Ben Roethlisberger’s game-winning touchdown pass to lift the Pittsburgh Steelers over the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII has sparked debate over whether Ben Roethlisberger is more clutch than Tom Brady and, in fact, the most clutch quarterback in the NFL. 

 

After all, Ben Roethlisberger already had more game-winning drives in the fourth quarter or overtime than any other quarterback since he joined the league in the 2004 season.

 

As a fan of neither, I’m more than happy to watch from the sideline as Steelers and Patriots fans duke it out, but I’ve long believed two things about being clutch in the NFL. 

 

A one-game performance, regardless of its importance, does not make player clutch.  A player's total body of work makes him or her clutch.

 

Two, the classic game-winning touchdown-drives statistic is an incredibly flawed measure.

 

The most obvious flaw with game-winning touchdown drives is that it does not account for a player's success rate. I would much rather see a quarterback succeed in four out of five opportunities than succeed in five out of 10.

 

If you play in more close games, you will have more opportunities whereas if you blow out teams and/or find your own team getting blown out, you will have fewer opportunities.

 

Another problem with game-winning touchdown drives is that quarterbacks get punished when their kicker misses a field goal, or their defense is unable to sustain a last-minute lead (think Brady and Kurt Warner in the last two Super Bowls).

 

Finally, game-winning touchdown drives fail to discern between successful drives when a touchdown was required and when a field goal would have sufficed.  It’s much more difficult to lead a successful game-winning drive when your opponent knows you need a touchdown.

 

Given the unavailability of a sufficient measure for clutch quarterback play, I decided to create my own.

 

The first and most important thing is that this new measure must be a success rate, rather than a tally of successes.  Therefore, I not only considered successes but also failures.

 

Next, I defined what it means to succeed and fail.  Remember, I pointed that simply pulling out the win is not a sufficient definition of success.

 

So, rather than looking at the final score of the game, I focused on the result of individual drives. Considering that game-winning drives are harder to engineer when a touchdown is required, drives were considered in two distinct categories.

 

Did the quarterback lead his team to a field goal attempt or a touchdown when tied or trailing by three or less points? 

 

Did the quarterback lead his team to a touchdown drive when trailing by four to eight points?

 

If a quarterback leads his team to a field goal attempt when trailing by four to eight points or scores a touchdown without a successful two-point conversion attempt when trailing by eight points, the drive was considered a half-success.

 

In order to be fair to quarterbacks, any drives that ended on a failed run (not performed by the quarterback) of one yard or less were thrown out.  Additionally, any drives that ended as a result of another player's fumble were discarded.

 

Moreover, to be fair, any drive beginning with under a minute remaining on the clock was thrown out.

 

In order to separate clutch drives from plain old regular drives, I had to determine a clutch period of the game.  The fourth quarter and overtime is a popular time period, so I decided to use that timeframe.

 

I would have liked to narrow the time period down further to later in the fourth quarter, but it would have led to an insufficient sample size.  

 

In order to consider the drives when a touchdown is required along with the drives when a field goal will suffice, I used the following method.

 

A quarterback’s success rate in each category was compared based on how far above or below the league average it was. 

 

Using relative success rates put each category on equal ground and allowed them to be used to create a single success rate by averaging them together. 

 

I weighted the relative success rates according to each category’s percentage of total clutch-drive opportunities for the individual quarterback.

 

As for the scope of the data, I used all regular season and postseason games played in the past four seasons from 2004-2008, which is Ben Roethlisberger’s career.

 

I set a minimum standard for which quarterbacks could be included based on sample size.  In order to be counted, a quarterback must have had at least 10 clutch-drive opportunities when tied or trailing by three or less points and at least 10 clutch-drive opportunities when trailing by four to eight points.

 

That standard left me with 37 quarterbacks.

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