Stat Card / Volume
Attempts and dropbacks
Two ways to count passing volume. Attempts count throws; dropbacks also count sacks and scrambles, the plays attempts hide.
What it measures
Passing volume, counted two ways, and the difference between them is where quarterbacks hide.
- Attempts match the official passing line: completions, incompletions (spikes included), and interceptions. Sacks are not attempts. Neither are scrambles.
- Dropbacks count every play where the quarterback dropped back to pass: attempts plus sacks, scrambles, and throwaways.
A quarterback who takes 45 sacks has 45 bad plays that never touch his attempt-based stats. Per-attempt stats quietly forgive them; per-dropback stats do not. Whenever two rate stats disagree about a quarterback, check the denominator first.
How it is computed here
Attempts count completions, incompletions, and interceptions with two-point tries excluded, matching official passing attempts. Dropbacks count plays with the nflverse qb_dropback flag set for that passer, which is also the denominator our EPA per dropback uses. Team and league views carry the same distinction: off_dropbacks at the team grain, and the league_baselines plays column for the all-snaps picture.
How fast it stabilizes
Immediately, in the sense that counting stats do not need to stabilize: they are exact records of usage. The useful signal is in the ratio. Sack rate (the gap between dropbacks and attempts plus throwaways) is sticky for a quarterback across seasons, more so than for offensive lines, which is itself a famous analytics finding.
How it gets misused
- Quoting per-attempt efficiency for sack-prone quarterbacks. Yards per attempt ignores every sack taken; per-dropback numbers are the honest version.
- Using attempts as a proxy for how often a team passes. Scrambles and sacks are pass plays. Pass rate built on dropbacks is the real tendency number.
- Comparing volume across eras or season lengths without normalizing. A 17 game season adds roughly 35 attempts of pure schedule.
Where it lives in the data
The dictionary columns behind this metric, straight from the shipped views. Explore any of them at /explore.
| View | Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| player_season | attempts | INTEGER | Pass attempts. Includes spikes, excludes sacks and two-point tries, matching official passing attempts. |
| player_season | dropbacks | INTEGER | Dropbacks as the passer, including sacks and throwaways. |
| player_week | attempts | INTEGER | Pass attempts. Includes spikes, excludes sacks and two-point tries, matching official passing attempts. |
| player_week | dropbacks | INTEGER | Dropbacks as the passer, including sacks and throwaways. |
| team_week | off_dropbacks | INTEGER | Dropbacks (pass attempts, sacks, and scrambles). |
| league_baselines | plays | INTEGER | League-wide offensive snaps in the scope of this row. |
Related metrics
Formulas reference the nflverse play-by-play columns our ingest actually uses; the reference table above is generated from the live data dictionary. Back to the full glossary.