Some quarterbacks and wide receivers just go together. Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison. Dan Marino and Mark Clayton and Mark Duper. Joe Namath and Don Maynard. John Hadl and Lance Alworth. But quarterbacks play with lots of receivers, and receivers generally play with several quarterbacks. We don’t remember most combinations, but that doesn’t mean they were all unproductive. So I thought it might be interesting to look at every wide receiver since 1950, find his best single season in receiving yards, and record who was his team’s primary quarterback that season.

Jerry Rice’s best year came with Steve Young, not Joe Montana. Randy Moss set the touchdown record with Tom Brady, but his best year in receiving yards was with Daunte Culpepper. Lynn Swann’s best year was with Terry Bradshaw, but John Stallworth’s top season in receiving yards came with Mark Malone. James Lofton’s best season was with Lynn Dickey, Isaac Bruce’s best year was with Chris Miller, Torry Holt’s top season came with Marc Bulger, and Tim Brown’s top year was with Jeff George.

This is little more than random trivia, but this site does not have aspirations for March content higher than random trivia. In unsurprising news, 25 different players had their best season in receiving yards (minimum 300 receiving yards) while playing with Brett Favre. That includes a host of Packers, but also a couple of Jets and Vikings, too (including one future Hall of Famer).

After Favre, Marino is next with 22 players, and he’s followed by Manning and Fran Tarkenton (20). From that group, I suspect that Tarkenton might surprise some folks. That is, unless they realized that he was the career leader in passing yards when he retired and played for five years with the Giants and thirteen with Minnesota.

The table below shows every quarterback who was responsible for the peak receiving yards season of at least five different receivers (subject to the 300 yard minimum threshold). For each quarterback, I’ve also listed all of his receivers.

I’m in the very large ocean of folks who can’t stand Phil Simms the analyst, but his presence near the top of this list reminders me of a larger point. When Neil and I were working on True Receiving Yards, some of Neil’s research quantified just how poor Simms’ receivers were. Maybe that’s not shocking, but it really stood out to us behind the scenes when we compiled the lists. One potential conclusion from the data was that Simms was underrated for maintaining an above-average ANY/A despite being saddled with such a terrible receiving corps.

In a very general sense, this post supports that idea. Simms was the trigger man for the best receiving season for 16 different players, which is a pretty high number for a man who ranks 27th on the career passing yards list. The quarterbacks with 15 different receivers include Tom Brady and Dan Fouts, who are in the top 11 in career passing yards, and Carson Palmer, who ranks 25th and has played for three teams. For Simms, I think his “16” reflects two facts: there was a good amount of turnover at the skill positions for the Giants (due to a lack of quality) and those players did not fare very well outside of New York.

Similarly, Donovan McNabb is tied with Simms at 16 players. Three of those players came during his time in Washington, but McNabb played with a lot of below-average wide receivers over the course of his career. That fact has been lost to history as the narrative switched to McNabb becoming a caricature of himself, but in his prime, he was the rare quarterback who put up great numbers despite below-average receiving talent. I won’t spoil it for Neil in case he wants to put that data into a fun post at 538, but I’ll just note that McNabb and Simms were probably the two top (using that word a bit loosely) quarterbacks most hurt by the quality of their receivers, based on Neil’s preliminary findings. This post lends a bit of additional support to that point.