Jameis Winston has played 15 games so far this season, and he’s thrown for 4,908 yards, with 31 touchdowns and 28 interceptions. He is going to run away with the INT crown, is a good favorite to win the passing yards crown, and will likely finish anywhere from 1st to 3rd in passing touchdowns. Winston also is in a tight race with two half-season guys — Matthew Stafford and Ryan Tannehill — to win the yards per completion crown. Oh, and he leads the NFL right now in sacks taken, too.
Some of this is a function of him leading the NFL in pass attempts (he’s also played 15 games, while most teams play their 15th game today). But Winston is also just extreme in almost every fun stat, which is why I decided to revisit my Fun QB Index with some tweaks.
Here are the rules for being fun:
- Passing a lot.
- A high yards per completion average.
- Touchdowns.
- Interceptions.
So here’s the simple formula I came up with:
Fun = [ (Yards per Completion – 10.0) * Completions, plus 45 x INTs, plus 45 x TDs ] / Games Played
This isn’t a rate stat, which means you get more credit for passing more often…. except when it comes to yards per completion. There, you only get credit for your yards per completion above 10.0.
Let’s use this formula for Winston. He’s completed 367 of 602 passes for 4,908 yards, a 13.37 yards per completion average. So he gets credit in the YPC component of the formula for (3.37 * 367), or 1,237 yards. With 59 combined TDs/INTs, that gets him another 2,655 yards. That gives him 3,892 fun yards, which is an average of 259.5 yards per game of fun.
Now, that probably means nothing to you in the abstract. But here is how the 2019 quarterbacks look when you run them through the same formula:
The table below shows the top 50 or so quarterbacks in this metric during the Super Bowl era, sorted by year. Winston has the highest grade of any quarterback since 1984. As an aside, while Winston is extremely fun, it’s noteworthy that Tampa Bay’s quarterback last year, Ryan Fitzpatrick, was also really fun (Winston was pretty fun last year, too; he had a 185.2 grade). The full list, below:
Finally, here are the 100 most fun quarterback seasons by this metric. The most fun season belongs to Houston Oilers quarterback George Blanda. You may recall that in 1961, Blanda had one of the best statistical seasons of all time; in fact, he remains the last player to lead his league in passing yards and win the title in the same season, which he did in the ’61 AFL (admittedly a watered down version of pro football). That year he produced the most fun season ever by this metric, as he averaged 17.8 yards per completion, and threw 36 TDs and 22 INTs in a 14-game season.
What do you think?
