Dak Prescott Took More Snaps Under Center Than You May Have Thought In Cowboys Game

Confirmation bias is a tendency to selectively notice or look for information that confirms one’s beliefs and presuppositions, and not notice or avoid information that would contradict one's prior beliefs. In the NFL, confirmation bias runs rampant. Countless articles and months of airtime are filled with presuppositions (what you see is what you want to see) backed, at best, by some anecdotal evidence but never any sound statistical backing.

One of those presuppositions is about Dak Prescott and the shotgun. In college, Prescott played almost exclusively out of the shotgun, which is why many observers to believed and continue to believe that he’ll struggle with the transition to the NFL where he'll be asked to take snaps from under center.

Never mind that reports stated Prescott had transitioned well to taking snaps under center, as Gil Brandt of NFL.com wrote in early June.

Dak Prescott's progression. The Cowboys knew Prescott would be a work in progress, but I'm not sure they expected it to come this quickly. Credit should go to offensive coordinator Scott Linehan and quarterbacks coach Wade Wilson for getting Prescott up to speed so quickly. Prescott wasn't getting first- or second-team snaps, but when he did get in there he looked like someone who had taken the ball from under center all of his life. He made several good sight adjustments in passing drills and his mechanics were very sound. He also showed natural leadership qualities; players gravitate toward him and seem to genuinely like him.

And never mind that the majority of passes thrown in the NFL are thrown out of the shotgun. Football Outsiders explain how you might have missed the trend to the shotgun if you had been asleep for the last 15 years.

In 2001, NFL teams only used Shotgun on 14 percent of plays. Five years later, in 2006, that had increased slightly, to 20 percent of plays. Shotgun usage has risen steadily since then, shattering the halfway point in 2013 (when NFL teams used Shotgun 59 percent of the time) and then creeping over the 60 percent threshold in 2014. Before 2007, no team had ever used Shotgun on more than half its offensive plays. In 2014, 26 different teams used Shotgun over 50 percent of the time, led by Philadelphia which used Shotgun on an NFL-record 86 percent of plays.

But it's not just Philly QBs that are using a high percentage of shotgun. Here's an overview of the top 20 QBs from last year by passing yards (with Tony Romo's 2014 season added for good measure), and their pass attempts out of the shotgun as a % of total pass attempts. The table is sortable, just click on the blue column headers to sort.

The Chip Kelly-enabled Sam Bradford tops the table with 92%, but shares the top spot with Philip Rivers and is closely followed by Jay Cutler. Neither of the latter QBs have a particular reputation as shotgun QBs. And the same applies for most of the other QBs here. 14 of the 21 QBs listed throw at least three quarters of their passes out of the shotgun - including Tony Romo at 76%.

Which brings us back to Dak Prescott. After his stellar outing on Saturday, it didn't take long before the first voices popped up claiming that the Cowboys had prepared a gameplan specifically for Prescott, a gameplan that allowed him to pass out of the shotgun, and that by adapting the offensive scheme, OC Scott Linehan helped get Prescott through the game.

Obviously, the argument continues, it's easier for a shotgun QB like Prescott to pass out of the shotgun than from under center, which is why Prescott's performance doesn't present an accurate picture because Prescott was scheme enabled - or some such confirmation bias-driven nonsense like that. And the anecdotal evidence to support that claim is that Prescott threw eight of his 12 pass attempts out of the shotgun.

Never mind that 18 out of the 21 QBs in the table above throw out of the shotgun more frequently.

Never mind that that Prescott took more snaps under center than from the shotgun on Saturday.

That's right, you read correctly. Prescott took 31 snaps against the Rams (including four plays blown dead by a penalty, a sack, and a kneel-down). 18 of those snaps were from under center, 13 were out of the shotgun. So much for game planning for "Shotgun" Prescott.

If we exclude the penalties, the sack, and the knee, that leaves 25 snaps. Here's how those 25 snaps add up in terms of play selection:

If you were looking for confirmation that "Shotgun" Prescott passes a lot out of the shotgun, you found it on Saturday. But if you understand that all QBs today pass a lot out of the shotgun, then Prescott's numbers don't stand out at all.

You'll find a detailed, play-by-play split for all snaps at the bottom of this post.

After railing against confirmation bias, it's important to understand that there's another bias that's just as prevalent in sportswriting, and one that we as fans are particularly susceptible to: Motivated reasoning. Here's the Scientific American explaining the concept.

Motivated reasoning describes our propensity to scrutinize ideas that oppose our intuitions less than ideas that support our intuitions. My favorite study (pdf) that illustrates motivated reasoning comes from Ziva Kunda. It goes like this.

Kunda brought participants into a room and had them play a game. Before they started they watched two other people play the game, one who was far superior (and actually a confederate). Here was the catch: Kunda told half the participants that the expert player would be their teammate and the other half that he would be their opponent. Kunda found that the participants lined up to play with the expert praised his skills while those lined up to play against the expert dismissed his skills and labeled him as lucky.

I trust that the data presented in this post makes it clear that Dak Prescott wasn't "lucky", scheme enabled, or somehow received help. I also hope that I did not "praise the skill" of Prescott and instead found the fine line between the two extremes.