Peyton Manning and Tony Romo staged a classic yesterday afternoon in Dalllas. The Broncos won 51-48, and the two quarterbacks put up ridiculous stat lines. Manning went 33 of 42 for 414 yards, and threw four touchdowns and just one interception. He wasn’t sacked, giving him an impressive 10.69 ANY/A average (based on the formula “Passing Yards + 20 * TDs – 45 * INTs – Sack Yards lost” divided by “Sacks + Attempts”). Romo may have been better, completing 25 of 36 passes for 505 yards and 5 scores — along with one fateful interception, and four sacks for -36 yards. That’s an amazing 13.12 ANY/A average.

So far this year, the league average ANY/A is 6.00. Since Manning was at 10.69 over 42 dropbacks, we could say that he provided 197 adjusted net yards of value over average. Meanwhile, Romo produced 285 adjusted net yards of value (40 * 7.12), which means the two quarterbacks combined to produce over 481 yards of value over average. If the league average for the season remains at 6.00, that would make this the fourth best (era-adjusted) quarterback battle since the merger, although only the second best game involving Manning. The table below shows the top 100 quarterback performances in the same game from 1970 to 2012.

Here’s how to read the table: for the top game: In 1972, Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas played a classic. The fourth column provides the team names (listed as QB 1 vs. QB 2) and a hyperlink link to the actual boxscore. The fifth column shows the quarterback stats: Namath completed 15 of 28 passes for 496 yards, 6 touchdowns, and 1 interception, and had 1 sack for -6 yards; Unitas completed 26 of 45 for 376 yards, threw 2 touchdowns and no interceptions, and was sacked 6 times for -44 yards. Namath produced 441 adjusted net yards of value (using the formula from above), while Unitas produced 154 yards, giving the duo a total of 595 yards above average.

In the comments, there was a request for the worst games. The way I ran the initial query was to take the top two quarterbacks from each game, which works well for finding the best quarterback battles. That method works less well here — it would omit all games where the starter played terribly and was benched — but since it only took me a minute to run it, here are the worst 50 games subject to that very large caveat. In other words, here are the worst quarterback battles where only two quarterbacks played (or a third quarterback was even worse, so the game still made the cut). The worst game was the famous Mud Bowl, the AFC Championship Game following the ’82 season.