Today’s guest post comes from one of the longest followers of this blog (and its predecessor), Richie Wohlers. Richie is 44-year-old accountant from Southern California who is a Dolphins fan despite never being to Florida. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing.

One of the stereotypical traits of a great quarterback is to be able to rescue his team from certain defeat in the fourth quarter by leading his team to a come-from-behind win. Thanks to the awesome work of Scott Kacsmar, we now have definitions for what it means to have a “4th quarter comeback”.

I began watching football in the early ’80s, and for most of the late ’80s and early ’90s I had heard that Dan Marino and John Elway were battling for the title of most 4th quarter comebacks (4QC). You can run a query on Pro Football Reference and see that when Elway retired, he was tied with Marino for most 4QC. Marino picked up 2 more 4QC after Elway retired and then Marino retired as the all-time leader in the regular season.

In this game in 2009, Peyton Manning recorded his 34th 4QC to become the new all-time leader. Entering the 4th quarter trailing by 3 points and scoring the winning touchdown with 5:23 left isn’t the most exciting of comebacks, but it counts, nonetheless.

Manning remains the leader with 8 more 4QC than Tom Brady and 9 more than Drew Brees.

I was a Dan Marino fan, and always loved when he was listed at the top of the unofficial leaderboard for 4QC, but it felt a little hollow to me. Joe Montana also had a lot of comebacks, but it seemed to me that his team trailed in 4th quarter far less often than Marino’s teams. This meant that Marino had far more chances to rack up his 4QC than did Montana. In fact, Marino’s teams lost almost twice as many games during his career as Montana.

So which QB’s have had the best success rate for 4QC given the number of chances they had?

In order to figure out the 4th Quarter Comeback Percentage (CB%), I am dividing the number of successful 4QC by the number of opportunities. By Kacsmar’s definition, a QB can only earn a comeback if the team trailed or was tied at some point in the fourth quarter, and some type of offensive scoring drive put points on the board in the 4th quarter while the team trailed by one possession or were tied and of course the team had to win the game.

I calculated a 4QC opportunity as the sum of all of a quarterback’s losses, plus all his ties, plus all his successful comebacks. There is a little bit of slop in these numbers for a few reasons.

• A QB’s W-L-T record on PFR is based on games started, so if a QB came on in relief and trailed in the 4th quarter but did not get a 4QC it will not count as a failed opportunity for him. Likewise, if he does get a 4QC, PFR still won’t credit him with a win.

• If the defense scored the winning points it would not be a 4QC and would also not count as a failed opportunity.

• If a team never trailed in the 4th quarter, but the game ended up as a tie, this would have never been an opportunity to earn a 4QC for the QB.

• I think the 25 points by Neil Lomax was the largest 4th quarter comeback in history. So, any deficit of more than 25 would be nearly impossible, but it will still count as a failed opportunity. I’m fine with that, because any team trailing by more than 25 points probably got there because the QB wasn’t playing well to begin with.

There are probably a few other exceptions, but this should still create a reasonable approximation of 4QC success rate. The denominator is therefore (QB Losses + QB Ties + Successful 4th Quarter Comebacks). The numerator is Successful 4th Quarter comebacks plus QB Ties divided by 2, so a quarterback gets half-credit for each tie.

On average, these quarterbacks have a 19% success rate. The table below shows every QB who has had at least 5 opportunities for 4QC since the merger (including pre-merger stats for quarterbacks who played after the merger, but only back to 1960 for Len Dawson, John Brodie).

The final column shows how each quarterback fared relative to the average 19% success rate. Let’s use Peyton Manning as an example. He had 79 career losses, 0 ties, and 43 successful 4th quarter comebacks: therefore, he had 122 opportunities. Given the 19% success rate for the average quarterback, we would expect an average quarterback to have 23.1 successful comebacks. Instead, Manning has 43, or 19.9 more than expected. That’s the most of any quarterback; his father has the fewest. [continue reading…]