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