On Monday, I published updated (through 2017) career passer ratings that are adjusted for era. Last year, I published the single-season ratings, so I wanted to update that post today.
Passer rating is a bad stat, and era-adjusted passer ratings have all of those same flaws, too. But EA-PR is without question better than passer rating, and since passer rating is such a ubiquitous stat, I wanted to post all of the EA-PRs so you could have them at your disposal (the table below has over 7,700 rows!).
Below are the era-adjusted passer ratings for every player in every season since 1932. Here’s how to read the table below, which is fully sortable and searchable. Sid Luckman has the best single season, playing in the NFL for Chicago in 1943. That season counted for 11.58% of his career pass attempts (useful if you want to calculate a player’s career passer rating), as he threw 202 passes, completed 110 of them for 2,194 yards with 28 TDs and 12 INTs. That was enough attempts to qualify for the passer rating crown; his actual passer rating was 107.5, and his Era Adjusted Passer Rating was 135.0, the best ever.
How was Luckman so good? He completed 54.5% of his passes in a league where the average was 44.4%; that would be like completing 77.6% of passes in today’s era. Luckman averaged 10.86 Y/A when the league average was 6.53; that would be like averaging 11.35 Y/A in today’s environment. He averaged a touchdown on 13.86% of passes at a time when the TD rate was 6.6%. Note that as originally constructed, a TD rate of 11.875% would maximize the touchdown rate variable in the formula; with the 4.2% touchdown rate now, a TD rate of 11.12%. Finally, Luckman had an INT rate of 5.94% when the average was 10.51%. In 2017, the league average rate was 2.46%; one small drawback of my current formula is that it caps the best scores in INT rates. An INT rate of zero in 2017 would be worth less than Luckman’s 5.94% when the average was 10.51%. So if a modern passer had 500 pass attempts, and completed 388 of them (77.6%) for 5,675 yards (11.35 Y/A) with 56 touchdowns and 0 INTs (11.2%), they would have an era-adjusted passer rating of 130.8. In other words, nobody is going to ever knock Luckman off the top perch here. This is because the standard deviation in passing has gone down significantly since prior to World War II.
One fun thing to do is to type in a franchise code like “nyg” or “gnb” and see the top era adjusted passer ratings for each franchise. Or you could change the “show results’ number in the drop down box for 20 to 50, type in Manning and see what happens.
What stands out to you?
