Heisman Candidates In Perspective

In four days, the most prestigious award in college football will be awarded. There are four possible candidates that the media has been focusing on, and unless you've been living under a rock, those four are Tim Tebow, Sam Bradford, Colt McCoy, and Graham Harrell.

The stats for these quarterbacks are very impressive. Sam Bradford leads the NCAA in touchdown passes, Graham Harrell leads the NCAA in passing yards, Colt McCoy leads the NCAA in completion percentage, and Tim Tebow leads the NCAA in best TD/Int ratio.

But the numbers are quite confusing. All three of the Big 12 quarterbacks have completed more passes than Tim Tebow has even attempted this season. With such a low number of attempts, it is quite hard to try and objectively compare all four quarterbacks.

After all, Tebow might have only had 28 TDs, but he also threw the ball 268 times. The number of attempts among the four are between 268 for Tebow to 568 for Harrell. This is hardly an even comparison.

To get a better grasp of how these quarterbacks compare to one another, we can simply standardize their attempts. Let us assume that each quarterback threw for 1000 attempts this season. In this way, we can hold the number of attempts constant and really compare the quarterbacks.

The stats that the quarterbacks produced are a representation of all of the games they played in. However, FCS opponents have a tendency to inflate numbers. For this reason, all FCS opponents have been removed to provide a better gauge of performance against real opponents.

This is how the quarterbacks shape up if each had 1000 pass attempts:

Passing Yards

Tim Tebow 9,004

Sam Bradford 10,193

Colt McCoy 9,187

Graham Harrell 8,170

Graham Harrell might have thrown for the most yards on the season, but he actually threw the least amount of yards if we hold the number of attempts constant. And conversely, Tim Tebow might have thrown for the fewest number of yards but actually threw for more yards than Harrell, holding attempts constant.

TD/Int Ratio

Tim Tebow 97/7.78

Sam Bradford 110/14.29

Colt McCoy 85/18.67

Graham Harrell 74/12.61

Again, holding attempts constant we see that Tebow is very comparable to the Big 12 quarterbacks, posting the best TD/Int ratio. Tebow also threw only 28 TDs, but had everyone had the same number of attempts, he would have thrown for the second highest.

Curiously, Colt McCoy posts the worst TD/Int ratio.

Rushing

Only two quarterbacks actually had meaningful stats in the rushing department: Tim Tebow and Colt McCoy. Utilizing the same idea by standardizing the number of attempts, we can do the same with rushing. Instead of using 1000 attempts, we will use 500 rushing attempts.

These are the number of rushing yards and TDs if these two quarterbacks had 500 rushing attempts each.

Tim Tebow 1743 39.47

Colt McCoy 2250 39.06

Tim Tebow would have had less than half a rushing TD more than Colt McCoy, but McCoy would have rushed for almost 500 additional yards.

Passer Efficiency

The ultimate final say in quarterback efficiency is the passer rating. This simple metric takes into account the completion percentage, yards per attempt, number of touch downs, and number of interceptions.

Tim Tebow 170.34

Sam Bradford 186.76

Colt McCoy 179.19

Graham Harrell 160.96

Putting It All Together

The passer rating is the ultimate measure of a quarterback. The quarterback with the best rating, if all attempts are held constant and all FCS opponents are removed, is Colt McCoy.

Colt McCoy would have thrown for the 2nd most amount of yards, had the highest completion percentage, and rushed for more yards than any other quarterback.

If I were to rank candidates based on this information, I would rank them (1) Colt McCoy, (2) Tim Tebow, (3) Sam Bradford, (4) Graham Harrell.