2017 Patriots Only Trade Deadline Game Thread

[Import78]

I recall reading that the final year of a QB isn't necessarily outside the normal deviation for the quarterback's career. Some googling found this article: http://www.advancedfootballanalytics.com/index.php/home/research/payroll-personnel/93-how-quarterbacks-age

I don't remember if this is the one I read before, but it seems pretty close, though I think the pint is a bit more garbled than I remembered it.

One of the more interesting things in the numbers was that the final year of a QB's career, regardless of age, is usually pretty bad, but not necessarily worse than the usual year-to-year variation in any individual QB's resume. In fact, the final year of a QB's career, on average, represents a decline of -0.75 AYPA. This is far worse than any one year of average decline due to age--actually equivalent to about 6 years of decline. To me, this suggests that natural variance is helping end many QB careers.

In fact, if you simply remove the very last season of each QB's career from the data, age-related decline virtually disappears.