You probably don’t think too much about Vince Young these days. The former Texas Longhorn star and Tennessee Titans disappointment last played in an NFL game back in 2011. But when I ran some queries recently, Young shocked me in a couple of stats. Let’s start with one you probably didn’t expect.

Young had a really good sack rate, particularly in 2009. But what makes Young’s sack rate really impressive is his sack rate relative to his rushing ability. In 2009, Young rushed 55 times and was sacked just 9 times. Among players with at least 200 pass attempts in a season, Young 2009 is the only instance where a player had at least 6 times as many rushing attempts as sacks; even if you drop the ratio to 5 times, only two other seasons are included.

And because Young had an insanely low average sack yards that year — he averaged just four yards lost per sack — he set another “record” that year. Young rushed 55 times and lost 36 yards on sacks; no other player has ever had more rushing attempts than sack yards lost, much less than 1.5:1 ratio that Young had that would hold up until you drop the pass attempt minimum below 120.

For his career, the numbers are similar, though obviously less extreme. Young had 282 career rushing attempts and just 83 sacks; that ratio of 3.40 rush attempts per sack is the highest among all players since 1970 (among the top 200 leaders in pass attempts). If you look at rushing yards compared to sacks, Young was at 17.58-to-1, second only to Michael Vick, who was helped by a remarkable 7.0 yards per carry average that nobody can match.

The table below shows this data for the 200 quarterbacks with the most attempts since 1970. When it comes to being a rushing quarterback and avoiding sacks, nobody can beat Vince Young:

So Young was great at avoiding sacks for a rushing quarterback. He was also great at winning games for a quarterback who threw a ton of interceptions (or, perhaps more accurately stated, he was terrible at avoiding interceptions for a guy who won so many games). Young threw 51 interceptions on just 1,304 attempts, a 3.9% interception rate. There were 37 quarterbacks who threw at least 1,000 passes from 2006 to 2011 (the years spanning Young’s career); Young’s 3.91% interception rate ranked 2nd to last, only ahead of Rex Grossman and his 3.95% rate. ^[1]A separate but noteworthy question to ask: did Young throw so many interceptions because he never wanted to take a sack? But during this period, Young went 31-19, a .620 winning percentage that ranked 9th among those 37 quarterbacks.

How do we compare players across eras? Well, for each season, we know what the average interception rate was; therefore, we know how many interceptions a quarterback would have thrown if he had an average rate. For Young, over the course of his 1,304 pass attempts, this means he would have been expected to throw 40.2 interceptions if he was an average quarterback. Since he threw 51, it means he averaged 127% as many interceptions as the average passer (51 divided by 40.2). Among all quarterbacks since 1970 with at least 1,000 pass attempts, Young’s 127% average was 1.77 standard deviations above average (also known as his INT Z-Score).

Young posted a career winning percentage of 0.620, which was 1.09 standard deviations above average for this group of quarterbacks.  If you combine the two, it means Young was 2.86 standard deviations above average in INT rate and winning percentage, which is the most of any quarterback. He’s followed by a pair of Raiders who were gamblers and winners in Ken Stabler and Daryle Lamonica, and then some quarterbacks who weren’t very good but played on good teams in Mike Tomczak, Jay Fiedler, and Mark Sanchez.

The table below shows this data for all quarterbacks with at least 1,000 pass attempts and 32 starts since 1970:

Some interesting notes on the very bottom of the list. Archie Manning is by far the biggest outlier in this direction; he was above-average at avoiding interceptions and yet still had the 4th worst winning percentage in this study. Robert Griffin is next: he has gone 6-19 as a starter since his rookie season. Tyrod Taylor, Ken O’Brien, and Sam Bradford round out the next three: those three players were really good at avoiding interceptions but also took a ton of sacks and didn’t play on very good teams.

What stands out to you?