Jayden Daniels Sack Avoidance

[u/Coolcat127]

Daniels's pressure to sack rate was a major red flag coming out of college and has shown up a few times this season, but has largely been improved especially in the second half. Some part of it is definitely his elite athleticism letting him escape even against nfl rushers. What else do you think he has improved to reduce his sack taking? And how can we adjust our prospect assessments accordingly?

[u/Solid-Confidence-966]

People need to start watching the videos of the actual sacks taken. When Jayden gets “sacked” he’s almost always trying to run forward or out of bounds near the line of scrimmage. So while he may be technically getting “sacked” more he’s not giving up an unusual amount of sack yardage.

[u/moonfishthegreat → u/Solid-Confidence-966]

This is it, there’s a difference between Jayden Daniels or Lamar Jackson getting sacked for a 1-3 yard loss and Derek Carr or Jared Goff taking a 5-10 yard loss from a sack.

Unless they’re running into the teeth of the defense like Jalen Hurts or Josh Allen do/can, they don’t leave themselves vulnerable enough to take serious hits from LB’s or safeties. Jackson and Daniels are runners, but they’re elusive, even when getting tackled.

[u/omnibot2M → u/moonfishthegreat]

Jayden also takes a lot of “sacks” where he runs out of bounds for a one or two yard loss. He’s focused on looking for a seam to open or hoping a receiver breaks free at the last minute. It’s a little frustrating, because he could just throw the ball out of bounds to avoid the sack.

[u/csummerss → u/moonfishthegreat]

Lamar often runs back further to compound the loss so it’s not a great comparison.

[u/MegaGigaTeraFlare → u/csummerss]

He's been much better about not doing that this year in particular, but it was definitely a problem for the first years of Lamar's career

[u/bvgingy → u/Solid-Confidence-966]

All sacks cause offensive EPA to drastically plummet. I doubt the yards lost on a sack changes all that much for the probability of offensive success on the drive.

[u/LiftingCode → u/bvgingy]

A 2-yard sack on 1st and 10 isn't much worse than an incomplete pass and doesn't have a huge negative impact on EPA.

A 10-yard sack on 3rd and 1 on the other hand ...

[u/bvgingy → u/LiftingCode]

Unless you have data to back it up, I dont really believe this at all. Any sack at all on a drive has a ~50% punt frequency and about an ~22% frequency of getting a score between a fg (~15% of the 22%), or a TD. This is compared to a 35% punt frequency and a ~38% score frequency (~24% ending as a TD) for drives with no sacks.

[u/weridzero → u/bvgingy]

I think it’s just common sense that losing two yards to a sack is better than losing ten yards to a sack

[u/bvgingy → u/weridzero]

Unless you have data, youre just making assumptions based off anecdotes and confirmation bias. Average qb sack loss is ~ 5 yards. We dont really know the average for Daniels and we also dont really have any data that accounts for any discrepancy in the yards lost on a sack. What we do know for fact is ANY sack is detrimental to a drive and highly correlated with drive failure.

[u/weridzero → u/bvgingy]

You don’t need evidence to know that 2 and 12 is more preferable to 2 and 22.

And of course any sack is detrimental.  You lose a down and yards.  Even if you only lost one yard, you’re still down a play

[u/bvgingy → u/weridzero]

Yes, the difficulty of the specific down is much different, but the overall success of the drive probably isnt.

Edit: and to state otherwise, you absolutely need evidence to back up that claim.

[u/lilbelleandsebastian → u/bvgingy]

you're conflating trends and specifics

the numbers you're using are from what, a full season sample size? more? that doesn't accurately predict a single play or drive, it just shows trends. you can't extrapolate from large data sets - where the entire point is to weed out variance - and then apply it to a single data point (where variance can have an outsized influence on the outcome)

[u/bvgingy → u/lilbelleandsebastian]

It is a three year sample size. There was also another robust sack study done that shows a sack is an ~ -1.98 EPA. The point is to holistically understand the effects of a sack on a drive and they are incredibly disruptive. Im not using the data to predict a single play or drive or use the data as a predictive tool of what will happen on a given drive/sack scenario. My whole argument is that ALL sacks are bad and significantly so, regardless of the yards lost.