Adam Steele is back for another guest post. You can view all of Adam’s posts here. As always, we thank him for contributing.

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In this post, I will attempt to estimate how many MVP awards each QB has “deserved” over the course of his career. I wanted to accomplish this task using very basic statistics, so the only inputs are pass attempts, passing yards, and TD passes. I can’t stress enough that this is aimed at providing rough estimates and not definitive answers.

Methodology

The metric I will use for this study is my own creation, Positive Yards Per Attempt (PY/A). I chose this over ANY/A for several reasons:

• It is available back to the early days of the NFL, whereas ANY/A only goes back to 1969; I prefer to employ a uniform measurement for players of every era.
• Sacks (invalid) and interceptions (unstable and invalid) are poor measures of QB performance, while Y/A and TD% are both statistically valid. (Proof)
• If I used ANY/A, a number of unworthy seasons would appear MVP caliber due to fluky INT rates (looking at you, Damon Huard).
• MVP voters typically focus on yards, TD passes, and wins (shame on them), but largely ignore interceptions and sacks.

With my justifications out of the way, let’s get to the actual formula:

1. PY/A = (Passing Yards + TD Passes *20) / Attempts.
2. Each QB season is compared to league average, giving us Relative PY/A (RPY/A). At this juncture, all seasons below +1 RPY/A are discarded, as I consider that the minimum baseline for a great season.
3. I don’t want anyone receiving MVP Shares for lighting it in limited action (Todd Collins in 2007, for example), so I added a minimum threshold for attempts in a season. From 1978-present, the minimum is 300 attempts, and from 1950-1977 the minimum is 200 attempts. I purposely did not prorate 1982 and 1987 because I don’t think MVP awards in shortened seasons should be worth as much as full seasons.
4. I excluded the AFL and AAFC because those leagues had watered down competition, and also because I’m lazy. Seasons before 1950 are excluded for the same reasons.
5. I want to emphasize QB’s who play all or most of a season, which is accomplished by subtracting the minimum baseline from each QB’s attempts in a season. For example, a modern QB who attempts 525 passes in a given year will have his attempts adjusted down to 225 (525-300). This ensures that a QB who plays excellently over 2/3 of a season doesn’t get too much credit, but still gets some (such as Kurt Warner in 2000).
6. RPY/A is multiplied by adjusted pass attempts to calculate MVP Value.
7. League MVP Value is summed in each season, and each quarterback’s MVP Value is divided by the league total. This is his MVP Share. The divisor is capped at 500 and floored at 200, which results in some seasons producing more or less than one MVP Share. This last modifier was necessary due to vast discrepancies in yearly MVP Value totals, as I don’t want historically great seasons penalized too much for occurring within a loaded field (such as 2011 or 1976). The 68 seasons from 1950-2017 produced a grand total of 60.2 MVP Shares, which feels quite reasonable (we can pretend the other 7.8 MVP awards went to non-quarterbacks).

Here are the top 100 MVP Share seasons since 1950:

And now the MVP Share career list (the Seasons column represents the number of different seasons each QB received more than zero MVP Shares):

I’ll leave the commentary up to you guys!