Yesterday, I ranked every quarterback in college football last season. Today, I’ll do the same for every quarterback since 2005. If you read yesterday’s article, you can skip the next three paragraphs, which explain the system I used.

I start by calculating each quarterback’s Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, done by starting with passing yards per attempt, adding 20 yards for each touchdown and subtracting 45 yards for each interception, and subtracting sack yards lost from the numerator and adding sacks to the denominator. Because the NCAA treats sack stats as rushing data, and because the game logs I have (courtesy of cfbstats.com) only show separate sack data on the team level, some estimation is involved in coming up with player sacks. Each quarterback is assigned X% of the sacks his team’s offense suffered in each game, with X equaling the number of pass attempts thrown by that player divided by his team’s total number of pass attempts.

Once I have calculate the ANY/A for each player, I then adjusted their ratings for strength of schedule. This involves an iterative process I described here and is virtually identical to how I calculate SRS ratings in college football on the team level. You adjust each quarterback’s ANY/A (weighted by number of pass attempts) for the qualify of the defense, which is adjusted by the quality of the quarterbacks it faced, which is adjusted by the quality of all the defenses all of those quarterbacks faced, and so on. After awhile, the ratings converge, and you come up with final, SOS-adjusted ANY/A ratings.

At this point, we can rank all the quarterbacks (and the defenses) based on ANY/A, but some credit needs to be given for those quarterbacks who shoulder larger workloads. In Georgia Tech’s offense, it’s pretty easy to rack up impressive ANY/A totals because just about every pass attempt comes against an unprepared defense. To adjust for this, I multiplied each quarterback’s number of attempts (including estimated sacks) by the difference between his ANY/A and 5.82, which is the average ANY/A over the eight-year period.

So, which quarterbacks were best from 2005 to 2012?

• It’s hard to overstate how dominant Sam Bradford‘s 2008 season was; remember, those Sooners topped 45 points in 11 games. And his production here includes the less-than-stellar performance he had in the National Championship Game against Florida. He finished number one in this system by over 300 yards.
• Tim Tebow had two top-20 seasons and a top-60 year, and that excludes all of his rushing statistics. Cam Newton‘s great 2010 season came in at #38, although again, much of Newton’s value came on the ground. Similarly, Vince Young’s fantastic 2005 would look a lot better if we added in his rushing stats. Young ranked 5th in passing value, rushed for 1,150 yards on 8.1 yards per carry, and ran for 12 touchdowns.
• 2012 was the year of the rookie quarterback in the NFL — and the table here can help us see why. Robert Griffin III‘s 2011 comes in at #4, Russell Wilson at #13, and Andrew Luck finished his career with two top-35 seasons.
• I discussed yesterday how Matt Barkley‘s 2012 season wasn’t that much worse than his 2011 campaign; of course, USC quarterbacks have tended to perform pretty well over the last eight years. Both Mark Sanchez and Matt Leinart had top-20 seasons. Tyler Wilson and Landry Jones both regressed in 2012, too, and for Jones, he actually had his best year in 2000.
• The 2007 NFL Draft was a disaster for quarterbacks: JaMarcus Russell and Brady Quinn went in the first round, but none of the quarterbacks had much success. If you type ‘2006’ into the search engine, you don’t see a lot of promising players, but it’s still interesting to see how they performed in college.
• A few people wondered where was Braxton Miller on yesterday’s last. Well, Miller ranked 61st last year. While the Buckeyes went 12-0, Miller threw just 15 touchdown passes and barely cracked 2,000 yards. He also was sacked on 10% of his dropbacks. His ANY/A was 6.8 but came against a schedule that was 0.4 ANY/A easier than average.

What about the top pass defenses of the last 8 years?

While you might have expected to see an SEC in first place, I don’t think too many will complain about the Ndamukong Suh Cornhuskers taking the top slot. That was a dominant defense that held up extremely well against several excellent Big 12 passing offenses.

What stands out to you?