Tim Tebow's Sabermetric Performance

Tim Tebow made his first start of 2011 today, and he did just as he has always done, he won.

That's all everyone has been saying. Tebow start and won, and therefore he is a legitimate NFL quarterback. The smarter NFL fans/analysts probably aren't taking it that far, but the majority of the talk has been extremely positive. Let's take a look at that.

First of all, Tebow beat the Miami Dolphins, who have yet to win a game this year. They are allowing 257.5 yards a game through the air, Tebow threw for 161 yards. That in and of itself doesn't really mean anything. I am not a football stat expert, but there's no way that yards tells the story of how a quarterback played well enough to use in an intelligent discussion. I can say that completing 13 of 27 passes is not very good, and neither is taking 7 sacks (although his 65 yards rushing may justify some of those). None of this really tells you the story, so let's look at the advanced stats.

Tebow's Win Probability Added (WPA) today was -0.03, which means he actually hurt the Broncos chances of winning. For a full explanation of what WPA in football is, visit this page, which is from the site that I get all these statistics from. I highly recommend reading that article, and the rest of the stuff on that site, it's life changing, and that's an extreme exaggeration.

Another useful advanced statistic is Estimated Points Added (EPA); you can find the explanation for that one here. Tebow's EPA today was 2.1, which is not good. He added only 2 points to his team's performance today, which would be awesome for an offensive lineman, but not for a quarterback.

The final statistics I'm going to use his Success Rate (SR%), which is simply the percentage of plays that Tebow made (or attempted to make) that were successful. This one comes with a little bit of opinion, but still offers a good picture of how he played. The percentage for Tebow's day was 34.8%, another unimpressive number.

For comparison purposes, let's look at Ben Roethlisberger's stats for today. Ben played very well and earned a 0.59 WPA, a 23.0 EPA, and a 56.8 SR%. That gives you an idea of how poorly Tebow played.

At the end of the day, all that matters is if your team won or lost, and the fact that Tebow is 1-0 on the year as a starting quarterback will keep the positive talk coming. However, Tebow's performance today doesn't show many good signs for the rest of 2011 for him and the Broncos.