Even Watt couldn't slow down Rodgers and... Henne.
Using the same principles from yesterday’s post, the table below shows all games where a quarterback produced over 100 Adjusted Net Yards above average. You’re probably surprised to see that Chad Henne’s performance in Houston ranks as the single best passing game of 2012. There were only 64 pass plays of 60+ yards last season, but three of them came by Henne against the Texans. That game narrowly edged out Brady’s Thanksgiving Night performance against the Jets (overshadowed by Le Buttfumble), and a separate shredding of the Texans secondary, this time courtesy of Aaron Rodgers. You can click on the boxscore below to see the full PFR boxscore of each game. As always, the table is fully searchable and sortable, and you can click the arrows at the bottom to see more rows.
We can also look at the worst quarterback performances, adjusted for strength of schedule. Brandon Weeden’s week one performance easily takes the cake. The Eagles pass defense ended up being a joke (30th in Adjusted ANY/A), and Weeden was a disaster in his first NFL start. This formula doesn’t include fumble data, but Mark Sanchez still managed to squeeze five games onto the list.
Next, let’s take a look at the best defensive performances. Note that this is not the same as the worst quarterback games, as the SOS adjustments are different. The #1 performance belongs to the Green Bay Packers, who held Jay Cutler to an 11/27, 126, 1/4 stat line, while sacking him seven times for 52 yards.
Let me take a step back and address a methodological point. To come up with strength of schedule-adjusted ratings, you need to adjust each quarterback for the quality of the defense and each defense for the quality of the quarterback. Doing this for defenses is easy, as there are no sample size problems. But for quarterbacks, if a passer has just 3 passes against one team, what rating do you give him? If he averaged 10.0 ANY/A against that team, the defense wouldn’t be penalized for that, because the system would assume that he was a 10.0 ANY/A player.
To counter that, I combined all quarterbacks who had fewer than 75 passes last year into one Pseudo QB. The Pseudo QB was sometimes good (say, Shaun Hill or Kirk Cousins) but more often very bad (think Greg McElroy vs. San Diego, Jason Campbell against San Francisco, or Charlie Batch against the Browns). In the table below, I’ve included those Pseudo QB performances. By the time I finished everything, I had permanently deleted the actual quarterback names, so “Pseudo QB” remains in the table. I could go back and re-run the thing, but we can instead chalk this up to me being a good enougher. In the table below, in addition to McElroy, Campbell, and Batch, we get Matt Leinart against the Panthers and Byron Leftwich against the Ravens).
Another interesting note: Peyton Manning and Eli Manning only show up four times on this list, but the Falcons were responsible for shutting down both brothers last year.
Finally, we can look at the worst defensive performance of the year. This one’s a no-brainer: the Texans against Henne. Considering how poorly Henne played in non-Texans game, he’s an easy choice. And here’s your glitch in the matrix note: Josh Freeman‘s 26/47, 279 yard, 0 TD, 4 INT performance against the horrible Saints defense was the 3rd worst game of any quarterback. But his 24/42, 420 yard, 3 TD, 0 INT game against New Orleans was the 3rd worst performance by any defense. The two Pseudo QBs below are Hill and Cousins.
As for the title of today’s post: I’ve put the NFL qualifier in there, as I previously did the same for all college quarterbacks.
