By comparing Colin Kaepernick to his peers, the data shows that he deserves to play in the NFL. His absence must be explained by something other than his performance on the field.

After Alex Smith injured himself halfway through the 2012 regular season, Colin Kaepernick took the decorated 49ers to their first super bowl since 1994 in just his second season. Kaepernick emerged as a superhero quarterback, able to both pass and run the football effectively. Fast forward four years, Colin Kaepernick made waves again by kneeling in front of audiences of millions of people during the national anthem before NFL games to protest wrongdoings against minorities in the United States. And now in 2017, Kaepernick is completely out of the NFL. With Kaepernick winning Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award last Tuesday, the conversation continues about whether Kaepernick deserves to play in the NFL or not. Some think he is being black-balled by the NFL, but some think he may just not be good enough to play. Kaepernick has even filed a grievance case against the NFL. But what does the data say about whether he is good enough?

The data was chosen from all quarterbacks in the NFL who played at least one game over the period of 2012 to 2016. Although Kaepernick was drafted in 2011, the majority of his play time was from 2012 to 2016. The data was further refined to only include quarterbacks who started at least 5 games each season from 2012 to 2016, which cut out about 60% of the quarterbacks in question. The numbers were then averaged over the four seasons so that the overall performance of each quarterback is being measured.

Live reactions of some of the NFL’s most prominent quarterbacks were also recorded when they found out about where they ranked against Colin Kaepernick.

Several metrics were chosen to see which percentile Kaepernick ranks against his peers, and they were averaged over the four year season that was chosen. Absolute values (e.g number of touchdowns) are generally not useful in comparing quarterbacks because some quarterbacks throw more passes than others, and their absolute numbers will generally be higher. It is often better to see how productive they are as a ratio to some other statistic. For example, yards per attempt is an excellent metric because it shows how many yards a quarterback normally gets every time they attempt to throw the ball. A lot of thinking about metrics comes from this excellent article on the metrics that matter most when evaluating NFL quarterbacks.

Touchdown to Interception Ratio

The Touchdown to interception ratio is the number of touchdowns a quarterback throws divided by the number of interceptions he throws.