Yesterday’s post about ANY/A and the HOF Gray Ink Test turned out to be very popular, with over 65 comments in 24 hours. So to facilitate further debate and discussion, I’m going to post the year-by-year ranks for each passer in the table below.

The table is fully sortable and searchable, but here is how to read it, using Manning’s line. He had a Pro-rated score of 110.8, the column the table is sorted by. The next 10 columns show his top 10 seasons. He had four seasons where he finished 1st in ANY/A — 2005, 2004, 2012, and 2006. In the parentheses in each cell I have included the number of pro-rated points. The only reason ’05 was Manning’s best year was because there were more qualified passers that year.

If you type ‘Aikman’ into the search box, you’ll see that his best season was a 2nd-place rank where he received 8.7 points; this was in 1995. His next best year was another 2nd-place finished where he received 8.6 points in 1993. He ranked 3rd in 1992 (7.1 points), 4th in 1994 (6.7 points), 6th in 1998 (4.8 points), and 10th in 1999 (1.0 point). If you type in Manning, you’ll see that both Archie and Eli topped out with a 5th-place ranking, although Eli’s was worth slightly more points because there were more qualifying passers that season. Archie had a 7th and 9th place finish, while Eli only has three other 10th-place finishes.

If you type ‘Van Brocklin’ you see that he actually received more points for his 2nd-place finished in 1960 than his three first place finishes in ’50, ’52, and ’54: that’s because there were 20 qualifying passers in ’60, and 10-12 qualifying passers in those other seasons. From 1949 to 1954, he was really, really good, and he and Graham really outpaced all other passers.

Now that you have the full data, please put any observations in the comments.