In the wake of quarterback Ryan Tannehill’s departure from the Miami Dolphins, a lot of fans and media are still working through processing Ryan’s impact on the franchise and where the team needs to go from here.
The Sun Sentinel’s Omar Kelly knows one place where Tannehill’s heir needs to be better: third downs.
When asked what we’d learned from the Ryan Tannehill era in Miami, Kelly started by acknowledging that in most areas, Ryan was admirable and, at least to some degree, effective. But the NFL’s “money” down was Tannehill’s worst.
“When it came to third downs, throughout his career…he was one of the NFL’s worst third down quarterbacks. His entire career. To me, right now, that’s the number one metric that I will ever evaluate for the rest of my life for how quarterbacks perform.”
Kelly isn’t wrong, either. Tannehill’s career passer rating on third down is 74.9 with a completion percentage of 57.4. Those numbers pale in comparison to his early down splits. It gets even uglier when expanding the numbers to look at third and 10+: Tannehill’s passer rating dips to 52.2.
Tannehill never threw a touchdown on third and 10+ to go in 267 pass attempts. Shoot, the team converted 37 first downs on Tannehill’s 267 pass attempts in those conditions (13.8%).
For some perspective, here are some other third and 10+ conversion rates of prominent quarterbacks around the league:
Ben Roethlisberger: 31.8%
Tom Brady: 27.0%
Drew Brees: 29.4%
Matt Ryan: 28.6%
Kelly is right. The Dolphins have many areas they hope to improve. But being better on third downs is paramount to them taking the next step as an offense and a team in general.
