There were 220 touchdown passes thrown during the 1950 season. Let’s break down who threw those scores into three categories:

• 22 were thrown by players who were not playing professional football in 1949, including rookies like Tobin Rote and Adrian Burk.

• 137, or 69% of the remaining 198, were thrown by players who were in the NFL in 1949: Norm Van Brocklin (18), Jim Hardy (17), and Bobby Layne (16) led the way here.

• 61, or 31% of the remaining 198, were thrown by players who were in the AAFC in 1949: George Ratterman (22), Otto Graham (14), and Frankie Albert (14) were the leaders in this group.

Now, for some perspective, note that in 1949, there were 10 NFL teams and 7 AAFC teams. ^[1]Historians might recall that the AAFC was an 8-team league. That’s generally true, but the Brooklyn Dodgers merged with the New York Yankees prior to the ’49 season. And yes, both of … Continue reading All else being equal, with just one merged league in 1950, you might expect the splits to be along the lines of 59% NFL, 41% AAFC. The above data looks as though this would support the widely-held notion that the NFL was the superior league. ^[2]Although, frankly, I’m not even sure if this would support the case nearly as much as many would suggest, since discarding the AAFC entirely is acceptable to some observers. But if you dive a little bit deeper into the analysis, you get a slightly different picture:

1) Graham and Albert were the quarterbacks for the Browns and 49ers in ’49, and also in ’50. To be fair, both did see significant declines in their numbers year over year, although that’s not exactly proof that the NFL was the superior league. For example, Tommy Thompson and Johnny Lujack — the two leaders in AY/A in ’49 — saw a huge decline in their numbers from ’49 to ’50, too. Regression to the mean is not a new phenomenon.

2) Y.A. Tittle was the quarterback for the Baltimore Colts (no affiliation with the modern Colts franchise) in ’49, and for started 9 of 12 games in ’50; the remainder were started by Burke, the second overall pick.

3) Ratterman was the quarterback for the AAFC’s Buffalo franchise in ’49, and then for the New York Yanks (no relation to the AAFC team known as the Yankees, although the NFL chose to place many of those Yankees on the Yanks) quarterback in ’50. The NFL’s Yanks in ’49 ^[3]At that time, nicknamed the Bulldogs. were quarterbacked by Bobby Layne, but once the Yanks got their hands on Ratterman — a four-sport letterman at Notre Dame — they shipped Layne to Detroit.

4) The Chicago Hornets were quarterbacked by Bob Hoernschemeyer and Johnny Clement. Hoernschemeyer was converted to running back in the NFL and made the Pro Bowl in ’51 and ’52. Clement never played in the NFL.

5) The Los Angeles Dons were quarterbacked by Glenn Dobbs and George Taliaferro. Dobbs missed all of 1950 with a knee injury, but was the MVP of the predecessor league to the CFL in 1951. Taliaferro, who was African American, was converted into running back/returner/utility player in the NFL, and made the Pro Bowl in ’51, ’52, and ’53. There have been just 8 seasons in NFL history where a player had at least 200 passing yards and a touchdown, 200 rushing yards and a touchdown, and 200 receiving yards and a touchdown; Taliaferro has three of them.

6) That just leaves the New York Yankees, the worst passing team by a good margin in 1949. Their quarterback, Don Panciera, completed 34% of his passes with 5 TDs and 16 INTs, numbers that don’t look good no matter what era adjustment you use. He did not make it to the NFL.

Under that light, the AAFC quarterbacks look pretty darn good. Four of the seven teams had their quarterback continue to start in the NFL in 1950: Graham and Tittle became Hall of Famers, Ratterman led the league in touchdowns that year, and Albert made the Pro Bowl in ’50 as well. For two other teams, two of their quarterbacks were converted to running back/utility roles and excelled, and another member of the platoon gets an N/A due to injury. The only clear team that had a subpar talent at quarterback the Yankees, but you knew that just by watching them play against other AAFC teams.

Let’s perform the same analysis for the NFL teams. I’ve sorted the 10 teams in existence in 1949 by their pass efficiency, as measured by Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt:

We see that among the top 7 passing teams, all kept their top starters. Then again, remember that while the AAFC had 4 star quarterbacks, three of them — Graham, Albert, and Tittle — were not available to NFL teams. It’s not as though the cream of the NFL was rejecting the talent from the cream of the AAFC. That left just Ratterman, who wound up stealing Bobby Layne’s job without a fight. The quarterbacks on the two worst passing teams in ’49 — the NFL’s Packers and the AAFC’s Yankees — did not contribute to the NFL in 1950.

So that limits our analysis to what happened to the Hornets and Dons. Now, could the Steelers, Cardinals, or Bulldogs given the QB job to one of the quarterbacks from the Hornets or Dons? Had they, that certainly would have made the AAFC quarterbacks look stronger. But the Dons were at a disadvantage, with one injured quarterback and one African American quarterback. We shouldn’t let that influence our view of the AAFC. As for the Hornets, Hoernschemeyer was really a runner even in the AAFC: in fact, his 133 rushes led the league in ’49. So him moving to running back doesn’t tell us much, either.

Of the bottom five teams in the NFL in passing, one traded for Layne, one turned things over to a rookie, and one gave the job to an AAFC quarterback. The Steelers and Cardinals kept their quarterback situations, but perhaps only because the AAFC had run out of starting quarterbacks. Perhaps the NFL comes out looking like the slightly stronger league in this analysis, but if it does, it’s not by a large margin, and my view would be that the disparity between the AFC and NFC has been larger in certain seasons.

That’s all for Part I: please leave your thoughts in the comments.