass from a shotgun formation.
6) Plays where the QB first recovers a fumble, and then fumbles himself.
7) Garo Yepremian style "what the hell was that?" debacles.

The only ones of these which could possibly result in a QB being credited with a pass attempt on a play where he also fumbled are numbers 5 and 6, and these are rare enough that it's far better to ignore them than try to account for them by using pass attempts. So, thankfully, are Garo-impersonations.

We have numbers for rushes, receptions and sacks. These plays are easy to account for. We'll ignore fumble recoveries and GYDs. That leaves us with center exchanges and handoffs. No QB fumbles on a high percentage of these or he wouldn't have had a job in high school, let alone the NFL, though I don't doubt that some do drop the ball more than others. But because these plays are so common, it's not exactly rare for fumbles to happen in these situations. Unless we go back and look at every individual fumble and sort out where it happened, we're kind of stuck. Rushes+sacks+receptions is going to give us a good estimation of how often a passer gets hit with the ball in his hands, but as a de facto estimation of "opportunities to fumble", it leaves a lot to be desired. It's going to be really friendly towards running quarterbacks, for one thing, because their exchange fumbles are going to get swallowed up by their high numbers of rushes. Still, it should yield some interesting results. So, Fumbles/(Receptions+Rushes+Sacks) = Fumble Rate by Hit.

Some of the interesting results... Kordell Stewart, one of the heaviest runners on the list, goes from below average before sacks and rushes are added, to above average after, to #3 on the list of 94 guys when you judge him per hit. As I said, this method is going to be kind to the running QBs, but it's pretty obvious that Kordell actually did a pretty good job of hanging onto the ball when he got hit. Dan Marino goes the opposite way. Not among the leaders in the other methods, he nevertheless had good scores. However, because he rarely ran and rarely got sacked, the fact that he put the ball on the ground a pretty high percentage of the time when he did get hit.

However, there are two players who really stand out on this list. Bert Jones has held the top spot no matter how we choose to compile the list. His 16 career fumbles are just ridiculous. He comes in at 3.34% on this list, almost two full percentage points ahead of the #2 player, Jim McMahon, and just over one quarter of the average of 12.37%.

The other standout, at the other end of the spectrum, is Kurt Warner. This won't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed his career, but Warner's quick release and avoidance of scrambling have disguised his numbers a bit until now. He isn't just last on the list, he's last by a difference higher than Bert Jones's score. He comes in at 23.96%, while Mark Rypien comes in at 20.09%. Yes, these numbers may be unfair to pocket passers, and yes, most of the guys at the bottom of the list could be described as "statues", but Warner's in another league when it comes to dropping the football.