The takes fly fast when it comes to young quarterbacks, because the draft cost is so high and the value proposition of a rookie-deal stud is so enticing (not to mention fans of the teams have seen some rough football and want to hope for better). Jayden Daniels came out to such a great start and stood out so starkly from his peers in the first month-plus of the 2024 season that there really wasn’t a Rookie of the Year argument.

But with Daniels playing through injury and the Commanders fading to some extent over the second half of the year, there has been at least a little daylight for someone else to stake a claim over the final few weeks of the season.

If Sports Info Solutions’ Total Points system is to be believed, Bo Nix should be in the conversation. And I think his statistical profile offers a pretty interesting case study for the kind of evaluation Total Points does.

Here’s the current leaderboard among rookie quarterbacks.

 (Note that the Total here can include some other categories beyond the sum of Passing and Rushing.)

If you were to consult other analytics-based measures of quarterback play, like ESPN’s Total QBR or rbsdm.com’s EPA+CPOE composite, Daniels sits as a top five-ish quarterback and Nix is somewhere in the middle of the pack. And I think that probably sits well with most film evaluators too. So what’s going on with our measure of what Nix has done?

The baseline stats

For those who haven’t followed Nix’s season, it’s useful to set a baseline. Here are his ranks among the 42 quarterbacks with at least 100 attempts in a handful of different categories. They tell a pretty consistent story.

* Independent Quarterback Rating is SIS’s adjustment to the Passer Rating formula that isolates competitive throws and factors within the passer’s control, ignoring things like drops and throwaways.

The overall production as a passer has been below average, although if we started counting a bit after the start of the season we’d be more charitable. The first few weeks of the Nix era were extremely concerning, punctuated by a 60-passing-yard showing against the Jets in Week 4. Since then his ranks are more in the 15-20 range across the board. And that includes a pretty horrible effort in Week 15 against the Colts, which Total Points puts right up next to that Jets game.

He has added some value with his legs, with the 6th-most carries by a quarterback this season. He was on quite a run (pun intended) in Weeks 6-7 against the Chargers and Saints, combining for 16 carries for 136 yards and 9 first downs. Those carries haven’t been super-valuable on average, though, as he’s only 15th in rushing EPA among quarterbacks.

So if Nix has had generally poor overall production and doesn’t have a secret stash of rushing value, where is Total Points finding the value?

Total Points and team context

The Total Points system takes what each player does on the field from a charting data perspective and credits or debits them accordingly. Because of that, there are plenty of opportunities for a player to be evaluated positively on a negative play or vice versa.

In Nix’s case, there are a lot of plays where he does alright and something goes horribly wrong, or the play should have gone horribly wrong and he escapes with a kinda-bad outcome. He’s captaining a ship that absolutely should be sinking and somewhat surprisingly keeping it afloat, which Total Points gives him a ton of credit for. As for whether it’s too much credit…let’s dig deeper.

Sacks—and what you replace them with—are a quarterback stat

It’s well established at this point that pressure, especially sacks, is largely driven by the quarterback’s tendencies. Nix seems to do a great job of avoiding them, and he’s had a decent amount of practice, if you’ve seen highlights of him running around in the backfield.

Nix has the 5th-lowest sack rate in the NFL this year, which is great. The guy with the lowest rate in the league is the likely NFL MVP (Josh Allen), and the players at the other end of the list are generally not the names you want to be around. And this isn’t a scheme-driven thing either, as you might expect from players like Tua Tagovailoa. Nix is 26th in 1-and-3-step dropbacks and 12th in 5-and-7-step dropbacks, if you count being in shotgun as counting for a couple extra steps. 

Sacks are very bad, so Total Points wants to give a lot of credit for avoiding them. The average high-volume quarterback has lost about 40 points of value on sacks this year, while Nix is right around 25. (For what it’s worth, Daniels is right in that median range, so the sack value basically covers Nix’s advantage in Total Points.)

When he avoids a sack, though, Nix often kinda chucks it up, generally in a throwaway-type effort, which is evidenced by his league-low on-target rate on pressured throws at least 10 yards downfield.

From a Total Points perspective, getting a catchable throw out there on such a play is a pretty big deal, because you’re at least presenting the possibility of a positive play in a spot where the expectation is pretty solidly negative. Nix doesn’t do a great job of doing any more than that, but the system gives him credit for pushing for more than a checkdown first, and then adjusts based on the accuracy. I don’t have evidence right now to suggest that the initial throw value is out of whack, but it’s worth digging into in the offseason.

Receiving…talent?

The Broncos are basically a Courtland Sutton operation on the outside. He has more than double the receiving production of anyone else on the team, and non-degenerates probably haven’t heard of anyone else. 

Here’s what Nix has dealt with this year:

• 6th-worst On-Target Catch Rate
• 9th-worst Broken+Missed Tackles per Reception
• 4 lost fumbles on completions (tied for the NFL lead)

Only the Colts have bottom-10 rates in the first two metrics, and they can’t compete on the fumble front. As a result, the Broncos are sitting on the worst receiving corps in the NFL by Total Points. They’ve been worth about 3 points per game below average over the course of the whole season.

Nix has not set the world on fire with his accuracy as Sean Payton suggested he might, but he’s done plenty to get this offense in position to succeed, and in large part his teammates haven’t held up their end of the bargain. 

Where we stand

I am not trying to sell anyone on “Bo Nix, top 5 quarterback” as the Total Points leaderboard would suggest, but I do think that he’s doing some important things well and working through a pretty difficult team situation, and his overall performance has been way better than the gap in Offensive Rookie of the Year odds would suggest. 

His improvement after the first month of the season has been encouraging, although it’s reasonable not to have too much patience with a 24-year-old rookie. But I’ll be keeping an eye on potential skill position improvements in the offseason that might buoy a signal caller who has shown signs of being a capable starting quarterback.