A week or so ago I made the comment that my biggest concerns regarding Texas Tech football are the play of Behren Morton and the secondary. I made mention of the fact that Morton’s QBR, which is the statistical formula utilized by ESPN to evaluate quarterbacks, was 56.4, which was 72nd in the nation overall. In 2023, Morton was 89th in QBR with a rating of 51.7. I know a couple of things, namely that even mentioning something like this will brand you as possibly a person that isn’t all in on what Texas Tech is doing and possibly used as some sort of Baker Mayfield complex, the type of fake motivation that he has used to fuel his entire career. I’m not here to motivate anyone, just pointing out some numbers.

QBR is not an end-all be-all formula. It isn’t perfect, but it is something. Here’s an explanation (it was originally an NFL metric):

The intent of Total QBR is to isolate each NFL quarterback’s contribution to his team’s fortunes as accurately as possible with the data available. It measures nearly every aspect of quarterback play, from passing to designed runs to scrambles to turnovers to penalties. QBR also strives to separate the performance of the individual quarterback from the rest of his team, all in an effort to rate the overall efficiency of each quarterback in the league.

One thing it hasn’t done, however, is to account for the strength of the 11 players on the other side of the line of scrimmage.

But now, QBR accounts for opposing defenses: Quarterbacks who face tougher defenses will have their ratings adjusted upward in proportion to the difficulty of their opposition, and those who face weaker defenses will have their ratings adjusted downward. This is one more step toward gaining a true measure of overall quarterback performance — and a big step.

So now the question is, why bring this up. Morton was injured for a good part of last year and 2023 and I get that, in fact, Morton’s health is another cause for concern, but we’re talking about QBR and his performance.

The other thing that I was thinking was that we’re operating under a new offense with Mack Leftwich at the helm and an offense that’s no longer centered around Tahj Brooks. What was the QBR for the Texas State quarterback for the last two years? I’m glad you asked because that quarterback was Jordan McCloud and his QBR last year was 76.9, good for 18th in the nation. And in 2023? 30th in the nation overall and a 71.9.

I do want to make something really clear, which is that QBR is different than Quarterback Rating. They are different numbers and QBR is a bit more advanced stats and proprietary to ESPN, while you can see Quarterback Rating in lots of spots, like CFBStats.

What I also want to do is bring you a bit of hope in that prior to the arrival of Leftwich, in 2020 McCloud was 109th when he was USF with a QBR of 39.1, completing 62% of his passes for 1,341 yards, an average of 6.9 yards, 9 touchdowns and 2 interceptions. A relatively anonymous quarterback at USF that had not really done much of anything (no offense).

But the switch flipped when Leftwich got ahold of McCloud. McCloud went from a bottom 3rd NCAA passer with nothing extraordinary about his statistics to a top 30 literally overnight. In 2023, which was year-1 in the Leftwich offense, McCloud completed 68% o his passes, 3.657 yards, upped that average yards to 8.9, 35 touchdowns and 10 picks. In 2024, 70% completion percentage, 3,227 yards, 8.3 yard average, 30 touchdowns and 13 interceptions. This is where things are a bit wonky, the 2024 season looks worse, but his QBR was better, perhaps an indication as to the team not being as good as not everything is on the quarterback’s shoulders.

If you want to have some expectation, then I think knowing that Leftwich can take a quarterback who was not all that great and turn him into a significantly better quarterback overnight, then this would be that opportunity. And it’s not as if Morton was terrible, he was in the top half of QBR for the NCAA, but he was 12th out of 15 quarterbacks in the Big 12. He was out-played by Alan Bowman, Garrett Greene and nearly every quarterback.

I think there is room for hope and being encouraged, but I think it centers on Morton being healthy and an offense that is probably more friendly to quarterbacks than Kittley’s offense. And I’d also say that the offense that Kittley ran is not necessarily his offense because he’s not the head coach (which is fine and don’t have a problem with McGuire dictating it), when he wanted to lean on Brooks so if we want to see how much McGuire tends to dictate things, I think comparing what Leftwich did while at Texas State vs. Texas Tech will be quite indicative of his level of involvement because I am fairly convinced that we didn’t see Kittley’s offense necessarily, but a combination of things that he was asked to do.

And as a little bit of extra, here’s some videos of Leftwich talking about passing game concepts for his offense:

Y Cross Concept:

Switch Levels Concept: