[Hammock Parties]

This one's good, too. Regression to the mean.

Alex Smith can help the Redskins win a lot of games. But he’s not going to carry them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...=.4b31ceabdb47

The Washington Redskins made a bold call when they decided that Kirk Cousins wasn’t worth the huge contract he was chasing and instead traded for Alex Smith to lead their offense. Smith currently has a grade of 67.7, good for 25th among quarterbacks in Pro Football Focus’ rankings, compared to Cousins’s 83.9, which ranks 10th.

With only five weeks of the season played, that number alone does not tell us whether the team made the right call (nor can it get into Cousins’s role in his departure from Washington to the Minnesota Vikings, or the financial advantages to the Redskins of having Smith over Cousins).

But it does give us a sense of Smith’s shaky start with his new team, and a deeper dive into the stats reveals a truth that has been apparent for much of Smith’s career: He has the ability to help his team win a lot of games, but he is unlikely to be able to carry it.

Smith is coming off the worst game of his Washington career, struggling badly against the Saints on Monday night, earning a grade of 60.1, the lowest of his season.

The outcome was reflective of one of the main differences between Smith and Cousins. While both recorded remarkably similar grades over the three previous seasons — Cousins earned an 80.5 in Washington, while Smith recorded a 79.9 in Kansas City — they got there in different ways. Cousins is a far more volatile player, while Smith is a very conservative passer who excels in the game-manager role.

There is strategy to that dynamic for teams to consider. At times, the guy who is less likely to cost you the game with mistakes is the more desirable leader of your offense. The problem comes in games such as Monday night’s, and that player then finds himself behind on the scoreboard without the ability to cut into the deficit.

When Smith and the Redskins went three scores down against the Saints, despite the fact that it happened in the second quarter, the game was more or less over, because Smith simply isn’t the kind of quarterback who excels in a shootout — it goes against his style of play. Cousins, on the other hand, has already shown this year with the Vikings that he is capable of executing that kind of comeback, bringing his team back from 17 points down against the Packers in a game that eventually ended in a tie.

For Smith and the Redskins to be successful, they need a specific type of game — and it can’t be a shootout. Since the start of the 2015 season, Smith’s overall grade is 79.9, good for 20th in the NFL. But when he falls behind by seven or more points, that grade plummets to 53.1, which ranks 33rd.

Perhaps the most interesting season of Smith’s career was last year in Kansas City, when he was more aggressive in pushing the ball downfield and achieved a high level of efficiency on those deep throws. He led the NFL in passer rating on throws of 20 or more yards with a 131.4 — 20 points higher than the second-place Drew Brees.

Because he was so successful on those deep shots, it may have looked like Smith had become a completely different quarterback, but in reality, he didn’t actually ramp up the frequency all that much. In 2016, Smith went deep on 9.4 percent of his pass attempts, which was 31st in the league. Last season he was at 12.3 percent, which only moved him up to 14th. He was notably more aggressive, but he was still only league-average in that area — it was his efficiency on those deep throws that stood out, and to an unsustainable degree.

This season, the production on those deep attempts hasn’t been as strong but the frequency hasn’t actually regressed all the way to his earlier career levels. He is currently taking a deep shot on 11.1 percent of his attempts, good for 22nd in the league. That’s some way short of last season, but still a notable uptick on his previous career baseline.

The bottom line with Smith is that he hasn’t been as aggressive and efficient as he was a season ago, but that was never really likely. What he has done so far in Washington is split the difference between that one outlier season for the Chiefs and his previous career baseline when it comes to aggression and shifting his style as a quarterback. That has the effect of actually improving the number of games he can play a significant part in winning for this team, but as was clear on Monday, it isn’t enough to transform him into the kind of quarterback capable of elevating his team to victory in a shootout.