About

My name is James Turner, I graduated Colorado State University in 2020 with a degree in Mathematics. I have been a lifelong fan of the NFL and played football for seven years in highschool and before. I started making the JTA approximately three years ago with my brother Jack Turner, who also graduated CSU with a mathematics degree. When we first started this project, we did not expect to find an algorithm more accurate and comprehensive than any other quarterback ranking algorithm ever made. Instead, we made it purely because we thought the results might be interesting. Initially, the JTA was purely a passing quarterback algorithm as we had no rushing statistics incorporated in it. Unsurprisingly, there were years where that drastically affected the best quarterbacks rankings, Cam Newton and Lamar Jackson’s MVP years, for example, took a big hit. Both of those players won MVP pretty handedly, in a large part due to huge contributions in the run game, so without any rushing stats, their incredible seasons were not represented accurately. Adding in rushing statistics was one of the first major changes to the algorithm and throughout the years Jack and I made dozens of changes with different levels of impact to most accurately represent the best quarterbacks every year. The two rules that we always followed were, one: you cannot change any of the raw data, even if it is just giving 15 more passing yards to someone in 1970, you have to use the correct data (all statistics were from pro-football-reference). The second rule was you cannot make any change just to benefit a player, every change has to logically make sense. For example, you can’t make interceptions worth more just because a favorite player might get a boost in the rankings, you would need to have a strong argument with multiple examples for why interceptions should have a bigger impact. Keeping each other accountable, this removes biases that we would make a change to favor certain players. Instead, we always focused on the end goal of making it as accurately as possible, so it can be a tool that anyone can use to remember who the best quarterbacks were of any year. People naturally have a selective memory, at the time it might make perfect sense that a smaller named quarterback had a better year than a certain star player. But in 10 years if you asked that same person to rank the players in that season, the vast majority of the time the star players would move up to the top of their list, even if that contradicts their initial ranking. This is because if a star player has years of success it all starts to lump together in your memory and people will often just take the average, then after doing the same thing to the average quarterback, his fantastic season suddenly wasn’t actually that good and he falls behind the star player in the updated rankings. For example, Tom Brady wasn’t a top 5 quarterback every year, but he was so consistently good for so long it is hard to remember any year where he is not. Using the JTA, you can easily track exactly how anyone’s career went every year without any recall bias. You can also then look at his career as a whole and find the exact number of top 2 seasons, top 5 seasons, or whatever you want.

Going back to myself, I feel like the best way to describe myself is pointing out that the one page specifically made to talk about myself and I immediately got off topic and started talking about how Jack and I went about making the JTA and why. I love football not only for the long touchdowns and big hits, but as a math major, I am a huge fan of the complexity and different strategies that go into every play, as well as following all the statistical leaders throughout the year. The fact that there are more statistics than ever being poured into the NFL and the NFL’s best quarterback ranking algorithm (QBR) can only predict the NFL MVP correctly 71.4% of the time, is crazy! When Jack and I finished the JTA, and the results were vastly higher (91.1%), I knew I had to make a website, so that even people who don’t follow as closely, would have a statistic they can look at to learn which quarterbacks are having the best seasons.

When naming the algorithm I figured that, considering that I had made the entire website, all the articles, and all charts and videos, that I have my name on enough things. Even though Jack and I made the algorithm together, he more than deserves his name on the algorithm, that is why it is called the Jackson Turner Algorithm or the JTA. Also, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without him, hell Jack even had the idea for making the algorithm, not to mention the literal hundreds of hours where we talked about every minute detail and which way is more logical and what makes more sense and how we can improve anything and everything. Also deserving a huge shoutout is my older brother Jesse Turner who always supported my making of the website and gave an enumerate amount of encouragement so high it helped pull me through any time I thought about giving up.