FanPost

Blake Bortles vs. Colin Kaepernick: A quarterback competition

Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports

With the Jacksonville Jaguars, we can be sure of two things: bad quarterback play and no competition for the position.

This has led to some talk connecting the dots between the league's best available quarterback and the Jaguars' need for improvement under center. And what is fans arguing about something without numbers?

So here's the deal, we'll look at a few ways to measure passers, and see who should be the face of the Jaguars' franchise.

QB rating

The first stat is one that many fans are dismissive of but perhaps they shouldn't be.


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So how do our contestants fare?

Not only does Kaepernick have a career quarterback rating higher than Blake's best year, but his stats play to his favor if we are to have a recency bias.

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Bortles 0 - Kaepernick 1

ANY/A

Another attempt to quantify quarterback performance that garners less attention than quarterback rating is Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt, and luckily for us, it is a slightly better predictor of wins than the old quarterback rating.


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And Kaepernick wins more of the last three years, and checks our recency bias box once more.

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Bortles 0 - Kaepernick 2

DVOA%

Moving further upwards in importance for quarterback stats, we reach Football Outsiders' DVOA % which seeks to assign value to each play based on factors such as field position, down and distance, and the opponent a team is playing against.

Looks like they are barking up the right tree.

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This stat doesn't seem to be favorable for either quarterback, but Bortles has been better in this stat over the last two seasons, so he takes the win.

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Bortles 1 - Kaepernick 2

ESPN's Total QBR

ESPN catches a lot of flak from fans, but when it comes to measuring quarterback their stat correlates the strongest with a team's likelihood to win.

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And once again Kaepernick has been better more often, and more recently.

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Bortles 1 - Kaepernick 3

So what do you guys think? Do the numbers lie?

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