Pressure on an opposing quarterback can be one of the most significant factors in winning a football game. A defense can make its day easier by rattling the other team's signal-caller and staying in his face the whole game.
Ben Linsey of Pro Football Focus decided to rank the quarterbacks most affected by pressure last season, noting that passers' average rating dropped from 97.3 to 63.5 in 2019 while under pressure. Teams averaged four more yards per drop-back (7.6 compared to 3.6) from a clean pocket.
Linsey used the difference between those clean-pocket passing grades and the pressured passing grade, along with the percentage of pressures each quarterback faced, to determine his top-10 most impacted players.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo came in at No. 9. While his pressure rate was among the lowest of those on this top-10 list, his difference in passer grade (-45.8) while pressured was the third-highest. Only Sam Darnold of the New York Jets and Matt Ryan of the Atlanta Falcons saw bigger drops, of those on the list.
"A time to throw of 2.58 seconds (fourth-lowest in the NFL) had something to do with that," notes Linsey. "The problem for Garoppolo wasn't necessarily efficiency when pressure did get home; it was the big mistakes he made."
Garoppolo passed for 7.3 yards per attempt while under pressure, which ranks seventh among all quarterbacks. One other stat, however, better shows how impacted he was when the pass protection broke down. The 49ers quarterback committed 12 "turnover-worthy" plays on only 174 drop-backs last season, which ranks in the bottom 10 in the league.
"Cleaning up some of those mistakes is the next step in his progression as the team's franchise quarterback," adds Linsey.
Garoppolo completed 69.1 percent of his passes for 3,978 yards with 27 touchdowns and 13 interceptions in 2019, which was his first full NFL season as a starter.
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