Yards above replacement (YAR)

This page contains a statistic I’ve developed called Yards Above Replacement (YAR). It is designed to understand how a QB performs relative to his peers.

YAR takes a QBs yards per pass attempt and yards per rush attempt and compares those to the average value of both for Power-5 QBs. That allows the calculation of whether a QB is better or worse than his peers.

As an example of how to view different values of YAR, I want to give a few examples from the SEC during the 2018 season.

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  • YAR = 0, average QB (Kellen Mond, 0.08)
  • YAR = -1, terrible (Ty Storey, -1.04)
  • YAR = 1, very good (Jake Fromm, 0.95)
  • YAR = 2+, Heisman candidate (Tua Tagovailoa, 3.55)

Thus, we can measure how well a QB plays on a game-by-game basis and hopefully understand whether he is improving and where he can improve further.

The following is a running update of SEC QBs for the 2019 season:

Overall:

Week 1:

Week 2: