Best Quarterbacks Ever: Comparison

July the 24th, 2016: by Mike McCutcheon

I’m a numbers guy

I like having an objective component when it comes to making comparisons between players.  Too often, fans get caught up in friendly debates with no clear cut winner.  I have at least tried to help settle some of those debates.

I decided to compile a list of quarterbacks by decade (for more accurate comparisons of eras) to see who truly has the best numbers. It is up to you, as fans, to determine what those numbers mean. Remember, numbers never lie, but they don’t always tell the full story. Of course, some QBs fold in the playoffs, some have bad O-lines, some have high numbers of dropped passes from their receivers – I’m not arguing this – this isn’t a perfect method by any means, but it is useful to a degree.

Metrics

The idea is to determine what the “average season” was for various QBs using their career numbers and coming up with an average.  Obviously, the better the QB’s average is below, the better their career was, for the most part. I found these averages by using the following statistics, guidelines, and metrics:

1. Firstly, injuries and missed games will be adjusted into averages for obvious reasons. If I did, for example, Peyton Manning’s career  yards passing per season, and I did his career 71,940 yards divided by his 18 seasons, I would get 3,996.67 yards per season.
   1. However, Peyton missed the entire 2011 season, and 6 games in 2015. It’s up to you to factor those injuries and missed games into your personal evaluations, but here, we are finding averages by games played, not seasons played, but converting those games played into an adjusted number of seasons played. To do this, one simply takes the career games played (266 regular season games for Manning), and divides by 16 (games per regular season) to find the career “adjusted” seasons played. Manning, in this case, played 16.625 seasons when factoring in injury. Therefore, I divide his 71,940 career passing yards by 16.625 and get 4,327.22 yards per season, on average, throughout his career.
2. I will pick around 10 players from each decade. I will try to pick either the perceived best 10 or at least 10 very prominent players from each decade. Keep in mind, some guys played from mid-decade to the middle of another decade, so I divided players into decades to even it out, trying to make the player fit into their best decade, though it doesn’t always work out.
3. That being said, here are the 9 basic categories used to determine the average season for each QB:
   1. Passing Yards per Season (Career yards/Adjusted seasons played)
   2. Passing TDs per Seasons (Career TDs/Adjusted seasons played)
   3. Passing INTs per Season (Career INTs/Adjusted seasons payed)
   4. TD – INT Ratio (Career TDs/Career INTS)
   5. Completion Percentage (Career Completion percentage on NFL.com)
   6. Rating (Taken from career average rating on NFL.com)
   7. Yards per Attempt (Taken from career average YPA on NFL.com)
   8. Yards per Game (Taken from career average YPG on NFL.com)
   9. Rushing Yards per Season (Career rushing yards/Adjusted seasons played)
   10. Rushing TDs per Season (Career rushing TDs/Adjusted seasons played)
4. Note, some players play in multiple decades and are among the best in multiple decades, but I will only allow them to appear in one. As long as the players I’m grouping them with played in the same “era” it will be fine. It’s imperfect.
5. Note also, I am listing the players within each decade in order by the number of seasons they played after adjusting for injury.

The 2010’s

The 2000’s

The 1990’s

The 1980’s

The 1970’s

Conclusion

Over the course of 4.6 decades, you now have a fairly accurate and injury adjusted statistic to represent various player’s “average season” throughout their career.

It’s interesting to observe through statistics how the position has developed and evolved over the years.  (I apologize if the quality of the Excel screenshots is blurry. I tried my best to get the biggest, clearest screenshot possible, but hopefully you have a computer or laptop than can zoom.)

It is also interesting to see some players that I perceived were better or worse than they appeared to be before I started looking at this. Granted, this is only for regular season performances, and it doesn’t tell the whole story, but I find it interesting none the less.

Who do you think is the best and worst QB from each decade?  Did your ranking of top QBs of all time change at all after viewing this?  What, if any, are some of the surprises you found from this?

Comment below.