JPAnalyst t1_jdqlxt3 wrote on March 26, 2023 at 12:42 PM

Reply to comment by thekaleshake in [OC] Correlation between heigh and performance of NFL Quarterbacks in 2022 by Exiled_From_Twitter

And the two charts you link to were an effort to respond to my chart which started this parade of QB height scatter plots. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/121pvx7/oc_nfl_quarterbacks_of_passes_batted_down/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

In my chart, which was not an attempt to evaluate QB effectiveness against height, but an attempt to evaluate one aspect of quarterbacking...batted balls.

There is widely assumed belief that shorter QBs will have their passes batted down more frequently which is proven to be false in my analysis. People point to players such as Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray who are short and have passes batted down often, but these two commonly used examples are not the rule which is evident in my chart. That’s was the point of my analysis, to either prove or disprove that narrative wasn’t sure which way it would go when I started, but it was clear when I finished.

The person who created the other two weird and flawed charts was aggressively critical of my analysis and thought they would create something more meaningful. It’s clear that they don’t understand football or analytics. So here we are. Then this OP responded to them, and this OP gets it.

Exiled_From_Twitter OP t1_jdr45gv wrote on March 26, 2023 at 3:14 PM

Yup, I appreciated your post. It was very interesting and I recognized that you were not trying to prove performance but rather something that I thought would have been more positively correlated (as you explained already haha). I definitely would have guessed that shorter QB's would have had a higher percentage of balls batted down (and very glad you used percentages). I then saw the two that were linked above and was like wow, these are pointless.

If I added a bit more context or lengthened the time period a bit it would have likely had a negative correlation b/c Russ and Kyler had poor seasons by their standards (the two main short guys) AND I could have gone back far enough to add Brees which would have really given the short guys a boost. But it didn't matter, pretty clear that of all NFL QB's, which is a selected and managed group, there's no correlation between performance and height.

JPAnalyst t1_jdr89hw wrote on March 26, 2023 at 3:43 PM

Not only are they pointless. The OP just doubles down when you try to explain why they aren’t looking at things the right way. And they clearly don’t understand the game of football. I’ve had some frustrating conversations with them on my post.

And I agree, both of our analyses are impacted by survivorship bias. If you get to this point, you’re the best in the world. But within that context it’s still worth proving that height doesn’t make much (or any) difference. A slight build might make a difference in injury risk, but that’s a story for another day.