What is the most important statistic in the NFL?
Trick question! Points!
Sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
The statistic I and therefore everyone else should care about the most is turnover differential. Winning the turnover battle in NFL games strongly correlates to wins and losses, a statement so radical even Bernie Sanders had to read it twice. In fact, teams that win the turnover battle win the game 78% of the time in the NFL (via Football Perspective).
So how does that connect to the headline you hate clicked? First off, thanks for clicking. You truly are in the minority judging by my Twitter notifications, but I appreciate it.
From 2010-19, the Patriots finished outside the top five in turnover differential only twice, but were inside the top ten every single year. 2013 and 2017, notable for being down years defensively, are the only two exceptions to this rule of thumb. In those two seasons, the Patriots were bottom ten in the NFL in takeaways, but turned the ball over offensively the eighth-least and the second-least respectively.
With Tom Brady under center, the Patriots seldomly turned the ball over.
Bernie Sanders removes glasses, rubs them on his t-shirt, replaces them on his face, and reads the previous sentence a second time.
Brady’s ball security over the years has consistently put the Patriots at the top of the league rankings in the statistic most associated with wins and losses. This is a major reason why the team was able to sustain success for so long despite the cyclical nature of roster building in the NFL. In the team’s first season without Brady, they finished 14th in turnover differential at +3, about what we’d expect from a 7-9 team whose defense was tied for the league-lead in interceptions.
How can the Patriots recapture the turnover differential monopoly they maintained under Brady?
Enter the second overall pick in the 2015 NFL draft, Marcus Mariota.
The last time we saw Mariota in action was in relief for an injured Derek Carr against the Chargers in Week 15 this past season, and he played very well. On display was his ability to utilize space as a runner as well as making simple reads down the field, finishing fourth in the NFL that week in average intended air yards and with a 98.1 QBR. Mariota’s skillset, his projected contract for a would-be starting quarterback (1 year, $10.5M, possibly up to $20M with incentives), and what it would cost for him to be acquired from the Raiders make him an attractive option for Bill Belichick and the Patriots.
But how does Mariota help improve the Patriots’ turnover differential? For all intents and purposes, he’s a very safe quarterback with the ball. In his four seasons as a starter for the Titans, Mariota was well in the bottom half of the league in interceptions, aside from 2017 in which Mariota finished third in the league with 15 interceptions. That one is fairly easy to write off though -- Mariota’s interceptions that season is one of the biggest apparitions in interception luck in NFL history. Everyone knows that interceptions aren’t always the quarterback’s fault; there are tipped passes, wrong routes run, etc. From the charting of NFL writer Cian Fahey we know that in 2017, Mariota actually threw more interceptions than passes that were “interceptable” -- in this case the interceptions literally went off receivers’ hands and directly to defenders.
Note: “Chartists” we’ll call them, such as Fahey or elsewhere on Pro Football Focus or PlayerProfiler are humans. Their work is subjective, thus the numbers aren’t replicas from company to company. But these are people who know football and thus I afford them “knowing my Netflix password” levels of trust. These numbers are also hard to come by unless you’re willing to cut off a limb to pay for a PFF subscription.
In case turnover differential doesn’t move the needle and you, the reader, are in the overtly literate camp of, "But he sucks!," here’s another aspect to take into account: Mariota has had a different play-caller every year he's been in the league.
The Mike Mularkey “exotic smash mouth” scheme of playing with nine offensive linemen the Titans ran with Mularkey as the offensive coordinator and then as the head coach didn’t exactly do much to jumpstart Mariota’s career.
BUT MARIOTA WAS BENCHED FOR RYAN TANNEHILL AND THE TITANS INSTANTLY IMPROVED! HE MUST’VE BEEN BAD!
Look, no one is making the case that Mariota is a Hall of Famer with untapped potential. But a truth that has proven out time and time again especially in the last decade is that quarterback’s playing in a play action-heavy offense for the first time typically take a year to adjust to it. Think Matt Ryan in 2016 or Aaron Rodgers this past season.
BUT MATT LAFLEUR WAS MARIOTA’S OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR IN 2018! HE’S FROM THE SHANAHAN TREE!
Sure, but that doesn't mean LaFleur ran a lot of play action that season. In fact, the 2018 Titans only ran play action 24% of first down plays. This is notable because Mariota was actually very good on play action, averaging 10.0 yards per attempt on such plays as opposed to 6.0 on non-play action passes (numbers via Warren Sharp’s 2019 Football Preview).
Mariota’s 2019 season under the play-calling of Arthur Smith was his first true season in a play action heavy offense. And let’s not forget that Mariota didn’t have his starting left tackle for the first four games of the season and the Derrick Henry train didn’t really take off until well after Mariota had been benched.
In Mariota the Patriots could have a player with a wide skillset--an idea that clearly intrigues Belichick based on last offseason’s Cam Newton signing, and a player who can at least partly recapture the most important aspect of what the Patriots lost when Brady left.