by Vincent Verhei

Nick Foles hasn't been a very good quarterback this year, and he was not very good again on Sunday. He went 19-of-32 against Minnesota, for just 168 yards. That's less than a 60 percent completion rate, and fewer than 10 yards per completion, and he failed to throw for a touchdown. He was sacked just once, though, and had no fumbles or interceptions. So it was surprising when we crunched the numbers Sunday night and found that Foles had been the worst quarterback of the week. It wasn't because of opponent adjustments -- the Vikings have been about average in pass defense this year, and Foles' DYAR actually went up after we took his opponents into account. Basically, Foles was the worst quarterback this week by default -- there were simply no truly terrible quarterbacks this week. If I may badly paraphrase a badly dated reference, Week 9 in 2015 was close to Garrison Keillor's vision of a perfect NFL weekend, a week when (nearly) all the quarterbacks were above average replacement level.

Including his one rushing play (a 2-yard gain on fourth-and-1 in the second quarter), Foles' game against the Vikings works out to -59 total DYAR. And while that was the worst of any quarterback this week, that says a lot more about the caliber of quarterback play this week than it does about Foles. If we take the worst quarterback from each of the first eight weeks of the season, we get a range from -138 DYAR (Ryan Mallett's game against Carolina in Week 2) to -233 DYAR (Foles' miserable game against Green Bay in Week 5), and an average of -170 DYAR. Foles' game against Minnesota, obviously, was much better than any of those.

In fact, we went back and checked the last five years' of data, and Foles this week was the best quarterback to finish at the bottom of the weekly rankings since at least 2010. Foles was just the ninth "worst" quarterback in that timeframe to finish above -100 DYAR, and the first since Mark Sanchez in Week 8 of 2012. The others, in chronological order:

Foles, as good as he was (relatively speaking), didn't even have a lot of competition for the bottom spot this week -- Eli Manning was the only other quarterback to finish below replacement level. Every other regular-season week since 2010 has seen at least five quarterbacks finish with negative DYAR, and on average over the past five years, 11.4 quarterbacks each week have been below zero. The funny thing, though, is that there weren't tons of outstanding quarterbacks this week either. There were only five quarterbacks this week with at least 100 total DYAR. That's not a terribly small amount -- it's more than we saw in Week 4 and Week 5 of this season -- but it is below the weekly average of 6.9 since 2010. Obviously, the fact that six teams were on bye this week had some effect on these numbers. Still, this was the first time since Week 15 in 2013 that more quarterbacks finished with at least 100 DYAR than finished below replacement level.

It's odd that this would be the week with so few bad quarterbacks, because in recent years we have seen more and more quarterbacks finish below replacement level each season. We have also seen fewer especially good quarterbacks (those with at least 100 total DYAR) each year, though that trend is less pronounced.