Fun with Data: Is Blake Bortles contract that bad? A look at 2018 cap hits and QBR

Blake Bortles may not have dominated the 2017-2018 NFL playoffs, but he did take the Jaguars to the AFC championship and nearly did enough to beat the Patriots. The Jaguars rewarded his play with a 3 year, 54-million dollar contract. Initially, I was aghast. At times it seemed that the Jaguars won in spite of Bortles. He threw for only 1 touchdown in the two playoff wins, with 2 interceptions and a combined 48% completion percentage. His play over the season also wasn’t spectacular.

So I wondered, how bad is this contract?

Turns out, it’s actually a pretty great contract in comparison to other teams, at least in terms of the salary cap hit for next season. I got my data on QBR from ESPN and my data on cap hits from over the cap.

Bortles is slated to cost the Jaguars $10 million dollars in cap next season, which is the 12th lowest out of the 25 qualifying players from ESPN who are currently under contract for next season. Below is a plot of these 25 players’ quarterback rating (QBR) as a function of their salary. salary (in millions).

Bortles is seen here in green and I added the least squares regression line for QBR as a function of salary. Bortles actually performed better last season then the predicted quarterback with a $10-million dollar cap hit. In case you’re wondering, Carson Wentz had the highest QBR last season, and was a bargain. I added a point for Kirk Cousins in red, reflecting his possible record breaking $30-million dollar contract. Based on his play in 2017 and the least squares regression line, he would be overpaid. This got me thinking, what are some of the best and worst QBR/Salary ratios going into next season? Below are the top 5 best ratios:

Quarterback	Ratio
Dak Prescott	91.9
Brett Hundley	54.1
Jacoby Brissett	52.1
Deshone Kizer	26.1
Trevor Siemian	14.5

It’s probably not surprising that all five of these players are on rookie contracts. And here’s the bottom five ratios in the league.

Quarterback	Ratio
Kirk Cousins	1.7
Cam Newton	1.7
Derek Carr	1.9
Eli Manning	2.0
Joe Flacco	2.2

Assuming that Kirk Cousins is paid $30-million dollars, he would have the lowest QBR/Salary ratio in the league. The rest of this list is also probably not surprising as they received massive long term contracts but played poorly as of late.

I hope you enjoyed this post and if so, check out some of my other blog posts!

-Andrew G Chapple

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