Hello folks, hope everyone is having a restful Broncos offseason. In all the talk about how much Tim Tebow needs to improve next year, one of the questions that isn't being asked is what exactly does this improvement mean? Everyone has varying opinions on what is most important for him to work on and I feel like with a lot of it, we mostly agree. What I want to examine here is an improvement in Tim Tebow's completion percentage. Quite simply, an increase in percentage equals an increase of yards and therefore an increase in favorable field position and scoring opportunities. We all know an increase is necessary and beneficial to both Tim and our team, but just exactly how much of an improvement should we expect, and what would that equate to numbers wise?

I wanted to attack this and get a better idea of these numbers by looking at any starting QB that has seen significant starting time since the year 2000. Specifically, I looked at the completion percentages of these quarterbacks from their first starting year to their second starting year. In other words, how much did they improve or digress in this specific category from year 1 to year 2 as a starter. Why do this? Well for all intents and purposes, Tim is going from a years worth of starts to his second full year. My only parameter was that each QB had to have at least 5 starts from year one to year two. Follow me after the jump and let's take a look at the results.

I've included completion and attempt numbers as well as the percentage for each year. Pay particular attention to the final column which scores the increase/decrease in completion percentage for each quarterback from year 1 to year 2:

QB	COMP 1	ATT 1	% 1	COMP 2	ATT 2	%2	DIFFERENCE
M. Bulger	138	214	63.5	336	532	63.2	-0.3%
M. Schaub	192	289	66.4	251	380	66.1	-0.3%
R. Grossman	262	480	54.6	122	225	54.2	-0.4%
T. Romo	220	337	65.3	335	520	64.4	-0.9%
P. Rivers	284	460	61.7	277	460	60.2	-1.5%
T. Brady	264	413	63.9	373	601	62.1	-1.8%
M. Ryan	265	434	61.1	263	451	58.3	-2.8%
K. Kolb	115	189	60.8	146	253	57.7	-3.1%
D. Brees	320	526	60.8	205	356	57.6	-3.2%
M. Leinart	214	377	56.8	60	112	53.6	-3.2%
R. Fitzpatrick	221	372	59.4	127	227	55.9	-3.5%
C. McCoy	135	222	60.8	265	463	57.2	-3.6%
Roethlisberger	196	295	66.4	168	268	62.7	-3.7%
J. Russell	198	368	53.8	120	246	48.8	-5.0%
C. Pennington	275	399	68.9	189	297	63.6	-5.3%
D. Anderson	298	527	56.5	142	283	50.2	-5.3%
M. Moore	85	138	61.6	79	143	55.2	-5.4%
S. Bradford	354	590	60.0	191	357	53.5	-6.5%
M. Cassel	327	516	63.4	271	493	55.0	-8.4%
P. Losman	113	228	49.6	268	429	62.5	+12.9%
V. Young	184	357	51.5	238	382	62.3	+10.8%
M. Stafford	201	377	53.3	421	663	63.5	+10.2%
M. Hasselbeck	176	321	54.8	267	419	63.7	+8.9%
J. Elway	123	259	47.5	214	380	56.3	+8.8%
A. Smith	84	165	50.9	257	442	58.1	+7.2%
C. Palmer	263	432	60.9	345	509	67.8	+6.9%
K. Orton	190	368	51.6	272	465	58.5	+6.9%
J. Campbell	110	207	53.1	250	417	60.0	+6.9%
J. Freeman	158	290	54.5	291	474	61.4	+6.9%
J. Harrington	215	429	50.1	309	554	55.8	+5.7%
P. Manning	326	575	56.7	331	533	62.1	+5.4%
E. Manning	95	197	48.2	294	557	52.8	+4.6%
J. Cutler	81	137	59.1	297	467	63.6	+4.5%
D. Carr	233	444	52.5	167	295	56.6	+4.1%
K. Boller	116	224	51.8	258	464	55.6	+3.8%
B. Leftwich	239	418	57.2	267	441	60.5	+3.3%
J. Flacco	257	428	60.0	315	499	63.1	+3.1%
M. Vick	231	421	54.9	181	321	56.4	+2.5%
B. Quinn	45	89	50.6	136	256	53.1	+2.5%
D. Garrard	98	168	58.3	145	241	60.2	+2.1%
P. Ramsey	117	227	51.5	179	337	53.1	+2.1%
M. Sanchez	196	364	53.8	278	507	54.8	+1.5%
A. Rodgers	341	536	63.6	350	541	64.7	+1.1%
T. Jackson	171	294	58.2	88	149	59.1	+0.9%
C. Henne	274	451	60.8	301	490	61.4	+0.6%

There are a total of 45 quarterbacks, 44 of which have seen significant starting time since 2000. One is a historical comparison, but we'll get to that later. Of these 44 modern day QB's, a total of 19 of them showed some level of digression in completion percentage from year 1 to year 2, and 25 of them showed some level of improvement in completion percentage from year 1 to year 2.

Breaking this down further, of the QB's that digressed, 37% of them had their completion percentage decrease by 3% or less, 37% of them had their completion percentage decrease from 3-5%, and the remaining 26% percent had their completion percentage decrease from 5-8.4%. Because we expect Tebow to improve his completion percentage and not digress, let's move on from these numbers to the QB's that showed a positive improvement.

Of the 25 QB's that improved, 32% of them showed an improvement from 0.5-3%. 24% of them showed an improvement from 3-5%. Interestingly, 48% of the QB's that improved completion percentage from year 1 to year 2 improved from 5-13%.

Last year, Tim Tebow had a completion percentage of 46.5%. The only other QB's on this list that posted a sub 50 percentage in year 1 are Eli Manning and J.P. Losman. Eli Manning increased his percentage by 4.6 percent in year 2 while Losman increased his by 12.9%. Needless to say there's not a lot of data to compare QB's who started off in the 40's in year 1, so let's do this. Let's take each category of improvement and extrapolate Tim Tebow's numbers into projections for year 2. Looking back, Tebow had 261 pass attempts in 11 games, which means that he attempted about 24 passes per game. Not knowing the run/pass breakdown for the future, let's use the round number of 400 pass attempts as our baseline (this equates to 25 pass attempts per game)

Increase	%	COMP	ATT	YARDS	TD	INT
3%	49.5	198	400	2673	18	9
5%	51.5	206	400	2781	19	10
7%	53.5	214	400	2889	19	11
9%	55.5	222	400	2997	20	11

Here's where things get interesting. Remember earlier when I alluded to a historical reference? Well if you weren't too lazy to look through the chart, you realize I was speaking of John Elway. Now for those of you that hate comparisons across eras, tough, go whine somewhere else. For the purposes of this research, I'm only looking at numbers and the reason why I included him was because John Elway had a completion percentage of 47.5 in year 1 and increased by about 9 % to 56.3 in year 2. Why this comparison is interesting is simple: A menial increase for Tim in the 3% range isn't really an improvement, an increase of 5% gets him on the good side of 50%. The reason I think an an increase in percentage of 8-9% for Tebow is attainable is because the numbers would break down like this:

A 9% increase next year would equate to 36 more completions next year. For each game, that would mean an increase of 2.25 completions, which if you think of nothing more than about 2 more completions per game, a 9% increase doesn't seem too daunting a task for Tebow.

There's been a lot of information as well as speculation in this post. If I was asked what an acceptable expectation was for Tim Tebow in order to view his 2nd full season as a starter as a success, it would be an increase in completion percentage from 46.5%-55.5%. Using his averages from last year that means about 3000 yards passing, about 20 TD's and 11 INT's. That is a good start. There's no way of telling if he can consistently break 60%, and for Tim and all the other things he brings to the offense, might not be necessary. Time will tell, we'll all know soon. Until then, this is my story and I'm sticking to it.