As Coach Urban Meyer puts it, "discombobulating" things are happening with the Buckeye offense, especially with the quarterbacks. A telling statistic that demonstrates this, but is not being mentioned, is the quarterback rating or QBR. Those have dropped to unimaginable levels. For the starting QB Cardale Jones, the QBR has plunged this year from 87 to 6. That's right, the single digit 6 is not a typo.
cardale | Cmplt | atmpt | pct | yds | td | int | qbr |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2014 Year | 56 | 92 | 60.9 | 860 | 7 | 2 | 58.7 |
Virginia Tech | 10 | 19 | 52.6 | 187 | 2 | 1 | 87.4 |
Hawaii | 12 | 18 | 66.7 | 111 | 0 | 0 | 42.7 |
Northern Illinois | 4 | 9 | 44.4 | 36 | 0 | 2 | 6.3 |
And of course, these QBR figures don't tell the whole story. Cardale's longest pass against Hawaii went for 24 yards-- it was a "pop" pass in the back field to Jalin Marshall who ran for 24 yards.
The regression in performance has also happened to JT Barrett. He had a sterling QBR of 83 for all of 2014. He began 2015 against Virginia Tech with a perfect score of 100, one pass out of one attempt for over 20 yards and a TD, and one run for 40 yards. But his QBR dropped to 17 in the Northern Illinois game.
JT | cmplt | atmpt | pct | yds | td | int | qbr |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2014 Year | 203 | 314 | 64.7 | 2834 | 34 | 10 | 83.0 |
Virginia Tech | 1 | 1 | 100.0 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 100.0 |
Hawaii | 8 | 15 | 53.3 | 70 | 0 | 0 | 47.6 |
Northern Illinois | 11 | 19 | 57.9 | 97 | 1 | 1 | 16.8 |
What is going on here with two good quarterbacks regressing? An embarrassment of riches has become an embarrassment.