Rookie Review: Comparing the TDs and Turnovers in 2014 of Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater, and Derek Carr

Interception Charting Data

Blame Breakdown

Bortles struggled mightily at points during his rookie season, and I think this comparison shows it pretty clearly. Bridgewater and Carr come out looking pretty similarly, although I did absolve Bridgewater of fault three times. One was on a Hail Mary, and the other two were on drops by Matt Asiata.

Now, after looking at blame, let’s try to break the causes of the interceptions down a little further.

Cause

I think this once again shows that Bortles struggled more often than his two rookie counterparts, and I also think it once again paints Bridgewater favorably. He had fewer poor decisions and poor throws than Carr did. Carr and Bortles would have a lot of overlap with plays where they would make both a bad decision and a bad throw, but Bridgewater did not have that nearly as often. Some other things worth noting are that all three rookies faced pressure on roughly the same number of interceptions, but Carr and Bortles had defenders make great plays against them twice as often as Bridgewater did. Bridgewater dealt with more WR drops, however, as three of his interceptions were on dropped passes while two of Carr’s were and none of Bortles’ were.

No let’s take a lot at how far they were throwing the passes that got intercepted.

Distance Breakdown

Despite throwing the most interceptions of the group, only one of Bortles’ interceptions was in the short range. Combine this with his TD data, and you see that big plays, good or bad, didn’t happen all that often when Bortles threw the ball short in 2014. Bridgewater ended up distributing out the distance of his interceptions fairly evenly, while Carr had somewhat of a concentration of interceptions in his intermediate passes, but it’s nothing like Bortles’ 11 interceptions on passes between 6 and 15 yards.

Location Breakdown

Throwing to the left (across his body) appears to be a huge problem for Bortles, and that will need to be fixed. His footwork just completely falls apart in those situations. As for Bridgewater and Carr, there are no really abundant trends, although both threw the highest number of interceptions when throwing to the intermediate right.

Now let’s take a look at the game situation each player was facing:

Situational Breakdown

Each rookie threw an interception in desperation. They also all came up short in crunch time at least once, with Carr throwing a pick twice with the game on the line. The Vikings played a lot of close games in 2014, and Bridgewater therefore ended up not throwing any TDs or INTs of the garbage time variety. Bortles and Carr, however, both got a lot of garbage times passes in, which led two 4 and two interceptions, respectively, in garbage time.

Let’s move on to how the interceptions look by quarter:

Quarter Breakdown

Teddy Bridgewater threw more than a third of his passes in the 2nd Quarter, and that might help explain why it was far and away the leader for him both in terms of TDs and INTs. Similarly, Bortles threw more passes in the 4th than any other Quarter, which helped lead to his 7 4th Quarter interceptions (the 4 garbage times didn’t hurt either). Carr spread out his interceptions a bit more than Bridgewater and Bortles did. A good sign is that none of these young QBs got in the habit of putting their defense in a tough situation early in the game, as each player only threw 1 first quarter interception.

Now let’s take a look at the interception breakdown by down:

Down Breakdown

Like with TDs, Bridgewater threw most of his INTs on first down and Carr threw most of his INTs on third down. Bortles, on the other hand, struggled most with interceptions on 2nd down. Like with TDs, I have no idea if this means anything, but it’s at least a little interesting to look at.

That’s all of the interception charting data I’m going to cover. Go to the next page for my favorite and least favorite throws from each QB.

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