Quarterback Win Rating: A Superior Methodology for Evaluating and Compensating Quarterbacks

AUTHOR
Kenneth Ko *

KEYWORDS
Financial Management, Football, Compensation, Regression Analysis

ABSTRACT
Businesses need to make wise financial decisions on how to spend their money, including how much to pay their employees. Sports teams are no different as they need to decided how much to pay their players. In the National Football League, teams need to pay their quarterbacks appropriately given that quarterback is by far the most important position and also because of the salary cap. In this paper, we present a superior methodology for evaluating quarterbacks: Quarterback Win Rating (QWR). With QWR we use quarterback winning percentage as the dependent variable, and other available quarterback statistics, including Passer Rating (Rate) and Total Quarterback Rating (QBR), as possible independent variables. The independent variables chosen for a given year are selected through analyzing the previous five years of quarterback data through the use of stepwise multiple regression. In this way, the best model is picked every year and is tied to wins, which are clearly the most important thing. The importance of the model is highlighted through focusing on playoff and Super Bowl quarterbacks. In short, QWR is shown to be a better way than either Rate or QBR to not only evaluate quarterback performance but also compensate them appropriately.