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Mullins performance

Well Mullins did pretty well in an emergency start this week. Probably a win if we’d run Chubb to the left on third and 3 instead of to the right? Don’t know what van Pelt was thinking?


I was actually quite confident that Mullins would do well as he had quite a few career starts for a third string QB. It reminded me of all the times that the Browns had to start backups including guys right off of the street. Who can forget Spergon Wynn, Bruce Gradkowski, Ken Dorsey, Austin Davis, Connor Shaw, Kevin Hogan and Seneca Wallace?


So I wondered how Mullens stacked up against the previous 31 starting QBs. I wasn’t interested enough to do a lot of statistical analysis so I decided to just use the Approximate Value (AV) number that I used in a previous post. Mullens had a humble record of 12 career AV points in 16 career starts before Monday’s game.


Surprisingly Mullens ranked 18th in career AV of the 32 QBs that have started for the Browns since the re-birth. He is just behind Wallace, Holcomb, Detmer, Weeden & McCoy. I don’t have AV values for 2021 so Mayfield, Keenum, McCoy and Mullins will accrue additional AV points. Interesting that after only 3 seasons Mayfield is 9th in career AV for QBs that have started for the Browns. He will probably be 5th or 6th after this season. If he is the starter in 2022 and 2023 he will probably be second to Garcia in career AV for QBs that have been Browns’ starters.


In the sad history of the reborn Browns the two single best seasons of AV for a Browns’ starting QB were Anderson (2007) and Mayfield (2020) with 14 points. Mayfield’s 2019 and 2018 seasons are the third and fourth best single seasons! Tim Couch holds the next three best seasons. A very sad record of poor QB play.


Mullins’ career AV per game started was .75. Mayfield after 3 seasons has averaged .78 AV/GS. No other past Browns starting QB has been much more than .5 AV/GS while starting for the Browns. For context Big Ben’s career (through 2020) was .86 AV/GS, Favre was .87 AV/GS, Matty Ice was .94 AV/GS and Brees ended his career with .96 AV/GS. Brady, Manning and Rodgers have all averaged more than 1 AV/GS through their careers.


So effectively on a per game projection Mullins is the second best QB in recent Browns history? I would guess that his performance will result in Keenum and his $6M+ cap hit for 2022 will be released in the off season.


I need to research what goes into calculating the AV. It is interesting that to score 1 AV/GS a QB would have to only score 17 for a season. Since Mayfield got 14 in 16 games last season he wasn’t far off of a Brady type score. I thought that he played well but nothing like a Brady season. Only 2 additional points in 2020 would have been a season with 1 AV/GS. I’d like to know what performance items would have yielded 2 AV points.

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