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# The Saints Have a Zero-to-Five Air Yards Problem
- URL: https://www.statsdigest.com/saints-short-throw-collapse-2025/
- Published: 2026-08-14T14:20:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-14T14:20:37.000Z
- Description: Shough and Rattler complete short throws just fine — New Orleans just can't gain a yard after the catch.
- Author: Bill Seifert
- Tags: Saints, Tyler Shough, Spencer Rattler, Chris Olave, YAC, EPA]

New Orleans finished 2025 at 6-11 and cycled through two quarterbacks — Tyler Shough (359 dropbacks) and Spencer Rattler (275) — with a stray dropback apiece from Taysom Hill and Chris Olave rounding out the roster. Almost every offseason take on the Saints reads this as a QB-development question: is Shough the future, or is Rattler, or is it neither? The play-by-play says the two QBs share the exact same failure mode in the exact same place on the field, and it isn't a downfield problem, an accuracy problem, or a sack problem. It's the shortest throws on the route tree.

## Table of Contents

1. Two quarterbacks, one identical crater
2. It isn't accuracy. It's what happens after the catch.
3. Chris Olave, the second-worst YAC receiver in football on short targets
4. The third-down punchline
5. What this means for 2026

## Two quarterbacks, one identical crater

On throws with 0–5 air yards in 2025 — the flats, the checkdowns, the quick outs, the sticks routes — Spencer Rattler graded out as the worst high-volume quarterback in the NFL. Tyler Shough was third-worst. Among the 34 quarterbacks with at least 80 short-throw attempts on the season:

| Rank      | QB         | Team | Attempts | EPA/play    | Comp % |
| --------- | ---------- | ---- | -------- | ----------- | ------ |
| 1 (worst) | S. Rattler | NO   | 97       | **\-0.224** | 78.4%  |
| 2         | B. Young   | CAR  | 177      | \-0.119     | 76.8%  |
| 3         | T. Shough  | NO   | 109      | **\-0.111** | 76.2%  |
| 4         | K. Cousins | ATL  | 82       | \-0.047     | 69.5%  |
| 5         | J. Hurts   | PHI  | 170      | \-0.032     | 75.9%  |

Two different quarterbacks. Different draft pedigrees, different backgrounds, different arms. Same offense. Both dead-last-tier on the same throw type. When two independent samples of quarterback play produce the same bottom-of-the-league result on the same subset of throws, the mechanism probably isn't the passer.

Aggregate the whole team and it gets worse. New Orleans' offense as a unit posted **\-0.194 EPA/play** on 0–5 air-yard throws in 2025 — the worst mark in the NFL, narrowly edging Cleveland at -0.194\. That's over 208 attempts, so this isn't a small-sample fluke. It's the offense's identity.

## It isn't accuracy. It's what happens after the catch.

Look at the completion percentages above and the diagnosis gets narrower. Shough completed **76.2%** and Rattler **78.4%** of their 0–5 air-yard throws. Those aren't broken numbers — Hurts and Prescott landed in the same neighborhood. The Saints' short passes get caught.

What they don't do is *go anywhere*. On short completions in 2025, New Orleans generated just **3.16 yards after catch per completion** — the lowest figure in the league. The next four teams and their YAC/completion:

| Rank      | Team   | Short-throw YAC/comp | Short-throw EPA/play |
| --------- | ------ | -------------------- | -------------------- |
| 1 (worst) | **NO** | **3.16**             | **\-0.194**          |
| 2         | CLE    | 3.54                 | \-0.194              |
| 3         | CAR    | 3.65                 | \-0.071              |
| 4         | PHI    | 3.67                 | \-0.009              |
| 5         | DAL    | 3.70                 | \-0.018              |

You can catch a five-yard throw and still create expected value if the receiver breaks a tackle and gets you to the sticks. The Saints didn't. Their short completions were, effectively, plays that ended where the ball arrived — three yards downfield, on second-and-eight.

## Chris Olave, the second-worst YAC receiver in football on short targets

The tell is who was catching these throws. Chris Olave, nominally the Saints' WR1, drew 45 short targets and hauled in 37 of them — a 82% catch rate on the shortest bucket of the route tree. On those 37 receptions he averaged **2.08 yards after catch per reception**. Among the 27 pass-catchers with at least 40 short targets in 2025:

| Rank      | Player       | Team   | Short targets | YAC/rec  |
| --------- | ------------ | ------ | ------------- | -------- |
| 1 (worst) | J. Downs     | IND    | 49            | 1.94     |
| **2**     | **C. Olave** | **NO** | **45**        | **2.08** |
| 3         | A. St. Brown | DET    | 53            | 2.56     |
| 4         | K. Allen     | LAC    | 66            | 2.82     |
| 5         | W. Robinson  | NYG    | 52            | 2.84     |

Second-worst in the NFL, at a position (nominal X receiver) where the league average is closer to four-plus. On Olave's short targets specifically, the play-level EPA was **\-0.23 per attempt**. Rashid Shaheed, on his 16 short targets, managed **1.75 YAC per reception** at **\-0.66 EPA/play** — a smaller sample, but pointing the same direction.

For contrast, the two Saints pass-catchers who actually *did* create after the catch on short throws were running back Alvin Kamara (3.3 YAC/rec on 20 targets) and slot receiver Juwan Johnson (3.9 YAC/rec on 40 targets). The Saints' problem isn't that they lack a YAC threat entirely — it's that their most-targeted short-throw receiver was among the least productive-after-catch pass-catchers in the sport, and their #2 wideout was worse.

## The third-down punchline

If short throws are effectively a Saints checkdown ritual with no yards attached, third down is where that becomes a scoreboard problem. On 3rd-down passes with 0–5 air yards in 2025, New Orleans:

- Threw 51 of them
- Completed 37 (**72.5%**)
- Converted only **11 into first downs** — a **21.6%** first-down rate
- Posted **\-0.581 EPA/play**

That -0.581 was the second-worst mark in the NFL on 3rd-down short throws behind only Philadelphia (-0.588), and the 21.6% first-down rate was likewise second-worst in the league. Read the two numbers together: seven of every ten short 3rd-down throws were completed, and eight of every ten of *those* still failed to move the chains. That's the Saints' entire 2025 offense in a single stat. They could hit the throw. They couldn't finish the play.

## What this means for 2026

The reflex read on New Orleans' quarterback room is that Shough and Rattler split the season, neither ran away with the job, and the Saints have a decision to make. That's true as far as it goes. Rattler's -0.22 EPA/play on 97 short attempts and Shough's -0.11 on 109 short attempts land in the same ugly quintile that Bryce Young posted on 177 attempts in Carolina, and the mechanism — completions that die on contact for 3.2 team YAC/completion — is one no quarterback fixes on his own.

Neither of these quarterbacks was good in 2025 in an absolute sense. Shough averaged **\-0.03 EPA/dropback** across 359 attempts (2,384 yards, 10 TD, 6 INT); Rattler was worse at **\-0.13 EPA/dropback** on 275 attempts (1,586 yards, 8 TD, 5 INT). But I'd argue the Saints have less clarity on either quarterback than the raw stat line suggests, because both were playing an offense in which the shortest, easiest, highest-leverage throws — the ones that anchor an NFL passing game — were structurally the worst-performing subset of plays in the league.

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*Notes on data: All figures cover the 2025 regular season, air-yard splits exclude sacks, and "0–5 air-yard" is measured on pass attempts recorded by nflfastR-style play-by-play. Rank thresholds: 80+ short attempts for QB leaderboards, 40+ short targets for receiver leaderboards, 20+ short-throw attempts on 3rd down for team third-down rankings.*