Saving Matt Ryan

An interesting conversation occurred in one of my leagues centered around the long-term value of Matt Ryan. The talk centered around debate on whether each owner would rather have Matt Ryan or Marcus Mariota, and many came down on the Mariota side which surprised me to a degree. The surprise wasn’t so much in that owners preferred the younger Mariota, it was the overwhelming numbers in favor of the third-year quarterback. It felt as if Matt Ryan was being dismissed as over the hill or too old. The conversation made me begin to think if Matt Ryan is being overlooked from a dynasty perspective.

Our own DLF rankings list Matt Ryan as the ninth highest rated quarterback, Mariota is ranked fifth and the top quarterback is Aaron Rodgers. Perhaps the two of the greatest quarterbacks of our era, Tom Brady and Drew Brees, were ranked tenth and 13th, respectively. Brees is currently 38 years old while Brady is 40 years old. While I don’t disagree with the placement of either of these players, it felt, and continues to feel, odd that Matt Ryan, who is only 32 years old, would be grouped closer to these two players than to a contemporary more his age, like Aaron Rodgers, who is 33 years old. Could it be the number of times Rodgers has been to the Super Bowl makes him appear more valuable? Am I simply overvaluing him? Perhaps, could it really be, the Matt Ryan is, in fact, unfairly undervalued in dynasty circles?

The first thing I had to do is find some baselines, or a yardstick upon which to compare Ryan to other quarterbacks. I decided to use the three quarterbacks that I felt he was unfairly situated between, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady and Drew Brees. While I wish I could have included Marcus Mariota, he simply doesn’t have enough seasons under his belt to provide a fair comparison. These three quarterbacks are viewed as the crème de la crème of the NFL. They are the elite signal callers that have won countless fantasy owners their league championships. Between them they have been named to 28 Pro Bowls, they’ve won seven Super Bowls and have been named NFL MVP four times. If these three quarterbacks aren’t a good yardstick upon which to compare one’s greatness then I don’t know who else to choose.

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Once I settled on those three players I wanted to obtain the statistics for the first nine years of full NFL regular season play for each player. The nine comes from Matt Ryan’s career length as a starting quarterback. I omitted years in which each player wasn’t a starter for his team (Aaron Rodgers 2005-2007) and seasons where a player was hurt quite early in the season (Tom Brady 2008). This left the following spans for each player, Matt Ryan 2008-2016, Drew Brees 2002-2010, Tom Brady 2001-2007 and 2009-2010 and Aaron Rodgers 2008-2016. This produced the following averages:

The captured statistics tell the story of a group of players who are very closely matched. Each has the lead in certain areas, but overall no single player can be considered out of his league in this comparison. Matt Ryan is the clear leader in terms of completions per year, outpacing the next closest player by 20 completions. He also leads in passing yards by about 130 yards. Aaron Rodgers makes a clear case to be the top-rated dynasty quarterback with an average of nearly 33 touchdowns a year, while minimizing his interceptions to just eight per season. However, Rodgers is sacked at roughly the same percentage as he throws touchdowns, a significant drag in leagues that take away points for sacks. Drew Brees has been a master at avoiding sacks, nearly halving the percentage of Rodgers. In terms of pure efficiency and consistency, Brady comes out on top, but only marginally ahead of the focal point of this article, Matt Ryan.

Ryan falls neatly between Drew Brees and Tom Brady in nearly every measurable area, completion percentage, touchdowns, interceptions, yards per completion and sack percentage. It is interesting to note that both Brees and Brady, not to mention Rodgers, were able to win a Super Bowl within the nine-year window that I used. Ryan narrowly missed that benchmark, losing to Brady’s Patriots in perhaps the most incredible Super Bowl to date. However, the point of this article is to highlight the fact that Ryan’s career is on an incredibly similar trajectory to these three greats. It could even be argued that Ryan has done more with less than each of the three quarterbacks that I’ve compared him to. Yes, Ryan has Julio Jones and has had stretches with Roddy White and Tony Gonzalez, but those weapons, while impressive, pale in terms of the sheer talent at the disposal of Brees, Brady or Rodgers. The very fact that Ryan is able to lead the competition in terms of completions and passing yards speaks volumes to the talent he possesses.

What is also important to dynasty owners to realize is that the careers of elite quarterbacks have significantly lengthening, Brady is 40 years old, Brees isn’t far behind at 38 and Peyton Manning was 39 when he retired. Brady has told Patriots owner Robert Kraft that he wants to play until he is 45 or 46 while Brees claims he isn’t retiring “for a while”. These statements are important as it appears as if top quarterbacks are now much more comfortable playing into their mid-40s, and are productive in doing so.

Why is this important to Ryan?

There’s an easy answer. If Ryan follows a similar career trajectory then it is very easy to see him, and Aaron Rodgers for that matter, playing at least another decade! If that trajectory holds true, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, Ryan can expect similar statistical growth rates. Brees’ completion rate has grown an average of roughly four percent, year over year. Brady’s has grown at a three percent clip. Brees and Brady’s passing yardage have grown at five and four percent, respectively, their passing touchdowns have grown by 11% and 13%, once again respectively.

In the first nine years of Drew Brees’ career (again, the current length of Matt Ryan’s career), he averaged 347.8 completions per season, in the years since, he has averaged 448.5, a nearly 100 completions increase! Similarly, he has grown from 3893.9 passing yards to 5140.8 passing yards, a 1246.9 yards increase, and from 26 touchdowns to 38.3, a 12.3 touchdown increase.

Tom Brady has grown after his first nine seasons as well, growing from an average of 332 completions per season in his first nine years to 374.7 in the years following that, a 42.7 completion growth. Brady’s passing yards grew by 621.7 yards, from 3851.3 to 4473, and his touchdowns have increased by 3.5 from 29 to 32.5.

In both instances, Brees and Brady saw the aforementioned levels of growth over a six-year period following those initial nine seasons (Brees didn’t play his first season in 2001, Brady didn’t his first season in 2000 and was injured for nearly all of the 2008 season).

If we project how Matt Ryan will look six years from the 2016 season (the 2022 season) using the growth rates of each of the two quarterbacks, we get the following projections:

I feel the Brees trajectory may be a bit a nice ceiling, while the Brady trajectory makes for a very solid and improving floor for Ryan. No player has ever passed for more than 5,477 yards in a single season (Peyton Manning), in Ryan’s ceiling he would fall just short of that record but would claim the third most passing yards in a single season, behinf Manning and Brees himself. Surpassing 5,000 yards is something both Brees and Brady have done, five and one times respectively, but is something which Ryan has fallen just short of (4,944 in 2016). His completions hold firm above 400 per season, a mark Ryan himself has eclipsed four times in his career already. Meanwhile his touchdowns never fall below 30 in a season, a mark which would consistently put him in the all-time top 100 record list for passing touchdowns in a season.

In every scenario Ryan’s value as a QB1 is maintained or is projected as growing. Claims that he is getting older ignore the fact that Ryan is significantly younger than two of the top quarterbacks in the league, quarterbacks who, even now, show no signs of slowing down. It also ignores the amount of growth that younger options would need to attain even to reach the levels Ryan is currently at, to say nothing of the growth he will continue to see in his game. It is entirely possible that Ryan could battle with Aaron Rodgers as the premiere quarterback in the league when Brees and Brady finally decide to retire, in around five years. Even then, both quarterbacks will still only be roughly the age that Drew Brees is currently, ignoring the additional years he is sure to play. That is a decade’s worth of elite production!

Matt Ryan remains an incredibly undervalued asset, even after posting the best statistical season in his career and falling short of a Super Bowl title by a razor’s edge. Take advantage of his current price tag as dynasty owners are unlikely to see it this low, or find such a great deal at the quarterback position, for a very long time.

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