How Beck’s season-ending run for Miami compares to other quarterbacks in playoff field
Miami Hurricanes coach Mario Cristobal has contested that UM quarterback Carson Beck has been playing as good as, if not better than, any quarterback in college football over the final month of the season.
The numbers back up his assertion, at least when it comes to the quarterbacks competing in the College Football Playoff.
Since the week of Nov. 8, when Miami began its run of four consecutive wins to secure an at-large berth into the 12-team playoff field as the No. 10 seed, Beck has completed 89 of 112 pass attempts (79.46% completion rate) for 1,125 yards and 11 touchdowns with just one interception.
Beck’s completion rate, passing yards per game (281.25), total passing touchdowns and passing touchdowns per pass attempt (9.82%) are all tops among the 12 starting quarterbacks in the playoffs in that stretch.
He is also one of just three quarterbacks among the dozen teams with either one or zero interceptions down the stretch of the season, along with Texas Tech’s Behren Morton (zero interceptions) and Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss (one interception).
“[The way] our quarterback is playing, it’s hard to compare [him to] anybody else in the country playing the kind the caliber football that he’s playing,” Cristobal said after Miami’s resounding 38-7 road win at Pittsburgh to cap the four-game regular-season win streak.
But ahead of No. 10 Miami (10-2) traveling to No. 7 Texas A&M (11-1) for its first-round playoff matchup on Dec. 20 (noon, ABC), let’s compare Beck to the rest of the field to see if Cristobal’s assertion truly stacks up.
For this exercise, we looked at each quarterback’s stats since the week of Nov. 8, when Miami began its four-game win streak. Since teams played an unequal number of games — two quarterbacks played three games, five played four games and five played five games — we evaluated the quarterbacks on rate stats (yards per game and yards per pass attempt instead of total yards, touchdowns and interceptions per pass attempt instead of total touchdowns and interceptions, etc.) in order to level the playing field.
Here’s how everything breaks down, looking at the top five quarterbacks in each statistical category:
Completion percentage
1.) Miami’s Carson Beck: 79.46%
2.) Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss: 76.47%
3.) Ohio State’s Julian Sayin: 74.64%
4.) Oregon’s Dante Moore: 74.55%
5.) Georgia’s Gunnar Stockton: 71.43%
Thoughts: Sayin, Beck and Moore have the three highest completion percentages throughout the entire season, but Beck has picked up his efficiency as of late. He has completed at least 75% of his passes each of the past four weeks while leading Miami’s offense. Overall, Beck’s 74.7% completion rate is on pace to shatter the Hurricanes’ single-season record of 67.2% set last season by Cam Ward.
Passing yards per game
1.) Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss: 331
2.) Miami’s Carson Beck: 281.25
3.) Tulane’s Jake Retzlaff: 248
4.) Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza: 245.75
5.) Oregon’s Dante Moore: 240.25
Thoughts: Beck is second here behind Chambliss — whose games in this stretch came against The Citadel, Florida and Mississippi State — but it’s also worth noting Beck’s passing yards per game average increased by nearly 40 yards during this stretch (243.38 through Miami’s first eight games compared to 281.25 in the final four). No other quarterback in the playoff field beyond these two averaged at least 250 yards per game over the final month of the season.
Yards per pass attempt
1.) Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza: 10.2
2.) Miami’s Carson Beck: 10.0
3.) Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss: 9.7
4.) Tulane’s Jake Retzlaff: 9.0
5.) Oregon’s Dante Moore: 8.7
Thoughts: In addition to the high completion rate, Beck is essentially averaging a first down per pass attempt. His overall yards per completion of 12.6 is slightly lower in the field — sixth out of 12 behind Mendoza (14.7), James Madison’s Alonza Barnett III (14.5), Retzlaff (13.5), Reed (13.3) and Chambliss (12.7) — but he is completing passes at such a high clip that it offsets that.
Touchdown percentage
1.) Miami’s Carson Beck: 9.82% (11 in 112 pass attempts)
2.) Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza: 9.38% (nine in 96 pass attempts)
3.) Georgia’s Gunnar Stockton: 8.73% (11 in 126 pass attempts)
4.) Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss: 7.84% (8 in 102 pass attempts)
5.) Texas A&M’s Marcel Reed: 6.96% (8 in 115 pass attempts)
Thoughts: Beck has thrown a touchdown pass on nearly one of every 10 pass attempts over Miami’s past four games. He has 11 touchdowns on 112 pass attempts. Even more: Seven players caught at least one touchdown in this four-week run. Freshman phenom Malachi Toney led the way with four. Tight end Elija Lofton had two. Wide receivers Keelan Marion and CJ Daniels, plus running backs Mark Fletcher Jr., Girard Pringle Jr. and CharMar “Marty” Brown each had one.
Interception percentage
1.) Texas Tech’s Behren Morton: 0% (zero in 116 pass attempts)
2.) Miami’s Carson Beck: 0.89% (one in 112 pass attempts)
3.) Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss: 0.98% (one in 102 pass attempts)
4.) Oregon’s Dante Moore: 1.82% (two in 110 pass attempts)
5.) Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza: 2.08% (two in 96 pass attempts)
Thoughts: Beck has just one interception over his past 112 pass attempts, and that came on a throw in garbage time late against Pittsburgh. His accuracy has elevated to another level as the season has gone on, and he shook off the poor midseason performances against Louisville and SMU when he threw a combined six interceptions in two defeats.
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