On Thursday, I looked at quarterbacks from 2016 who started at least 8 games and threw at least 150 passes. For those passers, I calculated how many standard deviations above average they were in Relative ANY/A (i.e., how much better they were, statistically, than average) and in winning percentage. I sorted the list by the difference between the two, to find the quarterbacks whose stats and winning percentages diverged by the largest amounts. And Friday, I looked at the quarterbacks whose passing stats most greatly exceeded their winning percentage in any given season. On Saturday, I looked at the reverse: the quarterbacks whose winning percentages greatly exceeded their stats.
Today, let’s look at some career ratings. One key note: This is a “career” rating but it excludes all seasons where a quarterback started fewer than 8 games, or threw fewer than 150 pass attempts. So this excludes partial seasons, making it not a true snapshot of a player’s career, but rather a quarterback’s career as his team’s main starter.
The main leader here is Dan Fouts, and it’s not particularly close. Over the course of his “career” — which spans 13 seasons as a starter with 150+ attempts — Fouts was a total of 13.8 standard deviations above average in ANY/A. However, he was barely above average in winning percentage, at just 0.23 standard deviations. Remember, Fouts had two top-30 seasons and four top-100 seasons in terms of his stats exceeding his record. As a result, his total “Diff” is 13.57, easily the most of any quarterback in this study, with Dan Marino, Boomer Esiason, and Drew Brees.
But since this is a cumulative stat, I wanted to also look at things on a per season basis. So Fouts was, on average, 1.06 standard deviations above average in ANY/A, and just 0.02 in winning percentage, for an average difference of 1.04. So is it better to sort the list based on cumulative difference, which is biased towards longevity, or average difference, which can be skewed by players who only played a few seasons? To combine the two ideas, I came up with a third column called Adj Diff. That’s calculated by adding 6 seasons of average (i.e., 0.00) play to every player’s total diff, and re-calculating their average on a per-season (with 6 additional seasons) basis. This helps blend both ideas, in my opinion. If you have only a few seasons, 6 seasons of average play will drop you down significantly, but it also limits the value given to compilers. Anyway, here’s the list:
At the other end of the list, you have Marc Wilson and Mike Phipps. Modern fans don’t spend much time thinking about those two, but here’s the quick summary.
Wilson was the Raiders main starter for 4 seasons, and he went 27-13 during those years. The rest of his career? He went 5-15, including a 1-9 record with the Patriots. Given his career 32-28 record, we don’t think of him as a winner, but he won over two thirds of his starts from ’81 to ’86. He split time over those six years with Jim Plunkett, who posted a slightly worse record but had slightly better stats. Wilson’s biggest problem was a terrible completion percentage and interception rate, even for that era, though he partially offset that with the fourth best yards per completion average of the 30 passers with the most attempts. The weirdest year for him was 1985, when he went 11-2 on the strength of a really good Raiders defense and an MVP season from Marcus Allen. Wilson ranked 23rd in ANY/A out of 30 qualifying passers that year. In 1981, Wilson ranked 27th out of 30 passers in ANY/A, but thanks to a league-high 4 fourth quarter comebacks, Wilson posted a 5-4 record.
As for Phipps, he was not a very good quarterback, but went 19-4 with the Browns and Bears in ’72 and ’79, despite posting league average ANY/A numbers both seasons. He also went 7-5-2 with the second-worst ANY/A in the NFL in 1973.
