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Fantasy Theory: How does losing your QB affect the TE/RBs? The Colts without Luck

Unfortunately Andrew Luck retired. As I happen to own in various leagues both Mack and Ebron, I was curious: how does teams react when they lose their star QB. Do they rush more? Do they use their TEs more?

I looked at the data of 7 recent cases where a team lost their QB mid-season; I think these cases make it easier to compare the data as directly as possible. The cases I used are:
- Roethlisberger 2015
- Brady 2016 (suspension)
- Romo 2010
- Luck 2015
- Rodgers 2013 and 2017
- Watson 2017

For each of these seasons I compared, for both the period with the QB and without (or with the backup, of course):
- team rushing yards
- team TE yards
- team other passing yards
You can see the results in the following chart:



This chart shows me that:
- in all cases, the passing yards went down considerably, as you would expect.
- In some teams the rushing yards went up, in others the went a bit down. It seems to me that the teams with a strong rushing attack were able to rush more, whereas the teams without a stud RB suffered.
- TEs as a group generally lost some yardage - actually, quite a bit, because 20-40 yards is a lot for a TE. The teams with strong TEs (Witten in Dallas and Fleener in Indy) hardly lost anything.

If we consider that Mack is a good RB, but no superstud, and that Ebron/Doyle are in fact very strong TEs, then I predict that Mack will gain a little, while Ebron/Doyle should be ok.

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