FanPost

Philip Rivers is in for a rough Sunday

Stew Milne-USA TODAY Sports

There has been a lot of talk about facing Philip Rivers this upcoming Sunday, so I decided to take a look at what the stats had to say about this match up.

A very rare matchup

The Jacksonville Jaguars have a historically good pass defense, labeling them "elite" might truly be selling them short in this regard. And Philip Rivers has been in the league for over a decade, played a lot of football in his time, and has played several good defenses in the past... but he has never faced a pass defense as good as the Jaguars boast this season.

He has only faced a pass defense with a DVOA% better than a -28.00% six times in 188 games, which means 97% of what you know about Philip Rivers isn't likely to apply when he faces the Jaguars.

Philip Rivers is still a good quarterback

When you are 35 years old and you have been giving Bortles a run for his turnover money, some might want to talk about age related decline in play. But looking at River's career QBR vs. career attempts, and I'm not sure the decline in Rivers' play is as great as some people might think.


FVaZGof.0.png

But QB Rating doesn't always tell the whole story, so let's look at his Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt (ANY/A).

F29xoas.0.png

So two stats that tend to correlate greatly with a team's win total seem to be saying Rivers is still a threat under center.

Philips vs. Elite Defense

Time for the "WELL ACTUALLY..."

Remember earlier when I said Rivers has rarely faced a good pass defense (and that ours was much better than anything he has ever seen)? In those six games against a pass defense of -28.00% or better, Philip Rivers has thrown more picks than touchdowns and has a quarterback rating of 66.88. The Chargers have only won 16.67% of those games averaging only 14.5 points.

And when we plot his QBR vs Pass DVOA% faced for every game since 2012 (plus two more of those -28.00% DVOA pass defenses) we get something like this:

M4zy6Ke.0.png

Looks like we have a moderate correlation that as the level of a pass defense increases (DVOA% becomes more negative), Rivers' QBR goes down. It's a concept I'm sure we can all get behind, but this then allows us to use the equation for the line of best fit to project the approximate midpoint of Philip Rivers' range of possible stats against our defense.

That works out to be a 66.6 QB rating.

Yes, the numbers suggest that Phillip "Damien" Rivers is going to be a good quarterback who is going to struggle mightily when he has to face our historic defense.

FanPosts do not necessarily reflect the views of the authors of Big Cat Country or SB Nation.