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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/JPAnalyst on 2025-08-18 12:07:29+00:00.

So far this preseason, Jaxson Dart has completed 74% of his passes, for two TDs and 0 interceptions - his PFF grade of 74.5 is the third best among rookies. Fellow rookies Shedeur Sanders is also off to a great start with an even better PFF grade of 82.1 to go along with his 60% completion rate and two TDs (with no interceptions). The guy most expected to be the best of the rookie group of quarterbacks is Cam Ward. Well, things aren’t looking so good for Ward. Out of 17 rookie QBs with at least 10 dropbacks, Ward is ranked 15th in preseason with a PFF grade of 46.9. Does this actually mean anything? Is it an indicator of how their rookie season will turn out once we turn the page in a few weeks to the regular season? I took a look at how rookie quarterbacks performed in the preseason since 2013 (the first year PFF has preseason ratings) and then compared their preseason to their regular season performance. My gut, like most people (although not all), is that preseason performance is not an indicator of regular season. But I didn’t go into this by taking a side and trying to support my point of view, I just wanted to get the data in front of us, and if it confirms what many already know, cool. If it contradicts the narrative, even cooler.

The biggest caveat is that we are working with tiny sample sizes with preseason, which is also why many believe any performance related metrics are not going to be predictable of regular season…that, along with vanilla defenses, playing with/against backups, not much film study against new rookie QBs, etc.

Before sharing all the data, I want to highlight a few examples. These are some examples to illustrate that preseason does matter:

  • In 2016, Dak Prescott lit up the preseason with a 78% completion rate, 9.1 yards/att, 5 TDs, and 0 INT, with a PFF grade of 81.9. He matched his preseason with an equally great regular season winning Rookie of the Year, and ending up with a similar grade of 81.5
  • Baker Mayfield had a similar experience in 2018, where his regular season PFF grade of 83.2, followed a preseason grade of 81.4. Mayfield was runner-up for Rookie of the Year that season.
  • Josh Rosen was ass in the 2018 preseason, with a 55% completion rate (on an Avg Depth of Target of 8.0), 5.1 yards/att, and a PFF grade of 46.2. “But this is top ten draft pick Josh Rosen, and pre-season doesn’t mean anything, he’ll be fine in the regular season, right?”. He wasn’t fine. He nearly equaled his abysmal preseason grade with a 49.1 PFF grade in the regular season, and the rest is history.
  • Marcus Mariota is the ultimate poster child for preseason being predictive of the regular season. Preseason PFF = 62.0; regular season PFF = 62.0.

Okay, that was fun. Now let’s do preseason doesn’t matter.

  • In 2021, number 2 overall pick, Zach Wilson came in with sky-high expectations, and he didn’t disappoint. Zach Wilson took the league (and maybe his mom’s best friend) by storm. In a light amount of work (20 attempts) he competed 75% of his passes, threw for 2 TDs, 0 interceptions, and ended up with the third highest preseason PFF score (85.7) by a rookie QB on my list of 48. Then the regular season came, and he ended up dead-last in the NFL in completion % (55.6%), passer rating (69.7), and ANY/A (3.86) with a PFF grade of 59.5, 26 points lower than preseason.
  • Who can forget 2014 and Bortles mania? Blake Bortles, another extremely highly touted player, drafted 3rd overall, came into that summer and bullied NFL preseason defenses by slinging the ball for an ADOT of 10.6, and 10.4 yards/att, with a PFF grade of 76.8. The Jaguars got their guy! Well, when the calendar flipped, his chariot turned into a pumpkin and his future gold jacket turned into jean shorts as he ended up with the biggest PFF drop (-30.1) from preseason to regular season of the QBs on this list.
  • On the flip side we have C.J.Stroud having us believe that the S2 Cognition test results are a meaningful indicator of NFL success, by being extremely mediocre in the preseason. We watched him in the preseason go 55% with 4.5 yads/att, 1 TD and 1 INT with a pedestrian PFF grade of 61.1, and we pointed and laughed about his seemingly low mental acuity per the S2 score. He then put up the third best rookie QB season in NFL history as measured by era-adjusted ANY/A behind only Dan Marino and Dak Prescott. His pre-season to regular season PFF grade increased by 21.9 points to 83.0.

The examples I shared are just to have fun with cherry-picking and showing how we can slice and dice things however we want to support a side of a debate - something we often do in our debates. Feel free to copy / paste into your online debates, depending on which side of the argument you’re trying to support.

Now I want to share the entire data se (see notes on data at bottom). If there is any correlation, we would see it when we plot the preseason PFF grades (bottom, X-axis) and regular season PFF grades (left, Y-axis). The pattern we would expect to see are the dots collecting and forming a left-to-right upward pattern. But what we do see appears to be widely random. That’s not to say there isn’t any pattern that we might find if we look at the data in a different way (I’ll do that in another chart), but preseason performance and regular season performance lack much, if any correlation when looked at this way…despite what my first four bullet points tell you.

preview.redd.it/vero3j5bqrjf1.png?width=916&forma…

Now I’m going to show this same data sorted in a table from best preseason to worst and see what happens in the regular season. Do you notice anything? When looking at this data top-down from best to worst preseason, there does seem to be a pattern.

When we look at the very top of the group, and we look at the very bottom of the group, I think what we are seeing is one of my favorite basic but smart-sounding topics…regression to the mean. As sample sizes increase (i.e. regular season), the extremes at each end move toward the average. While you can see some data at the extreme ends that don’t follow the overall pattern, it’s not hard to glance at the chart and quickly see what’s going on.

preview.redd.it/xwgu9blnqrjf1.png?width=588&forma…

There are 48 QBs in this data set, which makes for a clean top third, middle third, and bottom third of 16 QBs in each group:

  • The top 16 QBS in this group saw an average of a 13-point decrease (-16%) from preseason to regular season
  • The middle 16 QBs for preseason performance were virtually the same in the regular season, losing only 1.2 points on average (-2%). This does get quite a boost from C.J. Stroud’s +21.9, so if we use the median (instead of mean) to counter that, its -3.1 points.
  • The bottom 16 preseason QBs experienced a significant lift in their performance of +10.5 points or +24%

The takeaway from all of this is two parts:

  1. We can’t use preseason performance to predict regular season performance in terms of a correlation. Out of 48 quarterbacks in the data set, there is very little, if any indication that preseason performance is an indicator of how things are going to go when the starters are on the field and defenses get more complex.
  2. We can safely assume that outliers aside, regression to the mean is going to happen as general rule. Regression to the mean tells us to lay off the panic-button on the preseason under-performers and pump the brakes on the over-performers. These small sample sizes will start to move some of the extremes closer to the middle.

I most likely spent five hours analyzing data to tell you what you probably already know…preseason performance <> regular season performance. But hopefully you still learned something or found some interesting nuggets, and it never hurts to have some data to back up our assertions.

The cutoff I’m using for rookies in this analysis are 150 regular-season dropbacks, which averages about five rookie QBs per year. If they made the 150 dropback cutoff for the regular season, I didn’t have a preseason dropback cutoff; the lowest in the group had 19 preseason dropbacks. In 2021, there was no preseason due to covid, so Burrow, Hurts, Tua, and Herbert are not a part of this study. We have 48 QBs in the dataset.