What the Stats Tell Us
Passing Stats
As far as the quarterback position is concerned, Aidan O’Connell taking the reins for the final 9 games accounted for his dominance of these categories. Important context to include is that AOC threw 61.5% of our team’s passes, while Garoppolo threw 30.3%, and Hoyer 7.5%.
Our first category, Passing Yards, saw O’Connell produce 60.5% of our team’s 3,666 yards accumulated over the season, which came to 2,218 yards. Garoppolo accounted for 32.9% of the Raiders’ yards last season, totaling 1,205 yards. Hoyer finished with 231 yards, which was 6.3% of the team’s passing production.
Finally, Jakobi Meyers completed 2 passes for 12 yards, which was 0.3% of our season yardage. It was surprising to me that technically, Garoppolo outperformed his playing time in terms of his production share, and both Hoyer and O’Connell underperformed compared to their pass attempts. I don’t think anyone would argue that Garoppolo is a better QB than O’Connell at this point, especially because he threw for more interceptions in half the snaps, but it is interesting to see that yardage wise,
Garoppolo had more passing yards per throw.
The next category, Passing Touchdowns, yielded very similar breakdowns to passing yards. O’Connell had 12 (60%) of the Raiders’ 20 passing TDs while Garoppolo had 7 (35%). If you’re wondering where that 20th touchdown is, once again, look no further than Jakobi Meyers. With such a small sample size of touchdowns, it is difficult to draw much from it, but the numbers here agree with the percentages of passes thrown.
Neither of these marks are tremendous, as Garoppolo had 7 in 7 games, and AOC contributed 12 in 9 games.
Overall, our homegrown talent outperformed our acquisitions here. 2023 4th-round Pick Aidan O’Connell had 60.5% of the passing yards and 60% of the touchdowns, and our “Patriot Way” free agent signings (Garoppolo, Hoyer, and Meyers) contributed the rest.