180: The 10 MOST CLUTCH Quarterbacks in NFL History (Backed by Data Science)

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everyone thinks

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they know who the most clutch quarterback in NFL

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history is Tom Brady with his Super Bowl comebacks

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Josh Allen in the playoffs

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or Aaron Rodgers with impossible throws

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everyone has opinions but what does the data say

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well I'm a data scientist

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so I fed Python every play from the last 25 years

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over 1 million plays every pressure moment

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every game winning drive and then

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I let math and statistics decide

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who really performs the most

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when it matters the most and the most statistically

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clutch quarterback in NFL history is

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someone you definitely weren't expecting

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now analyzing

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patterns across 1 million football plays is not easy

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even with Python so I use today's sponsor

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Sphinx

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to help me process this massive dataset in Python

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to identify these statistical patterns that reveal

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who is the most clutch quarterback of all time

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more on Sphinx in a bit but before I reveal

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the most clutch quarterback of all time

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which I promise I will get to very soon

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let's start a timer for 30 seconds

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we have a huge problem what even is clutch

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it's pretty hard to define

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but we know it happens during crunch time right

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and that we can basically say

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is when the game is almost over and the score is close

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for now we'll say that

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clutch time is when the score is within one touchdown

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so that's like Seven Points

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and it's in the last eighth of the game

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or the last 7:30 of the fourth quarter

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or it's in overtime but even then

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how do we quantify clutch

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like numerically well

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we'll use two different definitions today

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No. 1 TV clutch and No. 2

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advanced analytics clutch

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let's go ahead and start with TV clutch

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coming in at No. 10 on TV Clutch is Josh Freeman

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surprisingly now

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I know he didn't have an incredible career

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but he definitely has some highlight moments

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now this one kind of surprised me

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I did not see Josh Freeman being on this list

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but he did have one really good season

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so maybe that's playing a big factor

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No.9 is the controversial Aaron Rodgers

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and this shouldn't be a huge surprise

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as Aaron has had a ton of clutch plays

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throughout his entire career

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specifically with the Green Bay Packers

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No.8 is Tony Romo yes

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that is the now lead NFL analyst for CBS

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who makes some very strange noises sometimes

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but he had some very clutch plays for the Cowboys

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back in the day coming in at No. 7 is Rich Gannon

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I'm going to be honest I had to look him up

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he's a little bit before my time

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but it looks like he had a little bit of a late

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career resurgence with the Oakland Raiders

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and ultimately

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won the league MVP and took them to the Super Bowl

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No.6 is disappointingly Deshaun Watson

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not much to say here so moving on to No. 5

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and it's the Greatest Show on Turf

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Mr Kurt Warner fantastic story of going undrafted

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to almost getting kicked out of the NFL

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two league MVP and Super Bowl champion

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No.4 is Jake Delhomme his season in 2,003

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LED the Carolina Panthers to the Super Bowl

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earning the team the nickname the Cardiac Cats

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due to the numerous

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game winning drives in the fourth quarter

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or overtime and those are all really things to Delhomme

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he set a franchise record

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with seven game winning drives

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in that 2003 season alone

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No. 3 is Andrew Luck and man

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I totally get why he retired early

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like I I make sense

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but I would have loved to see the rest of his career

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because he was absolutely incredible

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and was a very clutch coming in at No. 2

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it should really surprise no one

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it's Patrick Mahomes don't need to say much here

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he is very clutch

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he's been on an incredible run the last eight years

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leading to three Super Bowl wins

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in five Super Bowl appearances

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the only surprise here is he wasn't No. 1

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and lastly at No. 1

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the most clutch quarterback via TV is Tom Tua

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Tonga Vaiaoloa yes

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somehow Tua is the most clutch quarterback of all time

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it's not Tom Brady question Mark

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I don't get it if you know much about the NFL

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you'll know that this result

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it's kind of crazy

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Tua isn't exactly known as a clutch quarterback

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and honestly kind of has a reputation of being

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maybe the opposite of clutch

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so with that

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let's talk about how he came up with his top 10

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and the analytics that LED us to this point

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so what is TV clutch well

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it's a term that our AI data science co pilot

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Sphinx created for us

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it combines things that we can easily see on TV

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in terms of clutchness touchdowns

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interceptions completion percentages

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those types of things

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as well as how often they were in clutch situations

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so let's rewind for a second here

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and I'll tell you how we got this top 10

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and how you can replicate this exact same analysis

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on your own even if you're not a programmer

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you're not very technical at all

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and you don't know Python

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so I start out by using NFL versus

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Python package called NFL Data

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Pie to download the last 25 years of play by play data

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but instead of taking hours to understand how this API

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works and write all the code myself

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I just asked Sphinx to get the data for me

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in plain English

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Sphinx then went and read all of the API docs

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to understand how the API works

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and automatically wrote the code

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for me to get all that play by play data

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now could I have done that all on my own

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absolutely it just would have taken me a lot of time

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and I'm trying to pump out

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really high quality episodes

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for you guys

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so it was really nice to have a little bit of a co

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pilot to write this code for me

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it ended up retrieving the last 25 seasons

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which averages to around 45,000 plays per season

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which is a total of 1.18 million rows of data

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and it has 300 columns that let us know who is playing

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where the ball is what the result of the play and a lot

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lot more pretty sweet right

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awesome dataset well

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of course we actually aren't interested

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in all 1.18 million plays

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only the plays that fit the clutch criteria

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that we stated earlier

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which is basically the last 1/8 of a one score game

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and so all I needed to do was tell Sphinx that

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that's what I'm interested in doing

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and it will create this filter for me on my data

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so you notice I just spell it out in plain English

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and tell exactly what I want

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and the cool part is

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it's actually smart enough to find the right column

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names to do this filter

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as well as do things like check for missing data

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without me explicitly telling it to do so

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and finally it writes the code to do the filter

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and now we have a Python data frame

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with only the plays that fall into our clutch category

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next

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we want to analyze the quarterback part of our data

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because this is play by play data

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which has data about

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everyone and everything that's going on

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but we're really only interested

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in clutch quarterback performance

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and you'll see in the data

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that we definitely

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have a lot of quarterback names going on

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as well as whether it was a completed pass

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whether it was a touchdown

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or whether was an interception

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yards completed all that good stuff

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now this is where we can ask our co pilot

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Sphinx to analyze all the existing plays

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and using only touchdowns

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interceptions completion percentage

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yards and clutch attempts

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we can tell it to create a TV Clutch Factor score

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and ask it to rank by the most clutch quarterbacks

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based upon that score now Sphinx

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our copilot gets to work

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and first it does the aggregation

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for all of the quarterback pass plays

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and calculates all of the completions and touchdowns

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interceptions and the yards gained

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as a reminder our data was the play by play data

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not quarterback clutch season stats

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so this step is absolutely necessary

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to kind of clean the data

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aggregate it

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manipulate it in a way that makes it usable for us

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then this code calculates what's called a Z score

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for each one of those different metrics

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if you're unfamiliar with the Z score

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it's basically a measure

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of how many standard deviations

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a specific data point is

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away from the mean of that data set

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indicating its position within a distribution

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which is basically in layman's terms

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how much better or worse is a quarterback

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from the average quarterback

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based on these stats basically

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this is what you need to know

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a Z score of 0 means you're very average quarterback

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a Z score of 1 means you're above average

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and a Z score of negative 1 means you're below average

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for that particular stat

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our python code then creates a formula

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where the touchdown Z scores

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the yard Z scores

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and the completion percentage scores are all good

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and interceptions the scores are bad

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and out of the other end of this formula

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comes our top 10 list from earlier

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with the most clutch quarterbacks

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where Tua Tonga by Lowa

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somehow is the most clutch quarterback of all time

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now if this is your first time seeing Sphinx

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hopefully you realize how cool it is

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and how useful it can be

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it's basically a co pilot for anyone working with data

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it currently ships as a VS code extension

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that interfaces with Jupiter

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and other compatible notebooks

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it runs in your environments alongside you

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which first makes it safe and second

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makes it easy to use

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and it can access data through Python APIs

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or it even has MCP

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capabilities with things like snowflake

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or Databricks or Big Query or Salesforce

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whatever you're using

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and you can learn more about Sphinx

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and get started for free

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using the link in the description down below

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now once again if you know anything about football

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you'd really question how on earth

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can the current quarterback of the Miami Dolphins

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Tua Tonga Vealua

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be the most clutch quarterback of all time

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and is it like

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possible that Tony Romo can even be in the top 10

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and the answer to that is I don't know

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it's hard to know but we only really use basic stats

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like touchdowns and completions and interceptions

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earlier and that is a little bit basic

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the good news is that the NFL stat heads

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all of these NFL data analysts and data scientists

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and all these smart people

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have created other stats that are able to capture

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how unique and how clutch a play is

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and one of the things they created is called the win

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probability added or WPA for short

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and it's a bit hard to understand

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and it would be an entirely

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separate video to explain it in full

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but basically every play in a football game changes

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the chance that a team wins

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or loses but specifically wins

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WPA measures how much that play changes your odds

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so for example in 2024 the Washington Commanders

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were losing to the Chicago Bears

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15 to 12

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the commanders had the ball with two seconds left

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on their own 48 yard line

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they basically had a current chance of winning of 17%

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Jaden Daniels is playing quarterback and as you can see

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he drops back he's has to throw this

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now basically they have to score a touchdown

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so he has to throw it 60 yards 17% chance of winning

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they score a touchdown

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they win and you can kind of see that

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he has to run away from all these guys

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trying to sack him goes to the other side of the field

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he's now look at this

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he's at his 30 yard line he has to throw it 70 yards

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there's the ball being thrown

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it's in the air flies up

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you'll see that

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the ball pops out and is caught for a touchdown

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and Washington wins the game

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now

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that is a very high WPA because the time has expired

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there's no time left they'll now be at 18 points

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and they have beaten the bears pretty much

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no matter what happens cause there's no time left

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so obviously that play was a very high WPA

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now a WPA of 0

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would be a play that does not change

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the effect of the game at all

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for example most kickoffs that result in a touchback

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have a WPA of zero

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cause it's a standard play that happens multiple times

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the game and doesn't really affect what happens

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it's really just like okay

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the ball starts on

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like the 30 yard line or whatever it is

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a negative WPA

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would be when the offense makes a really

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costly mistake where they were going to win the game

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but now they're probably not

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for example this Josh Allen interception

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in this situation it is overtime

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the bills are playing the Minnesota Vikings

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the Vikings are winning 33 to 30

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but Buffalo the bills

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have the ball with Josh Allen as quarterback there

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is a minute left and they're on the 20 yard line

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so all Josh Allen has to do is score a touchdown

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and the game is over and the bills win

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and Josh Allen's really good

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so there is a current 74% chance of winning

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when this ball is snapped

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you'll see that Josh Allen gets the ball

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he looks he looks pump fakes throws interception

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the Vikings have the ball and they slide

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and now Vikings end the game

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because you only get one possession

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I think at this time during the NFL

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but even if that wasn't the case

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they could just kneel and the game would be all over

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so the game officially is over

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Josh Allen has thrown a game losing interception

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to make his team lose that would be extremely low

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uh WPA

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in fact they went from a 74% chance of winning to a 0%

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so that's negative point seven four not good

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now that we understand WPA

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we know that a high positive value means you are clutch

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and a low

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negative value means you are the opposite of clutch

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the play by play data that we actually downloaded

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has WPA for every single play

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which is really awesome for us

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because that means that we can ask Sphinx

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to find the 10 most clutch quarterbacks

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based on WPA so we can literally ask Sphinx you know

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find these 10 quarterbacks

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give us a total WPA an average WPA and sort the table

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descendingly by the total WPA

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and Sphinx will create its game plan

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over here on the left hand side

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not a football game plan but a data science game plan

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and then start writing the code itself to

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to do this analysis

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and finally it will give us our results

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so starting at No. 10 we have Aaron Rodgers

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once again he was No. 9 on our TV clutch list

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so this is not a huge surprise here

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anyway you slice it

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Aaron Rodgers was a pretty clutch quarterback

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is he now I don't know

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but back in the day he was

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No.9 is another current quarterback

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and that is Mr Cool Joe Burrow

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and there's a reason he has that name you guys

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this guy performs when it means the most

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and is able to make the big throws

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when the game is in his hands

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No.8

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is a name that I hadn't heard of in a really long time

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and it honestly really surprised me

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Carson Palmer if you're anything like me

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you haven't thought about that in a while

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but while he was playing

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he had some pretty clutch moments

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No.7 was on our previous list as well

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and it's Andrew Luck once again

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this guy was on the trajectory of becoming

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one of the best quarterbacks

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of all time and it's a shame

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we didn't get to watch the rest of his career

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No. 6 is Matthew Stafford

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also a current quarterback and it's well deserved

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he is one of my favorite clutch plays ever

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and he's really like

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done a lot of clutch things in his career

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both as the Lions quarterback

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and now as the Rams quarterback

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No. 5 is NFL legend Peyton Manning

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yes before he did all the broadcasting stuff

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he was a really good quarterback

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: 00:13:55

and made some absolutely clutch plays

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: 00:13:57

No. 4 is Patrick Mahomes

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: 00:13:59

and I was honestly kind of like

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: 00:14:01

I can't believe he's so low on this list

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: 00:14:03

but once again very clutch quarterback

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: 00:14:05

has been on an absolute tear with the Chiefs

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: 00:14:07

and has made a lot of the biggest throws

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: 00:14:09

in NFL history No.3 is Big Ben Roethlisberger

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: 00:14:13

a Steelers legend was in it forever

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: 00:14:15

made some great clutch plays

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: 00:14:17

No. 2 on this list actually kind of surprised me

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: 00:14:19

but it's kind of surprised

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: 00:14:21

we haven't seen his name so much at all anymore

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: 00:14:24

because he was such a good quarterback during his day

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: 00:14:26

and that is Drew Brees

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: 00:14:27

legend for the New Orleans Saints

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: 00:14:29

always seems to make really good completions

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: 00:14:33

like his percentage was always so high

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: 00:14:34

wasn't doing anything fancy ever

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: 00:14:36

but like pass after pass after pass

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: 00:14:38

he just like charged down the field

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: 00:14:40

and No. 1 the No. 1 clutch quarterback of all time

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: 00:14:43

as defined by total WPA across his entire career is

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: 00:14:49

drum roll please

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: 00:14:51

the goat himself

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: 00:14:53

Mister Tom Brady so in the end

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: 00:14:57

data science

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: 00:14:57

kind of already proved what we already knew

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: 00:15:00

deep down right there you have it

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: 00:15:02

the 10 most clutch quarterbacks

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: 00:15:03

as proven by data science

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: 00:15:05

now I challenge you to make your own clutch list

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: 00:15:07

especially if you hate this clutch list

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: 00:15:09

let me know in the comments down below if you hate it

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: 00:15:12

and why you think I'm wrong

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: 00:15:13

but you can create your own by downloading Sphinx

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: 00:15:16

using the link below

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: 00:15:17

and you can get my own Jupiter notebook

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: 00:15:18

and play around with my code template

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: 00:15:20

create something similar with football and actually

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: 00:15:23

you know change the parameters of clutch

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: 00:15:24

or use a different metric

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: 00:15:25

instead of WPA you can use something called EPA

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: 00:15:28

which is another one of those crazy NFL advanced stats

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: 00:15:30

or you can do something totally different

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: 00:15:32

and do it with the NBA or with soccer

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: 00:15:34

or with cricket or you don't have to do sports at all

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: 00:15:36

that is the beauty of something like Sphinx

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: 00:15:38

is it helps you create awesome analysis

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: 00:15:40

that would take you hours on your own

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: 00:15:42

and probably will still take you hours with Sphinx

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: 00:15:43

but a lot faster I'm excited to see what you make

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: 00:15:46

and I'm excited to see you

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: 00:15:47

hit the subscribe button as well right

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: 00:15:50

see you in the next one