Using Similarity Scores to Project Philip Rivers Season

John's recent post regarding Rivers being similar to Drew Bledsoe got me thinking...we have ways of calculating these things. Similarity scores for player careers has been around for quite some time, first introduced by Bill James for baseball players. Other sites have adapted the concept for NFL players, and Football Outsiders has published on player pages 1, 2, and 3 year similarity scores for players.

So I went over to Philip Rivers page and checked it out. The results were actually somewhat encouraging, as shown in the table below. Keep in mind that a perfect similarity is a score of 1000.

Well, that certainly doesn't look terrible on first look. There is nothing wrong with keeping company with names like that. For many of these guys, those years are just on the tail ends of their prime production years, but well before they were put out to pasture.

What if we tried to project Rivers next season based on the following year of the similar quarterbacks? Excluding Eli Manning, here are the results below.

Obviously, Tom Brady's 2007 would be everything we could dream of. It was one of the best quarterback seasons ever, and lead the charge to an undefeated regular season. The weighted average suggests a slight improvement in most numbers, but hardly a return to MVP-caliber form.

While we would love to see Rivers play close to Brady's 2007 or Peyton Manning's 2009, it will probably fall short of that, and just be a bit of an improvement on Rivers 2012.