Thorson’s Throws Week 5: Clayton Thorson has a big arm, right?

Welcome back to Thorson’s Throws, our new weekly statistical feature dissecting Clayton Thorson’s play every game. It’s a look at what worked and what didn’t for the quarterback, as well as the tendencies both he and Mick McCall showed in the passing game.

It was a brutal afternoon at Camp Randall for Northwestern. Save for a couple of late scores, every single aspect of the offense struggled. The passing game wasn’t a threat at all. Here’s why.

Year in and year out, everyone involved with Northwestern football — from casual fans to analysts to Pat Fitzgerald himself — knows what’s coming from Wisconsin: strong, smart line play on both sides of the ball. Sometimes Northwestern lives up to that. It did in 2015 when the Wildcats won at Camp Randall in a game dominated by Justin Jackson and NU’s defensive line. In 2016, though, Northwestern’s lines got thrown around in a relatively straightforward 21-7 loss. The same thing happened in 2017. Northwestern, as always, needed to establish the running game. It didn’t. It lost.

But more importantly, Northwestern’s inability to protect Clayton Thorson is what lost the game. Thorson was sacked 10 times and under immense pressure on countless other dropbacks. More often than not, this pressure came despite Wisconsin only rushing three or four defenders. As a result, Thorson had to get the ball out of his hands quickly. But there were other times when it seemed like the entire game plan was predicated on the short passing game. Take a look for yourself at the play-by-play. Thorson was pressured a lot. He wasn’t pressured so much that he had to make this many short throws:

Let’s break this down in table format:

Of Thorson’s 45 passes on Saturday, 37 of them were thrown under 10 yards past the line of scrimmage. Thirty-seven!!! That’s over 82 percent. Coming into the season, Thorson had thrown just 63 percent of his passes that short. Against the Badgers, he had to check the ball down a lot. That’s not the game plan’s fault. But Thorson threw an exorbitant amount of out routes, in routes and slants — routes that were his first read. It was a thoroughly uncreative game plan, and one that Wisconsin adjusted to after halftime and used to its advantage. In the third quarter, Thorson threw 12 passes. One went more than eight yards past the line of scrimmage. Northwestern had 10 yards of offense in the quarter. On the first play of the fourth quarter, Thorson was pick-sixed.

When sketching out the spread of Thorson’s air yards, which, yes, I do by hand and no, is not fun, I almost ran out of room to squeeze in every single short throw:

Yes, it’s that bad.

Here were a few notes I figured I’d throw in:

• Bennett Skowronek caught five passes for 38 yards, an average of 7.6 yards per catch. Coming in, he had averaged 18.2 yards per catch. Skowronek’s “deepest” target was just 9 yards past the line of scrimmage.
• Coming into this game, Thorson was averaging 6.2 yards per attempt on attempts under 10 yards. That dropped to just 4.9 on Saturday.
• The most major discrepancy, though, was in the 10-19 air yard range. Coming into this game, Thorson averaged 17.4 yards per completion and 9.7 per attempt at that distance. That came down to 12.3 and 5.3 against Wisconsin.
• Northwestern took two deep shots against the Badgers. One was just beyond the reach of Jace James. The other, to Skowronek, drew a pass interference.

So we’ll see what Northwestern changes for Penn State. Maybe McCall will try to get Thorson on the move via play-action and misdirection schemes, not only to take advantage of his athleticism, but also to take some pressure off his line. Maybe the line will play up to a higher level, allowing McCall to dial up some more deep route concepts and Thorson to deliver downfield.

Here are Thorson’s season numbers:

Other Thorson’s throws:

Week 1

Bye Week