A bad NFL team is capable of slapping together three wins in a row. Reeling off a string of six consecutive wins, however ... these days, that happens about three times a year across the league, and it nearly always happens to teams that were already counted amongst the NFL’s most competitive tier. Teams like the Packers, or Patriots, or Saints. Not a 2-5 team with a crisis of quarterback. And yet, that is exactly what Tim Tebow and the Broncos have done.
Tim Tebow’s Statistical Weirdness, And The Broncos’ Winning Streak
Six-game winning streaks happen to teams we already know are great, not a 2-5 team in a quarterback crisis. And yet, that is exactly what Tim Tebow and the Broncos have done. The stats paint a picture even weirder than you might imagine.
The debate over how much credit Tebow deserves for the Broncos’ six-game win streak is one worth having. Entering Week 15, his quarterback rating in 2011 sits at 83.9, which is about as close to average as one can get. That metric, of course, does not account for Tebow’s tendency to tuck in the ball and run with it.
As you would imagine, Tebow throws significantly less often than any other quarterback in recent memory to win six in a row:
This is a guy who completed two passes in an entire game and won. As you can see above, over the Broncos’ still-alive winning streak, Tebow has thrown for an average of 146 yards per game.
Now, if Tebow always played like he played in the first through third quarters, he would average only 84 passing yards a game, and he wouldn’t be riding this winning streak at all. He does not.
Now that is wild. See how his passing yards triple in the fourth quarter? That isn’t an isolated incident. That number is the product of a six-game sample size. More often than not, we tend to associate Tebow’s game primarily with the run, but his air attack is more interesting. While his rushing yards remain relatively constant throughout the game, his passing game -- which spends most of the game in near-dormancy -- suddenly ramps up to a breakneck pace in the fourth quarter, week after week.
For one reason or another, this works for him, and the Broncos manage to win by a one-score margin. Is this a sustainable model, or simply a trend that’s bound to normalize?
I have to guess the latter. Recently I wondered whether Tim Tebow is football’s answer to baseball’s Jeff Francoeur. As a rookie in 2005, Francoeur approached the plate like no other major leaguer did. He swung at anything within five miles of him. It took him six weeks to earn his first walk.
And in those six weeks, he was absolutely phenomenal at the plate. Despite his complete lack of interest in walking, he put up numbers that would let a player completely run away with the MVP award if he could sustain them for an entire season. He didn’t, of course. His opposition figured him out. Since then, his numbers have been decent at best, and usually subpar to flat-out bad.
And maybe Tebow doesn’t have much time left before the rest of the NFL figures him out. I hope I’m wrong about that, because if you can ignore the noise for long enough, you can bear witness to an interesting experiment.
If this spectacle is temporary ... well, listen. If you watch something for long enough, you can expect every once in a while to see something that defies every general trend. It’s not a miracle -- quite the opposite, of course, because it would be a miracle for a sophisticated, action-driven system like football not to be weird once in a while -- but it is something that we struggle to explain.
And whenever you see something that you struggle to explain, it seems to me that the only reasonable recourse is to enjoy it while it’s here.
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