Posted by MikeT23 on 11/11/2011 4:31:00 PM (view original):
Uh, no. An incompletion is NEVER more harmful than an interception. Both may be meaningless but interception is never better than an incompletion.
N E V E R ! ! !
Do you understand football?
I don't think that he meant that sometimes QB's will throw a pick and think "damn, well at least I didn't throw an incompletion!" I mean there is the outlier case of throwing a deep pick on 4th down which is basically as good as a punt, but that's a rare case.
The point was that if you line up all of the INTs and incompletions thrown over the course of the season, some of the incompletions will be pretty high up there and some of the interceptions will be trivial. Throw a pick on a hail mary at the end of the half? No biggie. Throw a pick down 21 with 2 mins left- who cares? Miss a wide open receiver on 4th down trailing by 4 points with a minute left in the game? That's pretty catastrophic.