Imagine a basketball player that hit 90% of his free throws in prior years but is shooting 68% this year. Something has clearly changed! It's irrelevant to mention that other elite shooters also miss free throws. All that matters is that our guy used to be an elite shooter and now he's not.
That is fair, but no one has made any attempt to
statistically measure Stafford's "open receiver read and recognition accuracy rate" for any particular season of his career. For all we know, he's not particularly elite in this department. Both Steph Curry and Lebron James are phenomenal basketball players. One of them is a tremendous FT shooter, the other one isn't. Just because Lebron James has NBA titles and MVP awards doesn't mean that he's great at FTs. Maybe Stafford has regularly not seen open WRs over the course of his career, it just isn't something that we've noticed or been concerned with, because his arm talent more than makes up for it, just as Lebron James does so many other things on the basketball court that he doesn't need to be elite at FT shooting.
If we wanted to talk about whether a basketball player's FT shooting had declined, we'd look at the FT stats. We wouldn't stop with anecdotally talking about missing 2 FTs at the end of a game that the team lost and consider it proof of the hypothesis.
Stafford has missed some throws this year, so the issue has been his accuracy more than his vision. Other times he sees an open WR but the pass rush prevents him from making a clean pass. Unless we analyze and breakdown each component in a more scientific way, I think the discussion becomes just speculative and driven by emotion instead of cold, hard facts. It tends to become a Rorschach test where people can see whatever they are inclined to believe about Stafford anyway, whether positive or negative.
Let's take Orlovsky's statement that the issue with Stafford's field vision "isn't bad, but it isn't MVP level". Is that conclusion accurate? It is possible that Orlovsky is wrong and Stafford is statistically "bad" in 2026 with his vision. Not just average, but bottom of the NFL among starting QBs. We don't know unless we try to measure it? Is he better or worse than Justin Herbert, who has terrible traditional stats? Maybe Herbert's vision is better than Stafford's but other factors make Herbert's overall stats worse.
If we look at PFR stats, Stafford already has 7 throwaways is 2026. In the 2021 season where we won the Super Bowl, he had 3 for the entire season. Stafford is on pace to have the most "bad throws" of any season since 2018 (they don't give us stats for earlier years) and the rate for dropped passes is the 3rd highest over that time period (one of the other years was when the Rams squeezed into the playoffs then lost to Detroit in the Wild Card round.)
It is possible that the true outlier season was 2025. That wasn't "the real" Stafford from a statistical standpoint and he was always going to regress to the mean. Is there really something wrong with Stafford in 2026 or are many of these problems things we've seen before and have always been there, we just didn't pay as much attention to them as long as the Rams were winning games?
