What's with the Thigpen fixation?

[OnTheWarpath15]

Originally Posted by keg in kc

Interesting article from december shows that Brees was top-10 in the NFL in both hits and hurries to that point of the season: http://www.footballoutsiders.com/ext...d-hurries-2008

I have to admit I was surprised by that. The guy was only sacked 13 times in 600+ attempts and completed 65% of his passes, which aren't exactly the kind of numbers that shout 'under pressure'.

The quarterback hits, of course, come from the official play-by-play. Official scorers are doing a better job of marking hits this year compared to last year, but there still are some very strange totals for certain teams because of scorers who seem to miss a lot of knockdowns. We've added a lot of hits to the official PBP thanks to the charting project, but that doesn't fully solve the problem. I'm sorry, but there's no way that last week's Pittsburgh-Dallas game had eight sacks but only one other play where a defender knocked the quarterback to the ground. And last week, the Bucs sacked Jeff Garcia five times but didn't knock him to the ground on any other play? Message to official scorer in Charlotte: I have my doubts.

Translation: Until hits taken are an official NFL stat, I have my doubts. Seems like there is no uniform guidelines as to what a hit is, or isn't.

For sake of conversation, let's play with these numbers.

Through 14 weeks, Brees was supposedly hit 36.5 times.

That averages out to 2.6 times per game.

So, the best we can do is assume he was hit 42 times over the course of the season.

Add that to the 13 sacks he took, and we have contact on 55 out of 635 pass attempts. Or contact every 11.5 pass attempts.

Roethlisberger wasn't on the list, so we don't have numbers to do the math - but it shows he was hurried the same number of times that Brees was.

Let's be fair and say that BR took HALF (which is being generous, IMO) of the hits that Brees took. 1.5 per game.

That's 21 hits over the course of the season, added to the 46 sacks he took. Contact on 67 plays over the course of the season, out of 469 pass attempts - or contact every 7 pass attempts.