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: [continue reading…]