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Examining Paul Warfield’s career

Warfield played for Woody Hayes, Paul Brown, Don Shula, and John McVay

Warfield played for Woody Hayes, Don Shula, and John McVay.

Paul Warfield has been confounding stat heads for years. Warfield was a rare first-ballot Hall of Fame wide receiver and one of the most athletic and talented wide receivers in history. However, his statistics look downright unimpressive to the modern eye. That’s not too surprising, though, since he played the prime of his career in football’s deadball era for one of its best teams.

I was pretty happy when I noticed that Warfield ranked 16th in my wide receiver ranking project last month; that’s much higher than most (all?) stats-based ranking systems place him, although some would argue that it would still underrate him.

One way to understand Warfield’s statistics is to see just how infrequently his teams passed. The table below shows some of the top wide receivers in football history to enter the league since 1960, including some Warfield contemporaries like Gary Garrison, Fred Biletnikoff, Harold Carmichael, and Gene A. Washington. While career numbers are interesting, you can often learn more by just looking at a player’s best seasons.

The table below shows the top 7 seasons for each wide receiver (based on the formula from this post) and how many pass attempts per game his team attempted during those seasons:

As you can see, it’s silly to compare someone like Warfield to Torry Holt or Wes Welker or Calvin Johnson. In fact, it’s hard to compare him to anyone. Even Otis Taylor — another Hall of Fame (caliber) receiver from the same era who played on good teams — saw three more pass attempts per game. John Stallworth played for great Steelers teams that rarely passed, but even they don’t come close to approximating the situation Warfield was in. If we grade the players by their number of Adjusted Catch Yards (20*RecTDs + 5*Rec + RecYds) per Attempt, Warfield all the sudden looks pretty good. He’s only behind Lance Alworth — who played in the AFL — Jerry Rice, and a bunch of receivers from the ’90s or later.

Here’s another way to look at things. During Warfield’s seven best seasons, he played in 103 career games (including the postseason). The next table divides all games into five-pass buckets. Warfield played five games where his team threw between 6 and 10 passes, 8 games with 11 to 15 passes, and a whopping 31 additional games of 20 or fewer passes. I also calculated a weight-averaged of the number of attempts the player saw in these games (using the median number in each bucket) to provide a way to sort the list.

You start to get into really small sample size issues, but let me close with a look at how many receiving yards each receiver gained in each bucket:

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