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This says he's got the top 5 easiest schedule in the NFL. But I think the other way to view this is teams that have built their defenses to defend what opponent QBs are good at:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...better-metric/
It’s Hard To Measure NFL Matchups, So We Built A Better Metric
By Josh Hermsmeyer
Filed under NFL
Los Angeles Chargers v Miami Dolphins
Tua Tagovailoa of the Miami Dolphins has faced difficult matchups — based on our similarity scores — to start his career. MARK BROWN / GETTY IMAGES
The NFL is a league of matchups, and no matchup is more crucial to wins and losses than the battle between a quarterback and the pass defense. That’s important for more than just the coaches calling X’s and O’s: Each week, the media, betting markets and fantasy players all make predictions about which teams (and which players) will best take advantage of their opponent’s weaknesses.
Because football is such a complex sport, quantitative analysts haven’t found a great way to capture all the relevant information for each offensive and defensive passing unit in a way that lets us make reasonable predictions about future outcomes. Perhaps the biggest flaw of most approaches to strength-of-schedule and matchup analyses, for example, is that they assume that because a defense has or has not allowed yards, completions and points generally, we should expect that performance to continue against a future opponent. The problem: That isn’t really true. Defenses have weaknesses, but to exploit them, an offense first needs to know they exist. Then it must possess the personnel needed to actually take advantage. In the NFL, neither of those circumstances is a given.
One approach to quantifying these matchups is to look at where on the field a quarterback tends to complete more passes than average and where a defense tends to allow more completions than average. We’ve published heat maps like these before on FiveThirtyEight — both for defenses and for quarterbacks. (We think they’re pretty cool.) If we use some fancy math,1 we can roll these heat maps into a single, convenient number that describes the similarity between where a QB’s passes are completed and where a defense allows passes in a given matchup, with higher numbers indicating a better matchup for the quarterback. These similarity scores then give us an idea of which QBs have faced a more difficult slate and who might have a challenge ahead in the upcoming week.
Like most quantitative measures, similarity scores are worthless without a decent sample size. To ensure we have enough pass attempts to make good comparisons, and to eliminate early-season variance, we chose to calculate our scores only for matchups that occurred from Week 5 onward. We then averaged the scores for each QB who played in at least three games over the seven-week period from Week 5 through Week 11 to see who’s had the toughest schedule, ranking them from the most challenging schedule to the most favorable.
(not the full article due to length)
By Josh Hermsmeyer
Filed under NFL
Los Angeles Chargers v Miami Dolphins
Tua Tagovailoa of the Miami Dolphins has faced difficult matchups — based on our similarity scores — to start his career. MARK BROWN / GETTY IMAGES
The NFL is a league of matchups, and no matchup is more crucial to wins and losses than the battle between a quarterback and the pass defense. That’s important for more than just the coaches calling X’s and O’s: Each week, the media, betting markets and fantasy players all make predictions about which teams (and which players) will best take advantage of their opponent’s weaknesses.
Because football is such a complex sport, quantitative analysts haven’t found a great way to capture all the relevant information for each offensive and defensive passing unit in a way that lets us make reasonable predictions about future outcomes. Perhaps the biggest flaw of most approaches to strength-of-schedule and matchup analyses, for example, is that they assume that because a defense has or has not allowed yards, completions and points generally, we should expect that performance to continue against a future opponent. The problem: That isn’t really true. Defenses have weaknesses, but to exploit them, an offense first needs to know they exist. Then it must possess the personnel needed to actually take advantage. In the NFL, neither of those circumstances is a given.
One approach to quantifying these matchups is to look at where on the field a quarterback tends to complete more passes than average and where a defense tends to allow more completions than average. We’ve published heat maps like these before on FiveThirtyEight — both for defenses and for quarterbacks. (We think they’re pretty cool.) If we use some fancy math,1 we can roll these heat maps into a single, convenient number that describes the similarity between where a QB’s passes are completed and where a defense allows passes in a given matchup, with higher numbers indicating a better matchup for the quarterback. These similarity scores then give us an idea of which QBs have faced a more difficult slate and who might have a challenge ahead in the upcoming week.
Like most quantitative measures, similarity scores are worthless without a decent sample size. To ensure we have enough pass attempts to make good comparisons, and to eliminate early-season variance, we chose to calculate our scores only for matchups that occurred from Week 5 onward. We then averaged the scores for each QB who played in at least three games over the seven-week period from Week 5 through Week 11 to see who’s had the toughest schedule, ranking them from the most challenging schedule to the most favorable.
| QUARTERBACK | TEAM | APPEARANCES | AVG. SIM SCORE |
| Tua Tagovailoa | Miami Dolphins | 3 | 63.1 |
| Russell Wilson | Seattle Seahawks | 6 | 64.7 |
| Matthew Stafford | Detroit Lions | 6 | 67.5 |
| Lamar Jackson | Baltimore Ravens | 6 | 69.4 |
| Kirk Cousins | Minnesota Vikings | 5 | 71.9 |
| Nick Mullens | San Francisco 49ers | 3 | 75.1 |
| Kyler Murray | Arizona Cardinals | 6 | 76.3 |
| Ryan Tannehill | Tennessee Titans | 7 | 76.5 |
| Justin Herbert | Los Angeles Chargers | 6 | 77.1 |
| Joe Flacco | New York Jets | 4 | 78.2 |
| Aaron Rodgers | Green Bay Packers | 6 | 79.8 |
| Alex Smith | Washington Football Team | 3 | 80.3 |
| Drew Lock | Denver Broncos | 6 | 80.3 |
| Tom Brady | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | 6 | 80.5 |
| Cam Newton | New England Patriots | 5 | 81.2 |
| Matt Ryan | Atlanta Falcons | 6 | 81.4 |
| Philip Rivers | Indianapolis Colts | 6 | 82.1 |
| Josh Allen | Buffalo Bills | 6 | 83.3 |
| Daniel Jones | New York Giants | 6 | 83.4 |
| Deshaun Watson | Houston Texans | 6 | 83.7 |
| Carson Wentz | Philadelphia Eagles | 6 | 83.8 |
| Jared Goff | Los Angeles Rams | 5 | 84.2 |
| Ben Roethlisberger | Pittsburgh Steelers | 7 | 85.5 |
| Baker Mayfield | Cleveland Browns | 6 | 87.4 |
| Patrick Mahomes | Kansas City Chiefs | 6 | 92 |
| Nick Foles | Chicago Bears | 6 | 92 |
| Derek Carr | Las Vegas Raiders | 6 | 92.9 |
(not the full article due to length)
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