Vikings Tidbits

So this season, one of the few common complaints with Bradford has been his tendency to throw short of the sticks on 3rd down; particularly the pathetic 3-4 yard passes that we've often seen on 3rd & long.


Some have suggested that this is mostly due to our terrible o-line, while others have suggested that it's due to Bradford having a lack of guts, etc.... I wanted to get a clearer picture as well, so I compared Bradford's 3rd & long numbers from this season (terrible o-line) to those of his 2015 season (above-average o-line) to see if there was a discrepancy. Here are the numbers...


3rd & 8+ yards to go:

2016 Bradford: 12/67 (17.9%) (32nd) 2015 Bradford: 16/69 (23.2%) (t-28th)


As you can see, not much discrepancy. This suggests to me that the struggles in tough passing situations has more to do with Sammy than anything else. I would have liked to see his 3rd & long numbers with the Rams as well, but unfortunately, the site where I pulled these stats from (Washington Post) only has them going back to 2015, but I doubt those would have looked good either considering his overall numbers.

For those curious, Teddy was 19/62 (30.6%) at converting 3rd & long in 2015, which was ranked 16th.