Jameis Winston is a good quarterback. I don’t know why some folks won’t believe that (well, I have some thoughts on why), but it’s true. One bit of proof for that: he’s one of the most-efficient third-down quarterbacks around.
That’s according to Football Outsiders, who have a statistic called ALEC to measure this. Effectively, it looks at how often and by how much a quarterback threw at or beyond the sticks on third down. And Winston was near the top of the table: only Carson Wentz and Aaron Rodgers did better there.
Of course, throwing at or beyond the sticks isn’t necessarily a measure of often you’ll convert on third down. But, turns out Winston also excelled there: he converted 48.5% of his third-down opportunities, which ranks him third in the NFL. And he did so on short, medium, and long third-downs.
We can only imagine how much higher Winston would have ranked had he not spent several games playing through an injury.
In other news, the Bucs defense was eh....terrible in this metric. It allowed opposing quarterbacks to complete 49.7% of their third-down opportunities, which is 7.9 percentage-points higher than the next-worst defense. That is some amazingly terrible performance there, somehow-still-employed Mike Smith.