Chicago Bears Quarterback Battles: Mitchell Trubisky versus Baker Mayfield
Trubisky vs. Mayfield: Accuracy
Completion Percentage
Mitchell Trubisky has been decent from an accuracy standpoint despite people’s opinions of him. He finds himself with a career completion percentage of 63.4 percent and over the last two seasons he completed 64.7 percent of his 950 attempts. Clearly Trubisky wins this category, but we need to look at a few more things before we crown him as more accurate.
Baker Mayfield completed 63.8 percent of his passes in his rookie year, but that dropped to 59.4 percent in his sophomore year. His career completion percentage is 61.5. However, just like in the analysis of Trubisky vs. Mayfield, we need to look beyond this number. We need to look at the depth of the targets and the depth of the quarterback’s completed passes. We also need to consider the talent around both players.
Let us look at the talent first. At first glance, the Browns’ offense has way more talent than the Chicago Bears. Allen Robinson is fantastic, but when you add in the second receiver of either Taylor Gabriel or Anthony Miller (you choose because it does not matter), the combination does not come close to the pairing of Odell Beckham, Jr. and Jarvis Landry. David Njoku had injury issues, but so did Trey Burton. No matter, Njoku is more talented than Burton.
When we look into some of the quarterback’s more advanced analytics, the Brown’s had a worse drop rate than the Chicago Bears pass catchers despite having more talent on paper. The drop rate for the Browns was 6.6 percent (2018) and 5.8 percent (2019). The Bears had an unbelievable drop rate of 2.6 percent in 2018 but came back to earth in 2019 with a 5.5 percent rate.
If we look at on-target throws though, Trubisky wins with 74.5 percent of his passes being on-target per pass attempt. This excludes any throwaways or spikes. Mayfield finds himself behind Trubisky again with only 70.6 percent of his passes being on target.
Now for the depth of targets and completions. In 2018, Trubisky averaged 8.8 air yards per intended pass attempt (IAY/PA) but only 6.3 air yards per completion (CAY/Cmp). Mayfield, on the other hand, averaged 9.3 air yards per intended pass attempt and averaged 6.5 air yards per completion. Both quarterback’s air yards dropped in 2019. Trubisky finished with 8.0 IAY/PA and 5.3 CAY/Cmp while Mayfield’s dropped to 8.5 and 6.3 respectfully.
Trubisky barely wins in this area too.