Nate Silver's website FiveThirtyEight.com is known for putting together over-the-top statistical analysis reports related to sports (and other things) and making them stand with pretty great reliability.
He predicts presidential elections with insane accuracy, and does the same with the NCAA tournament.
So in his latest take on the sports world, Silver's website handed out a Top Gunslinger honor to the NFL's most successful quarterback at making good on calculated risks, and it turns out, the award for the 2014 season goes to Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo.
FiveThirtyEight's Benjamin Morris awarded Romo using the following criteria:
The quarterback who takes the kinds of risks necessary to maximize his team’s chances to win, even if they’re unpopular with the commentariat and regardless of whether they pay off or not. Generally this means a quarterback who is willing to throw interceptions (or otherwise be very aggressive) when his team is down to improve its chances from dire to just not so great.
Romo led the league in wins when his team had previously trailed in a game. In fact, the Cowboys trailed in 13 of Romo's 17 starts in 2014 (he missed one game) and the Cowboys won nine of those 13 games.
Morris also wrote:
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This season, of all qualifying quarterbacks, Romo has not only committed to slinging it as much as any quarterback, but his gunslinging has paid immediate dividends. One thing that enabled this is when the Cowboys were up or down by one or fewer scores, Romo’s interception rate was only 0.6 percent — the lowest in the league. This is good gunslinging!
