Today’s guest post/contest comes from Adam Harstad, a co-writer of mine at Footballguys.com. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.

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Like most of you, ^[1]I assume. I like to spend my weekends building custom databases of NFL statistics. This past weekend, while doing just that, I happened to notice that Marshall Faulk topped 2,000 yards from scrimmage in both 2000 and 2001 despite playing just 14 games each year. Which sent me scrambling to the Pro-Football-Reference.com player season finder ^[2]Obviously. so I could share on Twitter the novel observation that Marshall Faulk was, indeed, good at football.

As luck would have it, the humble proprietor of Football Perspective just happened to be sitting at home, trolling around on Twitter, and likewise playing with various historical databases. ^[3]On second thought, I doubt luck played any role. He saw my tweet and responded in kind, with a list of all NFL players sorted by average yards per game from age 25 to 28.

All of this inspired a fun back-and-forth between various other users on Twitter which culminated in me providing a list of all running back seasons with 250+ carries and 50+ yards per game receiving. It’s a rather short list featuring just 8 total seasons. Marshall Faulk accounted for four of those eight seasons, consecutively, from 1998 to 2001.

I quickly noticed an interesting thing about that last list, though. Not only did Marshall Faulk account for half of those seasons in NFL history, but he actually had the top four by receiving yards per game. In fact, if we adjust our “receiving yards per game” baseline from 50 to 54, we wind up with this list, instead.

Now that is a rather more impressive list. Using just two simple cutoffs, we had managed to create a list that was just four names long, and every single one of those names was “Marshall Faulk.”

Seguing away for a second… in the early days of the internet, before there were continents composed solely of cat pictures (or handy NFL season finders to query, for that matter), people would resort to pretty much anything to keep themselves entertained. One game that sprung from these dark times was known as “Googlewhacking”. A Googlewhack was two words that, when entered together into the search bar of the eponymous Google, matched just a single result on the entire internet.

For instance, there was once a time when searching the words “ambidextrous scallywags” (but without the quotation marks) would return just a single match. This was then a successful Googlewhack. Googlewhacks were, by their very nature, ephemeral constructs, since the very act of publishing a Googlewhack would cause the published result to show up on Google and would therefore cause the words to lose their Googlewhack status.

Bringing things back to the present, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between our all-Faulk query and the Googlewhacks of old. Both were an attempt to use two relatively common items, (actual words on the one hand, performance cutoffs on the other), to generate a list with a single unique result. The Marshall Faulk query was essentially a PFRwhack. ^[4]Note that Chase did a version of this with Jerry Rice since, why not?

With a weekend still to kill and many better ways I could be spending my time, I latched on to this idea and decided to make a game of it. The rules: to qualify as a PFRwhack, all queries must be run through the PFR player season finder. The user is only allowed to create two constraints under the “Additional Criteria” heading on the right side of the querier. The user may choose whichever sort order he or she desires, (I’m personally partial to sorting by year, but for a true PFRwhack, it shouldn’t matter). Every other field in the querier must be left as it initially appears.

Any query that results in a list of at least two seasons, all of which were produced by the same player, will qualify as a successful PFRwhack. The “two season minimum” is intended to discourage simply producing a list of NFL records. (For instance, it would be easy to return just Peyton Manning’s name by setting “Passing touchdowns >54” under Additional Criteria.)

While two seasons are the minimum, PFRwhacks are scored by the total number of seasons they produce. For instance, the Marshall Faulk query that was the impetus of this post scores a 4, which is thus far the highest I’ve seen. Scott Kacsmar of Football Outsiders has managed to produce the only 3 that I’ve seen. I’ve also found a couple other PFRwhacks with two seasons, such as this one for Tiki Barber.

This is where I leave it to the Football Perspective community. What PFRwhacks can you find? Can anyone manage to score a 3 or a 4, or does Marshall Faulk earn the title of “King of the PFRwhacks”?

(Two last asides: while messing with the date range is strictly verboten, in case anyone out there wishes to be a shameless cheater who shamelessly cheats without shame, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that PFR only has target data going back to 1998 and only has quarterback sack data going back to 1969. Clever use of those constraints can allow an unscrupulous user to generate artificial date limits, allowing results like this.

Also, if you wanted to, you could use this query, but that violates the spirit of the rule. So no height/weight/BMI; you need to use something that changes every year.)

And now, one last aside from Chase. This may not be as “impressive” as the Faulk stat since it involves one good thing and one bad thing, but hey, this search yields a 5.

How high can you go?