I originally set out to see how the rookie QBs this year compare to other QBs making their debut pair of games. Everyone likes to talk about flukes the first game, and then jump on bandwagons after the second game because "He's had back to back blah blah blah". Anyway I compiled all the stats from the first 2 starts of every starting QBs NFL career and used this to figure out who to add (Starting QBs). I included Winston/Fitzpatrick Wentz/Foles and Gabbert/Mariota, because of the assumption that they will return from suspension/injury to start.

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I came up with this (sorted by QB rating):

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FIRST 2 STARTS

Some interesting and not so interesting notes:

• Rams have had the most current active starters (3) play their first two games with them.
• The most common start season is 2012 with 5 players (Kirk Cousins, Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, Ryan Tannehill, and Nick Foles)
• This year's rookies have performed about average relative to the rest.
• Context on Mahomes: had one start last year. Context on Josh Allen: only has 1 start in his career, but data from his game 1 non-start was included.
• The key takeaway appears to be that no matter how bad a QB looks in their first two starts, they can always come back and have a successful career as show by the bottom of the list.

Now let's look at most recent 2 starts for these players:

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MOST RECENT 2 STARTS

More notes:

• Fitzpatrick after starting his career with 2 of the worst possible games, has now had 2 of the best possible games to start this year.
• 4 game sample is way too small to make any assumptions on improvement or regression.
• Surprisingly similar to the first two starts for a number of players, but obviously too small a sample to say anything about it.

On average the change between their first two and last two looks like this:

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Averages for all players first and last 2 starts

And in totaling:

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Totaling for all players first and last 2 starts

Lessons:

• Don't take a 2 game stretch as the determining factor on whether or not a QB will have a good career. Tom Brady had a bottom half opening pair, and we see how that turned out; whereas guys who might be considered fringe starters are in the top half of opening pair, you just don't know.
• On average QBs struggled in their first two starts, unsurprisingly.
• The totals of wins and losses in opening 2 starts was a combined 30W & 40L for a 43% win rate. Not great, but not as bad as I expected.

Hopefully you found this interesting, I enjoy these types of projects so feel free to comment anything you might like me to investigate going forward and I'll probably look into it out of curiosity.

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