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.
On Monday, I looked at which quarterbacks since 1960 helped or hurt their teams the most by taking or avoiding sacks. On Tuesday, I looked at the quarterbacks who gained the most or fewest yards through the air per attempt or dropback. And yesterday, we looked at completions relative to league average.
Today’s article, “Mile High Club or: Scoring through the Air,” is an examination of how often quarterbacks threw touchdowns. [1]Note that I didn’t say “how well quarterbacks threw touchdowns.” A screen with 80 YAC, a bomb to a wide open speedster, and a missile into tight coverage all count for six on the stat sheets.
I have used the same methodology as before (similar to Chase’s model for Relative Adjusted Net Yards), and I have maintained the same minimum attempt cutoffs. That means we’ll only look at seasons with 224 or more attempts and careers with 1,000 or more attempts. Like before, I didn’t prorate for shorter seasons. [2]Feel free to copy the table and make your own spreadsheet if you’d like. Or don’t. I’m not going to tell you how to live your life.
Single Season Stats
The following table contains the 1,563 qualifying passing seasons and is sorted by marginal touchdowns. Read it thus: In 2004, Peyton Manning turned 497 passes into 49 touchdowns, a rate of 9.86%. The rest of the league threw touchdowns at a 4.27% rate, so Manning had a 5.59% marginal touchdown rate. This results in 28 marginal touchdown throws. [3]The caveat here is the same as it is with any marginal rate stats: one can only fair as poorly as the rest of the league permits. In 1934, the league average TD rate was about 3.5%; in 1943, on the … Continue reading
Peyton Manning may have broken the touchdown record in 2013, but it took him 162 more attempts to throw six more touchdowns than in 2004. He ended the 2004 season with a 9.86% touchdown rate, which remains the highest rate since 1961. With his incredible scoring rate, and his huge volume lead over the five players with higher rates, Manning earns the top spot for his second MVP season.
In 2007, Tom Brady and the juggernaut Patriots humiliated opposing defenses on their way to the top of the record books. On a per attempt basis, Brady’s performance actually rates higher than Manning’s 55 touchdown output in 2013. However, because Brady threw over 80 fewer passes, his magical season ranks just a hair shy (if a hair equals 0.268 marginal touchdowns) of what Manning did in 2004.
When Manning broke the single season touchdown record in 2004, he wore the crown for three seasons. Brady, for his part, wore it for six. When Dan Marino broke Y.A. Tittle’s record in 1984 (by 33 percent!), he held on to it for twenty years, despite a general upward trend in passing numbers over that time frame. Two years later, he posted just the second season in history with more than forty passing touchdowns. In between that, all he did was throw three touchdowns against the vaunted Chicago defense and allow Mercury Morris to pop the champagne. Marino’s ’84 and ’86 seasons both crack the top eight in marginal touchdown passes.
Although I set high thresholds to weed out the insane variance that comes with low attempt seasons, I like to highlight at least one season that didn’t make the cut. This time around, Sid Luckman’s 1943 is that season. He threw 28 touchdowns on just 202 passes – good for a 13.9% touchdown rate. This was nearly eight percentage points better than the rest of the league and resulted in him earning 16 marginal touchdowns. Not bad.
Career Stats
The next table contains the same information, but for the entire playing careers of the 222 qualifying passers. Read it thus: The same way as the other one. As always, the full table is available, but by default, only the top 10 are shown.
Manning, Brett Favre, Marino, Drew Brees, and Brady compose the top five touchdown passers of all time, so it’s no surprise to see them lead the list of marginal scoring passes. The biggest surprise here may be Aaron Rodgers, who already ranks sixth all time. I’ve said this before, and I stand by it: Rodgers has interception rates from fifty years in the future and touchdown rates from fifty years in the past. His 6.5% rate is easily the highest of any of his peers, and his 2.34% marginal rate is second only to Arnie Herber’s. [4]Chase note: A small part of this may be due to Rodgers playing the entirety of his career during the “good” years: he was on the bench during his young seasons and he has yet to enter the … Continue reading
Terry Bradshaw catches a lot of flak from modern fans who don’t put his stats in proper context. Lists like this help put his box scores in their rightful place in history. Ranking between Joe Montana and Jim Kelly on any quarterback list is almost always a good thing.
It is interesting to me to note the effect the league passing environment has on quarterbacks’ career rankings. Take, for example, the rates of Steve Young (5.59%) and Paul Christman (5.09%). They were within half a percentage point of one another, but Young’s contemporaries threw touchdowns at a 3.9% rate, while Christman’s scored at a 5.7% rate. The result is that Young ends up ranked seventh all time, and Christman ranks 152nd, just ahead of Christian Ponder.
You may notice a trend of me mentioning Cecil Isbell at the end of most of these posts. It’s not because I’m a big fan (I never saw him play) or even a Packers fan (I grew up a Niners fan before becoming team-agnostic). The reason I mention him is that, of all the quarterbacks with fewer than 1,000 career attempts, Isbell is usually the one who stands out enough to mention. In this case, he’s the runaway leader in marginal touchdowns from non-qualifying passers. In 818 career attempts, he threw 61 touchdown passes. That sounds like 22 games from a top QB today, but in his day it was something special. An average passer would be expected to throw just 36 touchdowns in his situation. [5]This, of course, ignores the very important fact that Isbell threw the ball to the most dominant wide receiver of his era.
That’s all for now. Join us tomorrow when the topic is (predictably) interceptions.
References
| ↑1 | Note that I didn’t say “how well quarterbacks threw touchdowns.” A screen with 80 YAC, a bomb to a wide open speedster, and a missile into tight coverage all count for six on the stat sheets. |
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| ↑2 | Feel free to copy the table and make your own spreadsheet if you’d like. Or don’t. I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. |
| ↑3 | The caveat here is the same as it is with any marginal rate stats: one can only fair as poorly as the rest of the league permits. In 1934, the league average TD rate was about 3.5%; in 1943, on the other hand, it was roughly 7.1%. Therefore, if you had a zero percent rate in 1943, your marginal score would look twice as bad as it would if you did the same thing in 1934. This is problematic at the seasonal level, but I think it works itself out at the career level. |
| ↑4 | Chase note: A small part of this may be due to Rodgers playing the entirety of his career during the “good” years: he was on the bench during his young seasons and he has yet to enter the decline phase of his career. For example, you won’t be surprised to learn that Rodgers has a TD%+ — the era-adjusted metric on PFR — of 126 for his career, while no other quarterback in history is over 120. But nearly all of Rodgers’ career has been between the ages of 25 and 31. If we look at TD%+ ratings for all quarterbacks during those years, Rodgers is not as much of an outlier in this metric. |
| ↑5 | This, of course, ignores the very important fact that Isbell threw the ball to the most dominant wide receiver of his era. |
