Yesterday, we looked at the best (and worst) regular season performances, as measured by Total Adjusted Yards per Play and its many derivatives. Today, it’s time to look into total career values. Keep in mind, these figures don’t include the postseason, where many legends cemented or defined their legacies. We will get to that later, I promise.

Because I apparently hate driving traffic to the site, I will not title this anything to do with the greatest or best quarterback. Instead, I want to be honest about the fact that the results below are simply one measurement of career performance and are not meant to be definitive. I do believe it is the best approach I have seen when it comes to using numbers to compare quarterbacks across eras, but it isn’t perfect. When you see “Johnny Unitas,” what you are really seeing is Unitas, throwing to Raymond Berry, John Mackey, Lenny Moore, Jim Mutscheller, and Jimmy Orr, handing off to Alan Ameche, and standing behind Jim Parker and Bob Vogel, while glancing over at Weeb Ewbank and Don Shula standing on the sidelines. When you see “John Elway,” what you are really seeing is Elway throwing to a ragtag group of receivers, playing behind a ho hum offensive line, and under the tutelage of an unimaginative head coach during his prime, before getting basically the opposite of that late in his career. The average reader at Football Perspective has a good grip on both history and stat and should have little trouble contextualizing the numbers presented today. [continue reading…]

It has been a while since I published anything specifically relating to my niche homebrewed metric, Total Adjusted Yards per Play (TAY/P). It has been longer, still, since Chase has posted his latest entry into the corpus of his legendary QBGOAT series. I figured I would kill one bird and dizzy another with one stone. This post is specifically about TAY/P and its derivatives. It is not a treatise on the greatest quarterbacks of all time. Instead, it is a look at how several quarterbacks have fared in a few different variations of a single measurement since 1932. If you want to view it as a GOAT list, you are free to do so, though I would not encourage it. I believe statistics should be used to support your argument rather than serve as the entirety of your argument.

I am not under the delusion that this is the premier metric to use when evaluating quarterbacks. I prefer a holistic approach that includes everything from simple box score stats to convoluted algorithms and subjective grades. I consider EPA/P, DVOA, and Total QBR to be superior measurements. ^[1]CPOE is a useful stat when trying to get a better idea, from the numbers, who was more or less accurate than their actual completion rate may have indicated. ANY/A is good but only looks at … Continue reading The only problem is that they don’t cover a large enough portion of NFL history to make comparisons. Thus, I continue to use TAY/P because it uses simple box score numbers to create a metric that can compare quarterbacks dating back as far as we have box scores. ^[2]With some caveats. We have full stats dating back to 1967. Prior to that, we don’t have full sack and sack yardage information for the AFL. We have data for sack yardage lost in the NFL dating … Continue reading [continue reading…]

Named in honor of Automatic Otto Graham, the Automatic Award goes to the most valuable player in the league each season. Given the value of passing for most of NFL (and AFL and AAFC) history, this award will almost always go to a quarterback. He touches the live ball more than any other player, has by far the largest impact on the outcome of his team’s success, and is arguably the most important position in team sports. ^[1]I don’t know much about other sports, but I have been told goalies play a pretty outsized role in winning hockey games. In basketball, I don’t know if there is necessarily a single … Continue reading By and large, I am going to give preference to players on successful teams, with the possibly flawed idea that a player may have been valuable on a bad team, but it’s hard to call him most valuable if he had a losing squad. I try my best to separate a player’s contributions from those of his teammates, but I still attempt to recognize historically dominant seasons that come on teams with other great players. After all, it is difficult to disentangle a quarterback from his receivers and protectors, a running back from his blockers, or any player from his coaches, and I don’t want to take away too much credit from a guy just because of his perceived advantages.

I have chosen most valuable players for every season back to 1920. However, given the paucity of recorded stats, as well as the nigh nonexistence of film to study, I decided to publish only the results dating back to 1946. At that point, we have nearly the same box score numbers that we have today, and there is enough game footage available to paint a fairly reliable picture of a player’s performance. Obviously, with less information the further back we go, I have less confidence in my selections with each additional year we travel into the past. At the same time, because I know it is more difficult to come to conclusions about those seasons, I’m less torn up about picking players in a tossup scenario. Today, with abundant information at my fingertips, I find myself going back and forth over two or three players almost every year, talking myself in and out of their respective qualifications to the point that words start to lose meaning and I shrink into myself like Demeter of myth.
[continue reading…]