Is Clutchness Real? An Overly Long Essay on the Topic of Clutch Quarterbacks

The Hall of Fame debate around Eli Manning surrounds one concept: clutchness. And he’s the central figure in one of the greatest sports stories of the modern era.

The sixth-seeded New York Giants, double-digit underdogs, were up against the greatest team in NFL history and a quarterback who would go on to earn the title of the greatest ever.

Until the fourth quarter, the Giants had scored just three points. But with a touchdown to start the fourth quarter, New York took the lead over the New England Patriots. After a rally to retake the score, Eli Manning found himself with the ball with 2:45 left remaining on their own 17-yard line.

The drive itself was fantastic, but no one remembers the drive. They remember the play.

Manning, escaping pressure from Adalius Thomas and the clutches of Jarvis Green, heaved the ball deep downfield to David Tyree, a sixth-round pick with 650 career yards and just two catches in this game for 11 yards.

We know what happened. He caught it, the Giants went on to score and in doing so authored an epoch-defining event in the sport.

The helmet catch was so iconic that the referee who chose not to call the sack while Manning was “in the grasp” of Green was tasked with interviews about his decision. He even broke down his film on the play.

It doesn’t matter that the pass was inaccurate to a well-covered player. Or that Manning would take a sack later in the drive or that the Giants left Tom Brady with 39 seconds to drive 50 yards for the game-tying score. Manning won.

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Football is somewhat unique when it comes to the concept of clutchness. The value of an individual performer is already difficult to capture, and doing so in vanishingly small samples is even tougher. It also doesn’t tend to materialize in single moments, like a walk-off home run or buzzer-beater three. These moments tend to begin — and often end — deep in opponent territory with minutes left.

The Hail Mary walk-off touchdown seems much rarer than anything Kobe Bryant did as the seconds faded.

But clutchness still stands out — an individual win in football is worth much more than in any other major sport because of the scarcity of games, both in the regular season and in the playoffs, where the single-elimination format stands out among its major sport peers.

That gives us an odd relationship with the concept. It’s harder to see, but it matters much more. Very often, we point to single drives — the 13-second drive from Patrick Mahomes, the original Hail Mary that coined the name, the Eli Manning 2007 Super Bowl comeback drive, the Minneapolis Miracle — because they stand out in our memory.

Sometimes, we compile multiple drives from the same quarterback and develop a narrative about that player, positive or negative. John Elway, Joe Montana and Roger Staubach became prototypical examples of clutch quarterbacks, while players like Dan Marino and Tony Romo developed the opposite reputation.

Manning’s reputation as a clutch performer is built off of two playoff runs. His career comeback rate is 23.2 percent. The NFL average is 19.4 percent. He ranks 79th of 187 quarterbacks in comeback win rate and failed spectacularly in his other playoff comeback attempts — 2007 and 2011 aside.

Rarely, some quarterbacks can change their reputation. Through 2016, Aaron Rodgers was known as a quarterback who couldn’t come back from behind. In fact, he had a 0-35 record when entering the fourth quarter trailing by more than a point against winning teams.

It certainly seems like conversations about clutchness dominate basketball more than football, but they are a nice punctuation mark in the discourse. After all, what separates Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen?

Those with an analytical bent might immediately reject the concept of clutchness out of hand. After all, that has been the general consensus in other sports that have studied the concept. To find out more, I read several studies on clutchness and talked to football analytics experts to nail down this question.

I asked Kevin Cole of Unexpected Points, Chase Stuart of Football Perspective and Timo Riske of Pro Football Focus to define clutchness and speak on their perceptions of its persistence.

Some of the defining studies on the topic have defined “clutch” as a positive change in performance under pressure, with “pressure” largely defined by situational context rather than social context (e.g., a close late-game situation rather than the presence of a hostile or friendly crowd).

When asked, Cole said the “nerdy” definition would be “a positive correlation between performance (efficiency or success rate) and win probability leverage on a play-by-play basis,” with his more layman definition coming through as “playing better (or not worse) in the highest pressure/impact situations.”

That wasn’t too different than what Stuart said, though he pointed out that the definition doesn’t matter that much because clutchness is primarily a story-making tool — so it is what we want it to be to suit our needs in the moment.

“Everyone has a different definition of clutchness,” said Stuart, “and there is a lot of ‘moving the goalposts’ when it comes to it.”

He added, “I think what people are trying to get at with clutch is essentially a combination of two variables: when a situation is very high-leverage (alternatively defined as, say, third downs, when there is a high expected swing in WP before a play (i.e., close and late), or in the playoffs), a quarterback plays better than he does in normal situations.”

All three analysts referred to a quarterback’s baseline as the measuring stick instead of their absolute performance. A quarterback must elevate their level of play (or not fall below it) rather than simply be better than their peers. As Riske pointed out, “I would say that clutchness is the potentially existing trait that some players might perform above their usual baseline when “things are heating up”, while others might play worse than their baseline.”

He added, “I think it’s important to put the baseline in the definition, because even if Zach Wilson were ultimately clutch and Peyton Manning were not, I’d still take a Peyton who shits his pants over a Zach Wilson with ice in his veins every day of the week.”

Riske also touched on the difficulty of nailing down when it’s time for things to be clutch. “The hardest part about the definition is what does it mean for things to heat up?” he asked.

“In football specifically, we could say it means the 4th quarter in a close game,” he said. “But then again, it could also mean an important game, for example, a game in December when the playoffs are on the line. Or even a playoff game or the Super Bowl. Then, there is the combination of both, say the 4th quarter of a close playoff game. Analysts’ brains finally start to explode when it’s the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl.”

Even if one identifies a clutch situation, one might struggle to define a clutch performance in that situation. “There are also different definitions of which kind of close games qualify for clutchness,” said Riske. “Does closing out a one-score lead count, even though the defense could still bail you out if you don’t score? Or does true clutchness mean that the QB performs when not scoring would basically end the game in the opponent’s favor?”

As Stuart pointed out, clutchness is used in media circles more to tag elite quarterbacks with something special than to genuinely identify quarterbacks who elevate their games in pressure situations. “It’s also not something that fits on a bell curve; there are many more players who are “not clutch” than “clutch”, at least if you listen to the general football discussion,” said Stuart.

He used former Jets and Eagles quarterback Mark Sanchez as an example. “Mark Sanchez was really clutch by just about any definition,” said Stuart. “Especially if you are comparing a player’s performance in high-leverage situations vs. regular ones. But is he one of the most clutch QBs ever? Jeff Hostetler was remarkably clutch: he still owns, without any era adjustments, the highest passer rating in postseason history among passers with at least 100 attempts.”

But they are not in the discussion for “most clutch” quarterback.

It’s difficult to define the idea and even more difficult to be consistent about it. Generally speaking, we think of clutch athletes as ones who rise to the occasion. That’s still a murky definition, so a more precise one from InPredictable is useful here.

If we add what Cole, Riske and Stuart mentioned and bring in the baseline, we could modify it to say that the greatest clutch athletes accumulate the most positive win probability in those high-pressure moments, relative to their baseline level of performance.

That definition generally aligns with the consistency analysts want and is somewhat testable. So we have a working definition.

The next step is to ask what it means for clutchness to be “real.”

Certainly, when we see fantastic plays in big moments, those are undeniably clutch. In that sense, clutchness is real. But that’s not what people mean when they refer to clutch athletes — they don’t mean that a player had a clutch moment or even that they had a few clutch moments. They mean that that player regularly rises to the occasion and repeatedly has clutch moments.

They also mean that this quarterback does so in high-leverage circumstances. In this conversation, the playoffs matter more, fair or unfair. Let’s shelve the definition above for a moment and talk about perception.

Romo is the perfect test case. He has one of the highest fourth-quarter comeback percentages in NFL history, ranking eighth among quarterbacks in the Super Bowl era. That’s ahead of Andrew Luck and just barely behind Peyton Manning, Joe Montana and Tom Brady.

But that’s just for the regular season. In the playoffs, Romo has had one comeback in five comeback opportunities. At 20 percent, he ranks 65th among all quarterbacks with at least one playoff win in the Super Bowl era. Among those with at least five playoff starts, he ranks 45th.

This still pretends that these conversations are consistent. They are not. Manning isn’t known as a playoff producer, but he has a stronger clutch reputation than Romo. But his regular-season comeback rate is nearly identical to Romo’s, and his playoff comeback rate is worse than Romo’s, ranking 60th among those with at least five playoff starts.

Romo is also ahead of Troy Aikman, Aaron Rodgers and Luck in playoff comeback rate.

It seems to be the case that clutchness just means having a memorable moment and owning a ring. Or in the case of Andrew Luck, being perceived as a player who inevitably would have achieved those things.

What about Kirk Cousins? After years of being derided for an inability to produce clutch moments, Cousins led the league in fourth-quarter comebacks in 2022. In fact, his 2022 comeback total is an NFL record for most comebacks in a season, shared with Matthew Stafford’s 2016 season.

This run included the largest comeback by point differential in NFL history.

Cousins’ career fourth-quarter comeback rate, 23.4 percent, is just above the league average.

But in the last three years, his comeback rate of 39.3 percent was the second-best in the NFL, just behind Patrick Mahomes and just ahead of Tom Brady. He is still not regarded as a clutch quarterback, despite this change in his close-game results.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage with the conversation — just because some of the narratives that emerge around quarterbacks are inconsistent doesn’t mean the concept itself is bankrupt.

We can identify who the clutch quarterbacks have been but can we determine who the clutch quarterbacks will be?

Which is to say, is there evidence that clutchness is an essential feature that quarterbacks carry with them as a trait rather than something we identify in moments after the fact? If it’s a trait, we should see successful quarterbacks pull it off after having established themselves as successful.

To start, we might as well list the top quarterbacks in comeback percentage, as an updated version of the metric isn’t widely available.

This comes from a method detailed by Richie Wohlers, who builds on work by Scott Kacsmar on fourth-quarter comebacks over the years — Kacsmar is why Pro-Football-Reference has comeback and game-winning drive data available.

Essentially, a fourth-quarter comeback opportunity is defined as any game where a quarterback experiences a fourth-quarter tie or negative point differential. In practice, this means that any fourth-quarter comebacks, losses or ties are opportunities.

There are problems with using the data as a definitive data source, of course. The most obvious issue is that not all losses present fourth-quarter comeback opportunities — a walk-off touchdown from a previously trailing team can produce a game where the losing team never played a second of the fourth quarter from behind.

On top of that, not all fourth-quarter deficits are the same. A team entering the fourth quarter with the ball at their opponents’ one-yard line down by one point is granted the same “opportunity” as a team down by three scores that enters the fourth quarter on the verge of giving up a fourth score.

Comebacks are built not just from an offense scoring enough points to overcome a deficit, but from a defense preventing scores to make sure that the deficit doesn’t grow. Defenses that don’t allow points but do allow long, time-consuming drives can be almost as damaging.

And this, of course, does not account for factors like receiver drops or an offensive line giving up quick pressure. Quarterback clutchness is more than their ability to score when down. But this broad approach gives us a crude idea.

Because our perception of the statistic is so playoff-dependent, let’s also look at quarterback comeback percentage with playoffs included. Below are the combined comeback rate as well as an adjusted comeback rate that accounts for the increased importance we assign to playoff performance, with playoff games (and comebacks) worth three times as much as regular-season games.

That’s nice, but that tells us nothing about whether or not clutchness is a repeatable skill. After all, if it wasn’t a skill, then we’d expect the best players to post the best comeback rates.

There’s something to be said about how clutchness may not be the ability to rise to the occasion but rather the ability not to fall due to pressure (i.e., choke). In that case, we’d expect clutch players to maintain their level of performance while others drop off in their level of performance. Either way, there are some decent ways to test it.

If clutchness is a repeatable skill, then we can use prior performance in clutch situations to predict future performance in clutch situations. We’d also need to find that clutch performance predicts future clutch performance better than non-clutch performance does.

Baseball might be the first major sport to open up the concept of questioning clutchness as a repeatable skill. A 1977 paper in the Baseball Research Journal for the Society for American Baseball Research by Dick Cramer found, using a method based on two paired seasons of data, no evidence that hitters who were clutch in one season would be clutch in another.