6 Fantasy Football QBs Whose TD Rates Are Trending Up & Down

Jun 03, 2024

Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Fantasy football is a game of prediction. And here at 4for4, we’ve delved into the year-over-year predictability of important statistics to help set a rubric for your fantasy forecasts.

In nearly every circumstance, touchdowns are the most volatile metric to track. But, as we all know, they’re also the most crucial. In typical scoring, a quarterback can drive the entirety of the field, completing 10 passes for 98 yards along the way, and a single shovel pass for a touchdown from the goal line counts for more points than the prior 10 completions combined.

More Positional TD Rate Trenders: RB | WR | TE

But if touchdowns are so volatile and inconsistent, how will we ever find success predicting the year-to-year results? Through a snazzy little mathematical phenomenon called “regression to the mean.” Put simply, the further a player is from their statistical average in a given sample, the more likely they are to swing back towards the midpoint (or “mean”) in successive samples. The average NFL-wide touchdown rate for qualified QBs in 2023 was 4.3%, and the average over the last decade is 4.6%. Over that same span, the data clearly shows that the further from the mean a quarterback strayed in a given season, the more drastic the correction appeared the following season.

Year-Over-Year Touchdown Rate Among Qualified QBs (Last 10 Seasons)
Season One TD Rate	Season Two Avg. Diff.	% of QBs to Regress Towards Mean
Above 7%	-2.7%	100%
6-7%	-1.0%	80%
3-4%	+1.2%	82%
Below 3%	+1.3%	84%

It’s worth noting, many of these numbers are dampened by the year-over-year consistency of the best and worst quarterbacks in this metric. Aaron Rodgers (good) and Daniel Jones (bad) don’t regress as much as they should because, to a degree, they “are who they are” on the touchdown front. Even more compelling stories can be found in “one-off” outlier seasons. When Cam Newton hit an uncharacteristically high 7.1% touchdown rate in 2015, the nosedive to 3.7% in 2016 felt that much worse. When Tom Brady posted an unGOATly 3.9% rate in 2019, his bounce-back to 6.6% with the Buccaneers appeared even more drastic.

So with all this in mind, here are some quarterbacks we can predict for a noteworthy shift in touchdown production in the 2024 season.