Bryan Frye, owner and operator of the great site http://www.thegridfe.com, is back for another guest post. You can also view all of Bryan’s guest posts at Football Perspective at this link, and follow him on twitter @LaverneusDingle.

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Last Wednesday, Chase unveiled his estimated sack numbers for 1960-1968. ^[1]I can neither confirm nor deny that he did this, at least in part, to give Joe Namath some love. I already had this post planned, but I wanted to wait for the estimated stats before running the numbers, as doing so would allow me to go back to 1960 instead of 1969.

This article, “Upright Citizens (Quarterbacks who Avoided Sacks)” is a brief examination of those quarterbacks who saved their teams valuable field position by avoiding sacks. By extension, it is also an examination of those quarterbacks who did the opposite. When Chase presented his 1960-1968 data, he included everyone who threw a pass during that timeframe. Because I am only concerned with quarterbacks, I have removed all non-quarterback plays and recalculated the metrics.

The methodology is straightforward: First, I subtracted each player’s stats from the league stats that season and found the “league minus player (LMP)” season averages. Second, I subtracted the LMP rate stats from the individual player’s stats to find a marginal sack rate and sack yards lost per dropback. Last, I multiplied those marginal rates by the number of dropbacks in order to find total marginal sacks and sack yards. In this case, lesser (or negative) is better. Also, I should point out that I did not prorate to a 16 game season. We can always do that for a later post (and I imagine Chase will when recalculating RANY), but for the purposes of this article I didn’t want to give credit for games that didn’t actually happen.

The first table presents the 1,540 qualifying quarterback seasons. Read it thus: In 1988, Dan Marino attempted 606 passes and took 6 sacks (that’s 612 dropbacks). On those sacks, he lost 31 yards. This gives him a 0.98% sack rate and 0.05 yards lost on sacks per dropback. Marino’s sack rate was 6.08 percentage points better than the rest of the league’s, and he lost 0.48 fewer yards whenever he dropped back to pass. Ultimately, his sack avoidance saved the Dolphins 37 plays and 293 yards more than expected. The table is sorted by marginal sacks, but you can sort and filter as is your wont.

From 1960 to 2014, there have been 3,813 instances of a quarterback taking at least one dropback in a season. I didn’t think it was fair to include low volume seasons, so I removed all seasons in which a player took fewer than 224 dropbacks. ^[2]I realize this is an arbitrary number, but so is any other number I could have picked. So I went with the NFL’s “official” arbitrary cutoff. This kept seasons like Tommy Wade’s 1964 campaign … Continue reading Doing so removed the top 182 seasons (by marginal sack rate) and moved Jim Hart’s 1975 season to the top in that category (listed as “Marg Sk%” in the table above).

Of course, the real story here is Dan Marino. Generally, volume and efficiency aren’t friends, but Marino was able to stay more than five percentage points below league average – on 560 or more dropbacks – five times. He owns the top five spots in marginal sacks, plus two more in the top 18. Incredibly, between 1984 and 1990, he was 222 sacks below expectation, saving Miami an estimated 1,620 yards.

In 2000, Vinny Testaverde was an incredible 30 sacks below expectation, saving the Jets nearly 200 yards. Unfortunately, as is often the case, his interception rate increased dramatically.

1979 was Bill Walsh’s first year in San Francisco, and his quick passing attack helped second year quarterback Steve DeBerg significantly reduce his sack rate while leading the league in pass attempts.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Randall Cunningham. In 1986, he took sacks on over a quarter of his dropbacks (72 on 281). His 18.3 marginal sack rate is by far the worst in the last 55 years. His rate was so high that his marginal sack total rates as the worst, even though he had far fewer dropbacks than anyone else near the bottom. Sure, David Carr broke his dubious record when he was sacked 76 times for the expansion Texans, but Carr did that on 239 more dropbacks. If you extrapolate Cunningham’s sack rate to the same number of dropbacks, you end up with 133 sacks!

Of course, anyone can have a fluke good or bad season and end up over or underrated by this table. How do things change if we look at career numbers?

The table below displays every quarterback with at least 1,000 dropbacks since 1960. Like the first table, it is initially sorted by marginal sacks.

This isn’t too surprising. Dan Marino and Peyton Manning are the leaders in saved sacks, if you will. The distance between Manning and third place Drew Brees is greater than the distance between Brees and 28th ranked Joe Ferguson. Although Manning isn’t done, it’s hard to see him reaching Marino on this list.

Of course, the methodology effects the rankings. Brett Favre wasn’t that great at avoiding sacks, but when you’re multiplying by 10,694 dropbacks, you’re going to end up with a big number. When you sort by marginal sack rate, you see that Doug Williams, George Blanda, and Steve Walsh all jump ahead of Manning. ^[3]In fact, Blanda actually rates better than Marino in marginal yards lost per dropback. Mark Rypien, Joe Namath, and John Brodie aren’t far behind. However, these six players didn’t have nearly the volume necessary to rank highly in marginal sacks or sack yards.

Cunningham ranks last, as you might expect, but note that over a third of his negative value came in that terrible 1986 bout. Without it, he still ranks in the bottom four of all time.

This list isn’t doing any favors for the small group advocating for Phil Simms to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. When you sit between David Carr and Neil Lomax on a career list, it’s generally not a good thing.

One last thing that may interest only me. As Chase pointed out in his estimated sacks post, Fran Tarkenton put up dreadful sack numbers early in his career. However, his sack rate was so good – particularly after 1974 – that he ended his career with (barely) fewer sacks than expected. However, because the nature of his playing style caused him to lose a great deal of yardage on some sacks, he actually lost nearly 400 sack yards above expectation.

What stands out to you?