Washington Football Team: The one stat where Taylor Heinicke needs to improve

OK – I get that a lot of Washington Football Team fans really like Taylor Heinicke and think he has what it takes to lead the club to great heights. The few times I have tried to pump the brakes on Heinicke enthusiasm by pointing out that he has basically played one quality game in six years, I have been generally met by – how to say this nicely – suggestions that I am a moron.

I won’t debate that particular issue right now. Instead, I’ll try a different tactic. I’m going to imagine that Taylor Heinicke is indeed the next coming of Dave Kreig or Jeff Garcia or even the Holy Grail of UDFA QBs — Kurt “HOFer” Warner.

Heinicke’s strengths are obvious. He is very mobile. He seems to be a quick study and a hard worker. He appears to be accurate on short throws. I’m qualifying these observations with “seems” and “appears” because the fact is, the body of work is way too small to say anything with certainty. But Heinicke does have strengths. And he has that miraculous playoff game against Tampa Bay last year to build on.

But, if Heinicke is to become a quality starting quarterback for the Washington Football Team, and not another Timmy Smith or Anthony Allen — players who had one brief, glorious moment with the team before reverting to mediocrity — Heinicke must improve one number.

Heinicke’s career yards per attempt is 6.1. That means on average, every time he throws a pass, the team gains 6.1 yards.  YPA is not the only meaningful statistic on a quarterbacks record, but it is a pretty important. And 6.1 is the poster child of pedestrian.

Heinicke does not have a particularly strong arm by NFL standards, but he has enough of an arm to make strides here. This play, which analyst Brian Baldinger highlighted, shows he can make effective medium-deep throws.

Football Team: How Taylor Heinicke stacks up against play-off caliber quarterbacks

Of the teams that have won the Super Bowl over the past ten years, only one had a starting QB who had a YPA under 7. That was Peyton Manning, who posted a 6.8 playing for Denver. Backup Brett Osweiler, who won most of Denver’s key games down the stretch while Peyton was injured, had a YPA of 7.2, and that pulled the team’s number up to 7.0 for the season. Seven of the ten Super Bowl teams had a YPA of 7.5 or higher, topping out with Eli Manning’s 8.4 with the Giants in 2011.

6.1 just isn’t going to get it done.

If you think that the Super Bowl champ is too high of a threshold, let’s look at the 14 teams that made the playoffs in 2020. None were as low as 6.1, but several were very close. The two lowest YPAs among playoff teams last year were posted by the Football Team’s Alex Smith and Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger (both 6.3).

There was one other under 7.0 (Chicago’s Mitch Trubisky at 6.9). The average across the 14 play-off teams was 7.4.

If you want to argue that Heinicke doesn’t have far to go to reach the level of Smith and Roethlisberger in 2020, I will point out two things. First, Washington became the fourth team in history to make the playoffs with a losing record, and that obviously had more to do with the woeful play in the NFC East than the team’s quality. You cannot count on that happening in a typical year.

The point about Roethlisberger, however, is more important. Roethlisberger poor 2020 YPA was an anomaly. For his career, Ben has posted a 7.7 YPA, among the highest in league history. The 8.9 he managed in 2005 stands as the best number any quarterback has put up in a Super Bowl-winning year this century. The reason that this matters is how it affects the defenses he faces.

In 2020, the defenses that played against Pittsburgh knew that Roethlisberger would push the ball downfield. He had done it his entire career. Even if he wasn’t as effective in 2020, the threat was always there.

That threat has not been present with Taylor Heinicke. It needs to be if he is going to continue his surprising rise as an NFL quarterback.

So far, in the preseason, Heinicke posted a 5.7 YPA vs New England and a 6.2 against Cincinnati. That falls right in line with his career average of 6.1, and that’s a cause for concern. It doesn’t matter that his completion percentage is very good.

That high completion percentage actually makes the low YPA worse, because it suggests that even if he completes a lot of passes, he simply cannot expand the field. (As a point of comparison, Ryan Fitzpatrick had a lower completion percentage in his first two games, but had YPAs hovering around 7.4.)

So why do these numbers matter? If you watched the Chargers’ Chase Daniel play against San Francisco on Sunday night, you saw exactly why. Daniel completed 67% of his passes but had an astonishingly poor 2.9 YPA. He could not move the offense at all. Hall of Fame QB Dan Fouts, calling the game on TV, put it concisely. Daniel, he said, was not making San Fran defend the entire field.

When a defense realizes it does not need to worry about downfield passes, it gains an enormous advantage. Safeties creep up to support the run. Corners play more press coverage because they do not fear getting beat deep. Coordinators call more blitzes for the same reason. Running becomes harder. Turnovers become more likely. Of course, you can overcome this in stretches. A couple outstanding plays. A little bit of luck. A mistake or two on defense. That all can happen.

But it doesn’t happen for long. And it doesn’t happen enough over the course of a season.

The Washington Football Team has added speed on the outside with players like Curtis Samuel and Dyami Brown. If Heinicke is to take advantage of that, he needs to start pushing the ball further downfield. Otherwise, opposing defenses will constrict the field and the offense will sputter.

Keep an eye on Heinicke’s YPA. It is not the only thing that matters, but it’s a very good indication of whether he is doing what he needs to in order to succeed.

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