Why Care About Ty Simpson's Depth of Target?

Every preseason, there’s at least one young quarterback who — for whatever reason — was a polarizing or controversial addition to his team. Invariably, that quarterback has a preseason performance that invites scrutiny; perhaps it was because the performance purportedly looked good on film but didn’t produce meaningfully interesting statistics or because the statistics look good on the surface but might be worth additional context.

This year, that performance seems to belong to Ty Simpson, the first-round pick for the Los Angeles Rams whose college profile seemed fine but not overwhelming and wasn’t widely regarded as a first-round pick by most analysts.

This isn’t conjecture; we can quantify this. The group of 134 draft analysts whose rankings composed the Consensus Big Board collectively ranked Simpson 38th overall. He’s not the only first-round quarterback in the last ten years to be ranked outside of the top 32 by consensus — Daniel Jones, Michael Penix Jr. and Bo Nix were all picked in the first round after ranking past the 30s. Not too far away is Josh Allen, ranked 28th overall and drafted seventh overall.

Oh, and Patrick Mahomes ranked 30th but was selected tenth.

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The bulk of analysts ranked Simpson between 30th and 51st overall, with his highest ranking tenth overall (Chris Trapasso of DraftGradeBook.com and Buffalo Rumblings) and lowest 211th (Walker Kelly of the Football Absurdity podcast).

Out of 134 draft analysts, 89 of them (66.4 percent) ranked him outside of their Top 32.

As one can tell from the cohort of quarterbacks one can compare Simpson to, this ranking is not damning in itself, just directional. Nix’s career is starting off strong — though, subject to the above-referenced investigatory analysis that parses production stats — and Allen, with four Pro Bowls and an MVP nod, is Hall of Fame-bound. Mahomes has done alright for himself.

The Simpson pick was perhaps more controversial than the Nix or Penix selections in large part because the Rams weren’t perceived as a franchise that needed an immediate solution at quarterback. With Matthew Stafford, they saw an MVP-level season and an NFC Championship Game appearance.

Of course, with Stafford set to retire sooner rather than later, the Rams certainly need to make an investment at the position. But with the benefit of time comes the luxury of pickiness — why reach now when a more well-regarded quarterback class is coming down the pike?

The biggest reaches, by value, in Consensus Board history at the quarterback position were Baker Mayfield for the Cleveland Browns and Mitchell Trubisky for the Chicago Bears. Both were certainly polarizing picks, and the Browns had any number of options, but it seems some of the criticism was muted by the fact that the Browns and Bears needed quarterbacks immediately.

Regardless, Simpson now has a microscope on him. And, in a matter perfect for the discourse, he put together a performance that was statistically impressive on the surface and remarkably questionable underneath in his first preseason game.

In his first preseason game, Simpson completed 21 of 25 passes for two touchdowns and no interceptions, producing a passer rating of 125.0 — a statistically outstanding mark.

When I saw the number of completions and the total passing yardage — 190 — a warning bell went off in my head. Any time a quarterback generates under 10 yards per completion, I’m pretty skeptical that they had a good game.

It’s not an absolute; Patrick Mahomes’ Week 5 game against the Vikings in 2023 is a good example of a low yards-per-completion game that I thought demonstrated quite a bit of quarterback skill. So too with Dak Prescott’s Week 12 game against the Commanders in the same year.

Of course, Mahomes experienced a blitz rate above 55 percent in that game, an extreme situation that calls for that kind of approach — and he still showcased accurate ball placement to generate yards after the catch. These games can require precise quarterbacking to best put an offense in scoring position.

On the other hand, most of Tua Tagovailoa’s 2024 and 2025 did not demonstrate good football, instead throwing short to accommodate a weakness rather than in response to a specific gameplan.

For the most part, these types of games represent hand-holding for the quarterback — a way to engineer around weaknesses and highlight other players on the team, hoping to win with missed tackles rather than precise play.

Both Simpson games were characterized by a low depth of target. Combined over those two games, he threw 4.70 yards downfield on average, ranking 75th of 78 passers — just ahead of Justin Fields, Tanner McKee and Brandon Allen.

There isn’t much difference in those numbers game to game; against the Chiefs, his average depth of target was 4.72 yards downfield while his game against the Saints featured an ADOT of 4.67 yards.

We can’t tell from the numbers if Simpson specifically had one type of game or the other in either outing, though there are some statistical signs we can look at. The first is dropback depth.

Usually, deep dropbacks signal that the offense is sending receivers downfield, and the quarterback’s footwork is intended to give the receivers time to hit their breaks. If not, the quarterback is often doing something wrong.

One could also look at time-to-throw. This isn’t as definitive; a quick time-to-throw could be a panic throw before the play develops or a gameplan decision — one that could be built around a quarterback’s weakness as much as it is an opponent-specific consideration.

But a short depth of target with a long time-to-throw might tell us that the quarterback was not operating within what was expected of the offense, especially when combined with a deep dropback.

For Simpson, we saw both red flags in his first game, the one that drew such significant praise. Again, nothing’s definitive with these marks, but they point in a particular direction.

Simpson’s time to throw against the Chiefs was 3.13 seconds while his dropback depth, on average, was 4.18 yards from where he snapped the ball.

These statistics tell us nothing in a vacuum and probably don’t mean anything at all if you’re not used to working with this data. So, let’s contextualize.

Only three offenses in the NFL last year had longer times-to-throw, and all three have scrambling passers who buy time, often out of structure: the Chicago Bears, the Tennessee Titans and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Baltimore Ravens, also characteristic of this style, tied that time to throw last season.

Simpson’s dropback depth of 4.18 would have been beaten by four offenses last year — the Arizona Cardinals, Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears and… in first place, the Los Angeles Rams.

Dropback depth is one thing. As far as air yards are concerned, the Rams had the deepest passing offense in the NFL last year, with an average depth of target of 9.24 yards downfield. The Packers ranked fourth (8.76) and the Bears ranked sixth (8.61). The Cardinals were an unusual exception, ranking 24th (7.18). They also benched their starting quarterback, so who knows.

As a percentile of individual game performances, Simpson’s time to throw and dropback depth in his first preseason game would have been in the 75th percentile and 86th percentile, respectively. These are pretty significant signals that the offense is looking for downfield shots.

Off the bat, without watching any of the game, we should be at least suspicious of the argument that many made in response to my tweet: that this was in the gameplan and part of smart offensive design.

The Rams are a deep-passing offense, and the fingerprints of the Rams approach are there, even if the actual throw distance wasn’t.

We shouldn’t be hasty drawing broad conclusions. After all, if all deep targets are covered, one would expect a player to check the ball down. Though, importantly, it does mean that the first defense of Simpson’s first preseason game — that short passing was the gameplan — doesn’t hold up.

Interestingly, Simpson’s second preseason game was nothing like this. He threw short again, but he had a very quick time-to-throw and short dropback depth, a good sign that this was now in the gameplan.

Sort of.

On plays where he did have receivers running downfield, he would stall in the pocket, then scramble. These weren’t included in TruMedia’s accounting, and his time to scramble was, on average, 4.90 seconds.

Regardless, we’re left with one fact: Simpson threw short. Does short-throwing statistical success in the preseason mean anything in the subsequent season for young quarterbacks?

Before looking at short throwing, do good preseason stats tell us anything at all about young quarterbacks?

I looked at all first- and second-year NFL players who played in the preseason with at least 10 attempts and examined their first- and second-year performances.

Among first-rounders, the worst-performing quarterbacks by preseason passer rating included Josh Rosen, Josh Allen, Anthony Richardson, Cam Ward and Mac Jones. Second-round underperformers included Will Levis, Drew Lock and DeShone Kizer. Jones might have an argument for having had a good rookie season, but the rest do not.

At the other end of the spectrum are high-flyers. They include Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott and Jayden Daniels. Marcus Mariota, who had a good initial showing with the Titans, also looked good in his early preseasons, with a passer rating of 103.5 over his first two years of exhibition play.

Does this suggest that good preseason passer ratings indicate good early performance? Not really — I omitted some key names. Among the underperformers were Brock Purdy, Deshaun Watson and Lamar Jackson, all of whom were instantly outstanding on the field. The best passer rating in the group belonged to Zach Wilson, while Kenny Pickett and Bryce Young weren’t too far behind.

Because passer rating is the statistic being highlighted here, we can use it to test against a more stable measure of NFL-level performance, EPA per dropback.

Correlation, a measure of how closely two sets of numbers relate, can be helpful here. Put another way, correlation answers the question, “if we know one number, how well can we guess the other related number?” — if we know that someone’s preseason passer rating, how well can we guess their EPA per dropback?

That number, the correlation coefficient, runs from -1.0 to 1.0, with either extreme representing a perfect relationship (that is, knowing one number inside the dataset gives us 100 percent of the information we need to guess the other number in the dataset) and 0, in the middle, representing no relationship at all.

The correlation between early-career (first two years of play) preseason passer rating and early-career performance is -0.01. Meaningless.

The relationship is surprisingly, but trivially, stronger for career EPA per dropback, with an r of 0.06.

But perhaps the problem is that some of the high passer rating performances are boosted by high-completion-rate performances — a well-known bias in the passer rating formula, demonstrably polluting it without increasing its signal.

Put another way, a passer rating formula without any completion rating would be better at predicting which quarterbacks would win in the future and which had won. So, let’s look at quarterbacks who earned a high passer rating and exclude those with low depth of targets to see if that improves our cohort samples.

After all, that’s sort of the problem that drove this exercise.

If we set the cut-off at 8.0 yards downfield on average, we get to exclude high passer rating performances from Wilson, Pickett, Teddy Bridgewater and Jaxson Dart. That leaves us with Prescott, Daniel Jones, Justin Fields, Patrick Mahomes, Bryce Young, Mariota and Blake Bortles.

That only barely feels better, but the overall impact is still an improved signal: the correlation coefficient is 0.11 when looking only at passers with a target depth further than 8.0 yards downfield.

For the purposes of projecting initial regular-season performance, low depth of target seems to be a stronger signal of possible poor play than passer rating. Below the 8.0 mark are first-round quarterbacks Mitchell Trubisky, Trevor Lawrence, Sam Darnold, Tua Tagovailoa, Carson Wentz, Kenny Pickett, Jaxson Dart, Johnny Manziel, Bo Nix, E.J. Manuel, Teddy Bridgewater, Jared Goff, C.J. Stroud, Zach Wilson, Jayden Daniels and Cam Ward.

While there are still some rookie- and second-year successes like Daniels, Wentz, Nix and Stroud, this is a pretty worrisome list.

The correlation coefficient for just depth of target to EPA per dropback in early career performance for first- and second-round quarterbacks is 0.06, which is tremendously weak but still slightly stronger than passer rating.

So instead of treating depth of target as a mark of quality itself, we can use it as a filter — those with good performances in passer rating along with a reasonably deep target depth might be worth becoming excited about.

When excluding those with a depth of target below 8.0, the correlation for first- and second-round passers increases to 0.13. We’re actually beginning to cook something interesting, though we need to confront the fact that we’re reduced to just 23 qualifying passers.

What really hurts us is the lack of a 2020 preseason, where a lot of prominent first-round quarterbacks emerge from — there’s zero first- or second-year preseason data for Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert and Jalen Hurts and only second-year data for players like Tua Tagovailoa.

The dataset only goes back to 2013, so we also miss first-year data for a strong 2012 class that includes Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin and Ryan Tannehill (Russell Wilson’s data would be useful here, but not in the truncated first- and second-round look).

So, OK, the data tells us what I think a lot of us already expected — a good preseason showing doesn’t tell us there’s a strong likelihood of early success. But to the extent that it can, one goosed by a bunch of easy completions tells us less.

Importantly, a good passer rating with a short depth of target isn’t bad — it’s merely not good.

But, like, what if that’s what the gameplan actually was, or what the defense gave Simpson? We can just look at the game, right? Let’s see if that’s the case.

The NFL tweeted out a highlight reel for Simpson’s first game — every throw in his preseason debut. But that came from the broadcast angle. Though it can tell us if most of the throws were accurate, it can’t really tell us how deep the other receivers are running their routes.