Rams quarterback Nick Foles had a bad season last year, which is why he went from being anointed as the franchise quarterback to getting benched for Case Keenum. But Foles’ season was even worse than his stats suggest.
Foles completed 190 of 337 passes for 2,052 yards, a completion rate of 56.4 percent and an average of 6.1 yards per pass. Those numbers aren’t particularly good on their own, but those bad stats are dwarfed by another stat that shows just how terrible Foles really was: Failed completions.
As explained by Scott Kacsmar of FootballOutsiders.com, failed completions are complete passes that fail to gain 45 percent of needed yards on first down, 60 percent on second down or 100 percent on third or fourth down. An eight-yard completion on third-and-10, for instance, would pad a quarterback’s conventional stats, but it would be counted as a failed completion.
And Foles has elevated failed completions to an art form: A whopping 41.1 percent of Foles’ completions were failed completions. That’s by far the worst rate in the NFL this season, and it’s the worst rate in the NFL since at least 1989, which is as far back as Football Outsiders’ stats go.
In other words, for as bad as Foles’ stats look, he actually padded his stats with a lot of four-yard completions on second-and-10, or nine-yard completions on third-and-12. Foles had an ugly 69.0 passer rating in 2015, but he was even worse than his stats suggest.
