FanPost

FanPost: Philip Rivers, Close Games and Crunch Time (Part 1)

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

We're about to dive into some stats, but before we do I would like to clearly state that I believe Philip Rivers is a HOF QB and has been one of my favorite players over the last 15 years. Now that we got that out of the way...

A glaring stat that began circulating last night after another crushing loss in which the Chargers had a chance, is that Philip Rivers has 61 losses of 7 points or less over his career. Apparently, this is the most of such losses in the Super Bowl era.

  • To rack up that many losses, the first qualification is playing in a lot of games! Of course, Rivers will go down as one of the games greatest iron men when all is said and done.
  • Secondly, in order to accumulate that many 1 score losses, the Chargers had to have at least been a good enough team to always be close to the margin. NFL folks know that the majority of games are won or lost by about 1 score and what separates playoff teams from teams that win 7 or 8 games is their ability to execute in crunch time.
  • Third, why are we emphasizing this record as it relates to Rivers? Because no position has a greater affect on that late game comeback (or preservation of a lead) as a QB who can lead drives to either score points or kill clock.

I saw people talking about this 61 loss stat and wondering, was it the defense blowing it, was it missed field goals, turnovers, etc... how much was on Rivers?

Well, it's impossible to isolate any one cause in each game (at least without going through the play-by-play of all 61 games), and most of these losses were certainly due to a combination of factors. BUT, what we can isolate is how well did Rivers play in those games? How many did he play like last night against the Chiefs? How many did he play great but maybe the defense let him down. Let's go to the tape:

First, let's establish some baseline comparisons:

Cmp% Yds/Gm TD% Int% TD:INT Y/A Rate
Rivers Total Career (as starter) 64.5 263.4 5.20 2.60 2.0 7.8 95
League Avg Since 2006 61.8 227.8 4.31 2.70 1.6 7.1 86.4
Rivers in 1 score losses 61.2 282.0 4.26 2.77 1.5 7.3 86.8
Rivers in Blowout losses 60.7 252.5 3.56 4.30 0.8 6.7 75.22

Key Takeaway - In these one-score games, Rivers' play has been more like a league average QB, rather than the Pro-Bowler he's been throughout his career. In Blowout losses, he's clearly been a below-average QB (regardless of any other factors that may have led to the losses). I would also note his elevated Interception rate in losses which has become more and more of an issue.

I guess when you expect Pro-Bowl level of play out of your QB and you get league average, it stings quite a bit. (Note, FWIW, Rivers also has 22 wins (18%) with below-league average play).

Now, we can also look at sums of specific game scenarios and see how many did Rivers really play bad in. What this will tell us is whether other factors (like defense or ST) were more influential than Rivers. I know that Passer Rating is not a perfect stat, but since we're looking at it in consistent average comparisons, it does the job well enough here to qualify Rivers' overall play:

In One Score Losses Number of Games %
Passer Rating Above Rivers' Career Avg 20 33%
Passer Rating Above League Avg 7 11%
Passer Rating Below League Avg 34 56%
Passer Rating Sub-80 23 38%

What is interesting here is Rivers had at least 20, if not 27 games where he played well enough to get a win and other factors might've been more of the contributing factor in the loss. That is about 44% of those 61 losses.

However, Rivers' play was clearly a problem in a minimum of 38% of those losses, and possibly as high as 56% of them.

Another thing that I discovered that was super interesting, is these percentages didn't change much in Blowout losses:

In Blowout Losses Number of Games %
Passer Rating Above Rivers' Career Avg 10 28%
Passer Rating Above League Avg 3 8%
Passer Rating Below League Avg 23 64%
Passer Rating Sub-80 20 56%

In other words, in Blowouts, Rivers had a higher percentage of really atrocious games, but overall he had a pretty similar percentage of "Below League Average" games in both 1-score losses and Blowout Losses. AND, he had a similar percentage of games where he played great, yet they still lost whether in 1-score or a Blowout.

I think the takeaway here is that in roughly 30% - 40% of losses, Rivers played great, but some phase of the rest of the team let him down.

However, in the other 60%, he just didn't play well and was just as much the root cause of those losses as anyone else.

And before anyone says anything - I know, I know, I'm not discussing the offensive line. But that is because there's A) No way to perfectly quantify that, and B) this is across 14 seasons which is a large enough sample size to zero in on Rivers' play. In those 38% of one-score losses where he had a sub-80 rating, you simply cannot put that on just offensive line play. Bad O-line may be a factor, but a QB (especially a great one), is playing pretty bad in games with ratings that low.

The conclusion I think is that Rivers is a HOF QB who has kept his team in the hunt in most games and most seasons, and that is certainly more than most QBs can say! But on the flipside, he's also displayed some pretty poor play in about half of his close games with a tendency towards increased turnovers that has really cost them.

You can find Part 2 of this analysis, with more context into each of these 61 losses, HERE.

6.3.6
6.3.6
6.4.1

This FanPost was written by a member of the Bolts From The Blue community and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Bolts From The Blue editors or SB Nation.