The Sickos Committee Presents - DETMER 2.0!!! (With a tribute to Kyle Vantrease).

One thing the Sickos Committee has always struggled to do is to find a way to quantify the term “Sickos” as it applies to college football. Everyone has their own definition - scores, types of plays, weather, weird outcomes, etc.. We understand this is college football - it’s all about the endless debates, and it has been since the sport started in the 1800s. Our fans get into huge discussions about what games are more “Sicko” than others. We’ve even upset fans of certain teams when we don’t rank their game as the Sickos Game of the Week. It’s incredibly fascinating and hilarious at the same time. 

The Sickos Committee has been on a mission to quantify the un-quantifiable and define Sickos college football. Since the beginning of the 2021 season, we’ve brainstormed ways to measure players’ performances in various aspects of the game to see if we could dial on what we believe makes a true Sicko All Star. We’re proud to announce that we’ve made some progress towards this - at least in one aspect.

Like any fellow “Sicko”, I loved the great Cole McDonald (RIP) during his run at Hawaii. He always seemed he was as likely to throw a touchdown as a pick-6, and no lead for either team was safe. It’s critical to note that McDonald was not a bad quarterback, but he loved to go out there and just let the ball rip. He threw for more than 3800 yards and 33 touchdowns in both his junior and senior years, leading the Rainbow Warriors to 8-6 and 10-5 records, respectively. What made him so thrilling to watch, however, was the aforementioned tendency to go big or go home, often on consecutive plays. He averaged a pick per game in his incredible senior year, with his masterpiece being in Week 0, where he threw for 378 yards, 4 TDs and 4 picks in a 45-38 victory over Arizona. He was even benched for his teammate Chevan Cordeiro (now at San Jose State), who threw the game-winning touchdown. 

My growing obsession with performances of this style — huge yardage, lots of points, and lots of picks — ultimately led me back to the master of a passing game that explodes in all directions, the 1990 Heisman winner Ty Detmer. The BYU legend threw for 5,188 yards, 41 TDs and 28 interceptions in his successful campaign to be named most outstanding player in college football. And it is in his name that we present DETMER, a simple analytic for determining how entertaining a QB will be to watch, either good or bad. It is, of course, an acronym.

We present to you DETMER:

Downfield — Lots of yards!!

Eventful — TDs! Picks! 

Throwing — They don’t call it roughing the scrambler.

Metric — This makes us sound smarter.

Encouraging — We’re optimists.

Rippin’ it — Just sling that ball around out there.

(PLEASE KEEP IN MIND, WE AREN’T TALKING ABOUT RUSHING YARDS OR SCRAMBLING AROUND HERE)

The Changes for the 2023 Season for DETMER 2.0 - An ever evolving metric.

Last year, we introduced the first of what we plan as a suite of Sickolytics — statistical analyses that quantify an appreciation for good football outside the bounds of that a playoff-centric approach can ever recognize. DETMER — Downfield Efficiency Throwing Metric Encouraging Rippin’ it — seeks to identify the most highlight-generating quarterback in the sport. Basically, if you put up a ton of yards, and a ton of TDs, and a ton of picks, you get a high score, because you’re making extremely watchable football for fans of your team and of your opponents.

Or, at least, that’s what was supposed to happen. In practice, the formula we created last year had a pretty notable flaw, one that our followers, all of whom are smarter than us, noticed almost immediately: If a QB had exactly the same number of TDs and interceptions, they got a huge score boost that would boost them beyond potentially more deserving candidates. Notably, our 2022 DETMER champ, FIU’s Grayson James, put up just 1,969 passing yards, 11 TDs and 11 picks for a total of 9.85 in the original DETMER formula. 

Here we’re the results from the 2022 season.

While James was entertaining, it’s obvious that he was putting up nowhere near as much entertainment as Georgia Southern’s Kyle Vantrease, who threw for 4,243 yards, 27 TDs, and 16 picks but managed only a 2.92. He might not have achieved the beauty of perfectly matching his TDs and picks, but he more than doubled James in yardage and TDs, with almost 50% more picks. Vantrease was the QB of 2022 closest to the namesake of our metric.

This was a Sickos Committee dilemma. James was our 2022 champ, deservedly, but we needed a fix that would accomplish one singular goal: game the numbers so that Kyle Vantrease would win.

Our followers had a simple fix that would have required us to change one constant in the original formula, but that was too simple and straight-forward for those of us in the Sickolytics department. We exist to generate needlessly complex ways to quantify things that are obvious to the naked eye, not to provide common sense corrections to simple errors of arithmetic.

This required us to go back to first principles: what, exactly, are we trying to represent through DETMER? After an extensive amount of scribbling in a notebook, the following principles emerged:

1. Reward big passing numbers; if you aren’t chucking it around out there, this isn’t for you.

2. Recognize players who are extraordinary in multiple categories of passing, some of which are regarded as bad.

3. Make sure it helps Kyle Vantrease win.

With that in mind, we embarked on an exploration of performance above median. Basically, if you’re way above average at multiple things (but especially picks and TDs), you’re our kind of QB. We entered this without a strong sense of which statistical categories to include. For example, we planned to include yards per attempt until we realized that Vantrease’s YPA is basically average for a college QB. (As explained by the graphic below)

Without further ado, we give you the formula for DETMER 2.0, our probably flawed in a new way “Sickolytic” for QB play in the 2023 college football season:

(Attempts per game/median + Completions per game/median + Yards per game/median)/3 * (TDs per game/median + Ints per game/median)

By anchoring all scores to what other QBs were doing, we can ensure that we’re rewarding the players who are simply trying to do way too much. 

Let’s break it down:Attempts: For 2022, the 67th-most prolific passer in college football threw the ball 32 times per game. By contrast, our hero Kyle Vantrease averaged 46.5 attempts in 2022, and our inspiration Ty Detmer 46.8 in his Heisman season. 2022 DETMER champ Grayson James? Only 29.75 per game.

Completions: For 2022, median pass completions per game was 19. Vantrease averaged 28.5, 1990 Ty Detmer 30, and Grayson James just 17.4.

Yards: Median pass yards per game in FBS in 2022 was 228. Kyle put up 327 per game, Ty 432, and Grayson just 163.9.

TDs: FBS median was 17 passing TDs. Kyle had 27, Ty had 41, Grayson just 11.

INTs: FBS median was 5 interceptions. Kyle had 16, Ty had 28, and Grayson had 11. This is the only category in which Grayson was even in the conversation as being the Most QB of 2022.

With this revision, we are now confident our calculations will provide us the one true most QB of 2023. We wish it could be Kyle Vantrease, but he’s finally done with college football after six seasons.

Through Week 2, here are our current DETMER leaders. 

Under the old system, this is what our list would have looked like:

It’s honestly a little heartening that chaos mage Arizona QB Jayden de Laura would be No. 1 in both versions, but the list of performances after him, we feel, makes the change to DETMER 2.0 readily apparent. Tyler Shough and Brayden Schager have been reliably doing everything QBs, both good and bad, and they deserve more credit than DETMER 1 gave them. Moreover, it’s exciting to see unquestionably great QB Michael Penix on here. He doesn’t throw many picks, but dude is just out there flinging the ball a ton, and he’s way above median on everything except picks, which means he can just squeak in at fourth despite taking care of the ball. 

We don’t know how things will wind up from here, but we’re excited to find out. Stay tuned for some weekly updates throughout the season!

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