A Tale of Two Quarterbacks: 3rd Down Efficiency

Through six games this season, the Hokie starting quarterbacks are showing a significant number of trends.

Overall conversion rates are very different with Willis converting only 48.1% of his 52 attempts and Hooker completing 61.1% of his 36. The big difference lies in distance. Willis averages a distance of 7.31 yards to gain while Hooker has 6.06. For the sake of consistency, I labelled anything shorter than 4 yards as short, 4-7 yards as medium, 8-10 as long, and 11+ as very long.

Willis to this point has been considered more of the deeper play threat, and it does seem to hold true. Willis is 10 of 23 (43.4%) on 3rd downs of 8 yards or longer distance, while Hooker has gone 4 out of 12 (33.3%).

Hooker has demonstrated a stunning advantage on the mid to short range 3rd down distances, converting 10 of 13 short attempts (77%), and 8 of 11 (72.7%) at medium distances, leaps and bounds above Willis' 53% on 17 attempts and 50% on 12 attempts, respectively, so any arguments that if the distances were shorter, Willis' numbers would look better.

With Hooker in the backfield, with his average distance, he's converting 3 out of every 4 attempts, compared to 52% for Willis. Even at 10 yards and in, Hooker is almost converting 2 out of every 3 attempts, whereas Willis converts at a slightly under 50% clip.

All this data reveals perhaps the biggest trend. Hooker having almost the same number of short and medium distance third downs through less than half the total attempts means that the Hokies are getting much better yardage on first and second downs. The 1.25 yard per attempt disparity means the Hokies have gained an additional 45 total yards before taking a third down snap than with Willis.