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As you have probably read quite a few times on this website, touchdown numbers are very unpredictable and fantasy owners tend to overvalue players who had a lot of touchdowns and undervalue players who had few touchdowns. This is pretty simple since owners often look at fantasy points scored in the previous season without looking at specific statistics. The following article will show you how much of an advantage you can gain over your opponents simply by understanding this.

Starting with quarterbacks, there are various ways to look at this such as the average change for quarterbacks who had more than a certain number of touchdowns. However a much more interesting and meaningful statistic in my opinion is the number of touchdown passes for every pass attempt. This is a way to have much larger samples of data and include all quarterbacks who only played a few games in a season because of injuries or other reasons. The only restriction used is that a quarterback had to attempt at least 200 passes in two consecutive seasons to be included in this analysis. The league average is 0.043 touchdown passes for every pass attempt so I decided to look at various ranges situated around this average. The following chart shows the average number of touchdown passes per pass attempt for quarterbacks since 1983 and their average in the following season:

As you can see, the difference between the highest and lowest group goes from 0.038 (0.063 – 0.025) to 0.012 (0.049 – 0.037). To put this in more concrete terms, a quarterback who attempted 550 passes and had 35 touchdown passes (0.063 per attempt) would be expected to have only 27 in the next season. On the other hand, a quarterback who had only 14 touchdown passes would be expected to have 20 in the following season. In a league that awards four points per touchdown pass, that means the gap between two quarterbacks could close by 56 points. This means that a quarterback could move up by more than five spots on your list if you simply look at this ratio. I determined the following formula which best predicts a quarterback’s touchdown passes per pass attempt: 0.027 + 0.339 x previous year’s ratio.

These are statistics so you always have to be careful. For example, Peyton Manning has averaged 0.057 TDs per pass attempt over the last five years so you can probably expect him to remain somewhere around last year’s 0.058. However, his brother Eli was between 0.043 and 0.046 from 2005 to 2008 and suddenly went up to 0.053 last year. The formula says he would go back down to approximately 0.045 which is right around his average from the previous four years. Assuming he once again attempts 510 passes, we can expect him to pass for 4 fewer TDs than last year, a difference of 16 fantasy points.

To compare those numbers with those at other positions, we looked at total touchdowns per touches (receptions + carries) for running backs that had over 200 touches in two consecutive seasons:

As you can see the numbers for running backs are very similar to quarterbacks. Here is once again the formula that best predicts a running back’s total number of touchdowns based on his previous year’s touchdown totals: 0.018 + 0.364 x previous year’s ratio.