This week
Sam is hosting NE. We project 276.5 passing yards, 13.8 rushing yards. The number comes out of a drive-level simulation of the game rather than a season average — it asks how many possessions his side is likely to get, what they do with them, and how much of that flows through him.
How much he's on the field
Across 20 games, Sam has been on the field for 96% of his team's snaps. That's a full-time role. Snap share at this level is the most stable input we have — it changes slowly, and it survives a bad game in a way that yardage never does. The model weighs this above efficiency for a simple reason: snap share predicts next week better than last week's yardage does.
What kind of quarterback he is
Sam has completed 379 of 568 (67%) for 4720 yards, 30 touchdowns and 14 interceptions — 8.3 yards an attempt. He's also run for 109 yards, which matters more than it looks: rushing production is the most reliable floor a quarterback has, because it doesn't depend on anyone catching anything. Yards per attempt is the number to watch: completion percentage rewards checkdowns, and a quarterback can complete 70% of his passes without ever threatening anybody.
His last 5 games
Over that stretch Sam has 1042 total yards. Five games is a small sample in any sport and a tiny one in football, where a team plays seventeen times a year — so recent form informs the projection without overriding the usage underneath it.
How the model reads him
Every projection here is built the same way for Sam as for a starter on a contender — simulate the game, then apportion it by role. No manual adjustments, no gut calls on who's due. The weighting behind it is proprietary and re-tuned on real outcomes; everything it produces is public and graded against the box score.
What we'd flag
Three things to carry. The season is seventeen games, so most trends here are small samples wearing a confident number. Game script rewrites usage — a team trailing throws, a team ahead runs. And injury news lands after we publish.