QB Health and Making the Playoffs

Following some of the posts on this board, I decided to look in detail at how the health of the QB impacted a teams ability to make the playoffs.

First I looked at all 48 teams that have made the playoffs in the last 4 years, and checked how many starts they had by a single QB in their run to the playoffs. Of those 48 teams, 3 had QB changes because they benched their starter for their backup due to performance (as opposed to injury). I excluded those 3.

- Of the remaining 45, 37 had the same QB start 15 or 16 regular season games. 82% of the teams that made the playoffs from 2005-2008 had a QB that managed to stay in the lineup. The vast majority of these had their QBs start every game (33 of the 37).

- The flip side of that, there were only 8 teams in those 4 years that managed to make the playoffs while their QB was unable to start 2 or more games in the regular season. 18% of all the playoff teams.

- Of the 16 teams that reached the conference championship game (for 2008 I used the top 4 seeds) in those 4 years, 15 had QBs that had started all 16 regular season games.

I also looked at all the teams (playoffs and non-playoff bound) for one year, 2008.

- There were 16 teams whose QB started all 16 games. 10 of those 16 teams made the playoffs, or 63%.

- There were 4 teams whose QB started 15 or more games. 1 of those teams made the playoffs, or 25%.

- There were 9 teams whose QB missed 2 or more games due to injury. None of those teams made the playoffs, or 0%.

(There were also 3 teams that changed their QB for performance reasons).

This isn’t an exact science. Its sometimes a bit difficult to tell whether someone was benched because they were gimpy or because they were playing badly. And I didn’t count getting knocked out of games at all, just whether they were able to start or not. That would be pretty interesting info as well, but its pretty difficult to get.

But the overall message was pretty clear. Most of the teams that are in the playoffs, haven’t had their QB out with an injury during the regular season. And those teams where the QBs miss multiple games a season rarely make the playoffs.