NFL

Daniel Jones plays better when you’re not there

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2 weeks ago

October 8, 2024

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Daniel Jones plays better when you’re not there

OK, I’m just kidding. Well, kidding on the square, maybe. Here’s a quiz for all of you:

Name Daniel Jones’ five best games as a Giant. Off the top of your head. No looking up anything before you decide.

When I did that exercise, this is what I came up with (I did look up the stats below after I’d chosen the games):

2019, first start, Tampa Bay: Jones brings the Giants back from a 28-10 halftime deficit in his first start, throwing for 336 yards and two TDs and rushing for two more in a 32-31 victory.
2019, the Chase Young Bowl: Jones throws for 352 yards and five TD passes, the final one in overtime, as the Giants beat Washington 41-35, are relegated to the No. 4 2020 draft pick, and have to “settle” for Andrew Thomas.
2021, at New Orleans: The 0-3 Giants go to New Orleans and defeat the Saints in overtime, 27-21, as Jones passes for 402 yards and two TDs.
2022, vs. Indianapolis: Jones rushes for 91 yards and two TDs and passes for 177 yards and two more TDs as the Giants clinch their first playoff appearance since the 2016 season and the fans serenade him with “MVP” chants.
2022, Wild Card playoff game at Minnesota: Jones throws for 302 yards and two TDs and rushes for 78 yards as the Giants eliminate the Vikings from the playoffs, the first time any QB has accumulated 300 passing yards + 70 rushing yards + two TDs in a playoff game.

Your list might not be the same as mine. The PFF grades might disagree. This is just based on gut feelings. But when I put it together, I noticed that four of my five choices were away games, and the one home game was one in which his rushing was more the story of the game than his passing.

Of course that’s a small sample, biased by my own impressions. Let’s think about the 2024 season, though. Jones looked awful at MetLife vs. Minnesota, and he technically played well at MetLife vs. Dallas but couldn’t get the Giants into the end zone and lost as a result. On the other hand, he played well and threw two TD passes in Washington and would have beaten the now unstoppable Jayden Daniels if the Giants had a kicker that week. He played well and threw two TDs passes in a win at Cleveland. He played probably his best game of the season this week and threw two more TDs passes in a win at Seattle.

My conclusion? Daniel Jones just doesn’t like playing in front of you season ticket holders.

Granted, that’s still a small sample. He’s had parts of six seasons to accumulate more statistically significant numbers. Fortunately for me, Pro Football Reference has done the work for me. One of the features their database includes is various splits of statistics – including home vs. away. Let’s look at some prominent NFL QBs to see how much home cooking affected their play. We’ll stick to QBs who played all or most of their career with the same team.

Drew Brees

No team wanted to play the Saints at the Superdome with their raucous crowd making deafening noise when Brees was their QB. The luckiest thing that ever happened to the Giants occurred in the 2011 playoffs, when the home 49ers beat the road Saints and the Giants got to travel to San Francisco rather than New Orleans the following week. We weren’t imagining the Superdome advantage. Here are Brees’ career home-road splits:

Better record, higher completion rate, much better TD-INT ratio, higher passer rating, more yards per attempt and per game at home relative to on the road.

Aaron Rodgers

Rodgers has only played a few games for the Jets so his career is mostly about the Lambeau Field advantage. It’s big:

Rodgers has been almost a .500 quarterback on the road but close to unbeatable at Lambeau. Higher completion rate, many fewer interceptions, higher passer rating, many fewer sacks, and more yards and air yards per attempt at home.

Ben Roethlisberger

Big Ben was more successful on the road than Rodgers, but still, better home record, many more TDs, many fewer interceptions, higher passer rating, many fewer sacks, and more yards per game at home.

Matt Ryan

Ryan actually had a losing career record on the road. At home he too had a higher completion rate, fewer interceptions and sacks, and a higher passer rating.

Dak Prescott

A pretty similar story to the other quarterbacks, with a much better record, completion rate, many more TDs, slightly fewer interceptions and sacks, and much higher passer rating at home.

It’s not perfect – Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, and Justin Herbert have performed roughly equally well at home and on the road overall during their careers. And Patrick Mahomes has actually played better on the road than at home:

Overall, though, most of the NFL’s great quarterbacks have played better at home than on the road. There’s a reason why teams seek the home field advantage in the playoffs.

It’s different for Daniel Jones, though:

His record has been almost equally bad home and away. At home, though, he has thrown more interceptions (29) than touchdowns (27), while on the road he has an excellent 41 touchdowns vs. 14 interceptions. His passer rating on the road (91.8) is a whopping 13 points higher than at home (78.7). He’s been sacked 15 times more at home than on the road in one fewer game. His yards per attempt, air yards per attempt, and yards per game are all better on the road.

How can we explain this? The sample size is big enough to make you wonder if Jones really does have a home field disadvantage. Maybe it’s the winds at MetLife. Maybe it’s the turf there. Maybe it’s the New Jersey traffic. Or maybe it’s this:

It’s no secret that since Jones signed his $40M per year contract, fans have resented it, both because they feel he inherently isn’t worth it, even though he is now only the 16th-highest paid QB, and because they feel it has limited what GM Joe Schoen can do in free agency. This past Sunday in Seattle only heightened that feeling, as the Giants saw old friends Leonard Williams and Julian Love on the other side of the line from Jones while Xavier McKinney was intercepting another pass for the Packers, not to mention the season-long weekly angst over Saquon Barkley being an Eagle.

Could it be that the fans are actually adversely affecting Jones’ play? I’m not his therapist so I couldn’t say. Maybe, though, we can find some indirect evidence in the numbers. Here are Jones’ NFL passer rating home and road splits for each season:

Some of the home vs. away differences, and a couple of the year to year differences, are considerably bigger than the standard deviations of the yearly values (though in three of the six years the sample size is considerably less than a full season). So we can’t really conclude anything; I wouldn’t want to submit this to a refereed scientific journal. For fun, though, there are some interesting hypotheses to raise about the season to season differences:

There has only been one season in which Jones played better at home than on the road as a passer: 2022. What was the vibe at MetLife that year? The Giants opened on the road with a stirring last minute comeback victory over Tennessee in Brian Daboll’s first game as head coach. The crowd grew more excited each week as the Giants stacked wins, none better than their victory over the Ravens, still Lamar Jackson’s only loss to an NFC team. By the time the Giants clinched a playoff berth at home with a lopsided win over the Colts, fans were chanting “MVP” as Jones came off the field late in the game.
In every other season but one, Jones has played worse at home than on the road in the passing game. The difference was small in 2021, but really large in 2019, 2023, and thus far in 2024. It’s hard to believe those huge differences are just statistical noise.
And then we have a unique year, 2020. In that season Jones had an almost identical home-away split in passer rating. What made 2020 different? No fans in the stands, of course, because of the pandemic. A perfect control experiment.

Of course no hypothesis has perfect data. Some “expatriate” Giants fans live in other cities (which seem like foreign countries to New Yorkers) and attend games when the Giants come to town. Some fans are craz…er, devoted enough to travel to other cities to see the team play. And quite often these past few years, fans of other teams have invaded MetLife, especially late in losing seasons, creating a home field disadvantage for the Giants. There’s also an inherent randomness in differences between home and away, and year to year, caused by differences in opponent strength, injuries. etc.

Is there really a home field disadvantage, though? Here one more test, this one of a great quarterback who played his entire career at MetLife – Eli Manning:

Eli had almost identical home vs. away splits, though his record was a little better at home. It’s a little more interesting than that, though. Here are his season-by-season breakdowns:

I’ve color-coded the years with a noticeable home-away difference. At first glance it looks pretty random. Upon closer inspection, though, the case can be made that it at least somewhat tracks Eli’s roller-coaster career arc:

Enthusiasm for the “chosen one” in 2004 as he takes over from Kurt Warner as starter in mid-season (home > away)
The bloom is off the rose as Eli doesn’t develop much but the defense takes the team to the playoffs in 2005-2007. In the first of those years they get shut out by Carolina in a home playoff game. The Giants get to the playoffs in 2007, though, despite Eli’s mostly mediocre play in the regular season, and the “road warriors” run the table to a Super Bowl title.
In 2008-2012, Eli is cherished by fans and generally plays better at home, or at least equally well home and away. In 2011 he does get one home playoff game, but after that it’s road warriors part II as the Giants once again upset their way to a ring. But the beginning of the end is in sight in 2012 even though fans may not realize it yet.
In 2013-2014 reality has set in that the Giants are no longer good, although in 2014 they add Odell Beckham Jr. and rekindle excitement.
They’re still bad in 2015 but for whatever reason Eli plays well at home again, and then in 2016, they are a much better home team as they make the playoffs again. That bodes poorly since they open the playoffs in Green Bay, where their boat sinks.
In 2017-2019, Eli is on the downswing of his career, the Giants are losing regularly, and the home field disadvantage appears again.

You can bet there will be excitement at Met Life next Sunday night when the Giants go up against Joe Burrow for the first time (the Giants last played Cincinnati in 2020, the week after Burrow sustained a season-ending knee injury). The Bengals are reeling at 1-4 and the Giants can insert themselves into the playoff picture with a win. You can imagine, though, what the mood will be like if the Giants fall flat at home once again. Does it affect Jones’ play?