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Just The Sports: Anthony Morelli: Rocket-Armed, Rock-Brained Quarterback

Just The Sports

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Anthony Morelli: Rocket-Armed, Rock-Brained Quarterback

When everyone jumped on the Anthony Morelli bandwagon after one game against Akron, I was pretty surprised. Anyone who watched the game closely could clearly see that Morelli became a worse quarterback as the game progressed, but apparently most people chose to only focus on the three touchdown passes and ignore the 50% completion rate. Since I have not followed the rest of Morelli's games closely because he is not a particularly good college quarterback, I was unsure whether he actually got worse during all of his games so I put my Sherlock Holmes sleuthing hat on and decided to find out.

Except for the fourth quarter (probably a result of throwing fewer passes), Morelli, for the season, does regress from one quarter to the next, no doubt a big reason why Penn State has struggled this season. The first quarter is by far Morelli's best quarter. In the opening fifteen minutes of games, he has completed 69.5% of his passes, 8.0 yards per pass attempt, a 40.7% success rate, an average of 10.8 extra yards on successful plays, and an average of 5.6 needed yards on his failed passed attempts.

Then the second quarter comes and there is a big drop-off in production. Morelli only manages to complete 47.7% of his passes, has 6.2 yards per pass attempt, a 36.9% success rate, an average of 11.0 extra yards on successful plays, and an average of 5.1 needed yards on failed plays.

The drop-off between the second and third quarters is not nearly as large as the one between the first and second quarters, but it is there nonetheless. Third quarters see Morelli complete only 46.8% of his passes with 5.3 yards per pass attempt, a 35.5% success rate, an average of 8.2 extra yards when he runs a successful play, and an average of 6.1 yards needed when he does not.

Even though the fourth quarter/overtime period does not fit into the linear decline of aggregate numbers, I did the work so I'm going to throw it in here anyway to justify the hour or so I spent looking through play-by-play data. He manages to rebound in a big way in terms of completion percentage with 60.4% and success rate with 41.7%, but the rest of the numbers (5.8 yards per pass attempt, 5.4 extra yards per success play, and 5.1 needed yards on failed plays) in no way define spectacular play.

When it comes to touchdown-to-interception ratio, the third quarter is the only one in which Morelli has throw more touchdowns than interceptions. The only quarters all have a 1:1 ratio in this category.

So far, it looks like the criticism of Morelli not being a smart quarterback is as accurate as his passes are inaccurate.

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