The Mertz Conundrum

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Here’s a chart of the success rates on offense for SEC teams in 2023 plotted against their yards per play gained.

There’s a little bit of variability in the middle, but it’s pretty clear that you want a high success rate if you also want an effective offense.

For those of you unfamiliar, success rate is a way to distinguish the value of yardage based on the particular situation. For example, a 3-yard gain on third-and-2 is much more valuable than a 3-yard gain on third-and-8. Thus, a successful play is defined as one that gains at least 50 percent of the yards to go on first down, 70 percent of the yards to go on second down, or is converted into a first down or score on third or fourth down.

It is through this filter that I think it’s helpful to evaluate returning Florida QB Graham Mertz.

Success Rate and Throw Distance

(Ed. Note: All stats that include Throw Distance courtesy www.secstatcat.com)

I was piecing together some data for this article and looking at some numbers when something very specific hit me. To be honest, it shouldn’t have been a surprise and it makes complete sense. But look at how success rate varies with completion percentage at different throw distances for the top-6 QBs in the SEC (by QB Rating).

At throws more than 20 yards, success rate and completion percentage are exactly the same. This makes sense as completions more than 20 yards are almost always going to result in a first down. The same is true for completions 11-20 yards where only every once in a while (after a holding call, for example) does a completion not result in a first down.

But look at how success rate and completion percentage diverge for shorter throws even as completion percentage rises. It isn’t that shorter throws can’t be successful. It’s that a QB who relies on shorter throws exclusively may have a high completion percentage, but that won’t necessarily correlate to success.

Also note that the success rate of throws in the 0-10 yard range and the 11-20 yard range are higher than those in the 20+ yard range or those behind the line of scrimmage. This suggests that if you’re not great at deep shots, you’re probably better off trying to stick with intermediate throws.

Thus, the distribution of a QBs throws becomes important when comparing performance. To look at that, we can look at the frequency of attempts at each throw range for each of those top six SEC QBs of 2023.

This is where the Mertz conundrum begins to appear. Mertz is first in attempt frequency behind the line of scrimmage and he’s last in attempt frequency more than 20 yards downfield. Given what we talked about above, that should correlate to a higher completion percentage than his peers. Mertz does lead this group at 72.9 percent, but that’s just a few ticks above Jayden Daniels (72.2%) even though Daniels goes down the field far more often.

But it’s not just that Mertz doesn’t go down field very often. It’s that he’s only equally effective across throw distances which means that his throw distribution is inefficient.

Every single one of these QBs has a QB rating over 200 at some throw distance except for Mertz. While Dart and Beck both struggled going deep, they made up for it by being ultra-efficient at the 11-20 yard distance. Jayden Daniels, Jalen Milroe and Brady Cook were actually pretty poor on throws behind the line of scrimmage or from 0-10 yards, but they made up for it by being ultra effective when they went deep (and in the 11-20 yard range for Daniels as well).

But there you have Mertz, making 69 percent of his throws within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage. Combining those throws we get a completion percentage of 85 percent, but a QB rating of 156.9 and a success rate of 49 percent. If he’s going to live at those distances, the throws are going to have to pay off more than that.

Takeaway

It isn’t an accident that Mertz is throwing short. His average depth of target (ADOT) for 2023 was 6.8 yards. Of these six, Beck was the next closest at 8.6 and the rest were above 9.5.

Some of this is scheme. If you’re tired of the jet sweep tosses and the QB screens, you should be. Those plays just don’t pay off at a high enough rate to be running them unless they open up something else downfield. Given these numbers, that didn’t happen for Florida and Mertz last season.

But some of it is Mertz. In his four seasons at Wisconsin, he completed 59.5 percent of his throws for 11.8 yards per completion. Last year at Florida, he averaged 11.1 yards per completion. The difference was that he upped his completion percentage to over 70 percent and I suspect some of that increase was by design.

That same increase can’t be relied on in 2024 as there just isn’t anywhere else to grow from an accuracy perspective. If Mertz completes 73 percent of his throws with the same peripherals, we’ll get the exact same performance that we got in 2023. That isn’t bad QB play, but it’s a guy who is middle-of-the-pack from a success rate perspective, which we established at the start means a middle-of-the-pack offense. And because Mertz adds nothing – and is really a net negative – on the ground, he’s going to have to transform his game in a way to take another step forward.

That means the ball is going to have to get pushed down the field. The benefits of that are a potential increase of explosive plays, which would push the Gators offense up in the rankings. The downside is that pushing the ball down the field makes your offensive line have to hold for longer, opens you up to sacks and increases the odds of throwing an interception.

That’s why I call this the Mertz conundrum. Florida’s offense only gets better if he goes down the field more, but there’s a risk associated with making that choice as well. You might be able to avoid that risk if your defense was lights-out, but that clearly hasn’t been the case in Gainesville for a while now.

Which means if Billy Napier wants to win more than 6 games in 2024, he’s going to have to take that risk.

Goodbye Bill Carr

The first time I met Bill Carr, I had no idea who I was talking to. As someone who didn’t move to the state until 1997 and attended UF from 1999-2004, I have to admit that I still don’t know enough about the program prior to Steve Spurrier’s arrival as head coach in December of 1989.

So there I was in 2019 after finishing up a speech at the Gainesville QB Club when Mr. Carr made it a point to come up to me to discuss Read & Reaction and my approach. It wasn’t until I went home and Google’d his business that I realized who I’d been talking to. He just introduced himself as “Bill”, not a titan of the program I was covering.

Bill Carr was a Gator through-and-through. He was Spurrier’s roommate and a three-year starter. He was drafted by the Saints in 1967 and left them to serve in the Seventh Infantry Division in Korea, never to see an NFL field. At that point, he came back to Florida, becoming the AD in 1979 and setting up the program for success. Though his tenure ended in some controversy, I don’t think there’s any doubt that he laid a foundation that enabled the success Florida has seen on the football field since that time.

I guarantee you that anyone who knew him will rave about him. How do I know? Because when we were talking that first time, he handed me his business card and told me to reach out if there was anything he could do to help me grow the website. He even suggested his consulting firm and I might be able to collaborate. I then emailed him and he wrote back to encourage me. That meant more to me than he knows as someone who at times feels like an imposter in this space.

The world lost a loyal Gator with his death on Saturday night, but more than that, it lost a good man. Goodbye Mr. Carr. You will be missed.