Welcome to your weekly Tyrod Taylor article. Truthfully, we can’t guarantee to write about Tyrod every week this offseason, but there’s plenty to take from his 2016 season and to discuss about his future with the Buffalo Bills.
Yesterday on Twitter — the place in which many of these Tyrod articles come to fruition — Chase Stuart of FootballPerspective.com, sent a tweet about the brutal second half of the season Carson Wentz had. Included was a ProFootballReference.com chart of all quarterback’s statistics from the 9th game to the 16th game of the 2016 campaign.
After checking that chart, I changed the search query to the first half of the season to see if Tyrod’s figures were drastically different.
They were.
Here are Tyrod’s splits from the first eight games of the 2016 season and the last eight games — as we know, Tyrod only played in the final seven games.
Tyrod Taylor 2016 season split stats
| Comp % | TD | INT | YPA | QB Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comp % | TD | INT | YPA | QB Rating |
| 58.7 | 9 | 2 | 6.43 | 87.2 |
| 65 | 8 | 4 | 7.49 | 92.4 |
Over the second half of the season, Tyrod’s 7.49 YPA was the 14th-best in football (out of 33 qualifying QBs), right behind Tom Brady’s YPA of 7.50. His 6.43 YPA during the first half of the year was 28th out of 32 signal-callers.
Tyrod’s 1.06 difference in yards per attempt is sizable.
It’s the same difference as his 7.49 YPA in the second half of the season and the 26th-place finisher Cam Newton (6.55) and 27th-place Eli Manning (6.12) during that time frame.
The Sammy Watkins Effect was likely at play during the first half of 2016. Watkins was clearly not 100% in Buffalo’s first two games then he missed the rest of games 3 - 8. Unsurprisingly, his absence damaged Tyrod’s efficiency.
Watkins missed games 9,10, and 11 — Seattle, Cincinnati, and Jacksonville — but returned for the Bills outings against Oakland, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Miami. Strangely, Tyrod’s YPA for the three games without Watkins during the second half of the season was 7.48. For the final four contests of 2016, his YPA was 7.49.
While his TD to INT ratio went from better than 4:1 in the first half of 2016 to just 2:1 in the second half of the season, Tyrod completed a much higher percentage of his passes and was more efficient accumulating yards through the air in November and December than he was in September and October.
It’s certainly a positive trend for Tyrod to take into his 2017 season.