The Best QB in NFL History

by shake n bake on Jun 24, 2008 3:03 PM EDT in Analysis Comment 27 comments

Pro-Football-Reference has data from before 1970 and 2006/2007 so they are taking another shot at ranking them in both top single seasons and career performances.

A whole post is dedicated to the methodology used so read it if you want to criticize the way the list turned out. Basically it's yards per attempt adjusted for sacks, TDs and INTs, minus the league average, times attempts with rushing thrown in if the QB was a solid contributor on the ground (over 4 YPC).

Peyton Manning recorded the 2nd, 11th, 29th, 31st and 42nd best QB seasons in NFL history. Other active (or recently retired) QB seasons in the top 50:

Tom Brady 2007-3rd

Kurt Warner 1999-8th

Daunte Culpepper 2004-12th

Jeff Garcia 2000-14th

Drew Brees 2006-28th

Kurt Warner 2001-32nd

Donovan McNabb 2004-40th

Daunte Culpepper 2000-41st

Steve McNair 2003-49th

Manning ranked as the top QB in the league for 4 consecutive years from 2003 to 2006 one of only 3 QBs to top the league more than twice.

The top QB in each of the last 15 season

Quarterback		Year    Team    ANY/A   Rating
Tom Brady		2007	NWE	8.04	1817
Peyton Manning		2006	IND	7.38	1396
Peyton Manning		2005	IND	7.44	1189
Peyton Manning		2004	IND	8.82	1885
Peyton Manning		2003	IND	6.85	1220
Rich Gannon		2002	 OAK	6.55	1072
Kurt Warner		2001	STL	6.79	1189
Jeff Garcia		2000	SFO	6.81	1354
Kurt Warner		1999	STL	7.53	1490
Randall Cunningham	1998	MIN	7.78	1324
Steve Young		1997	SFO	6.98	904
Brett Favre		1996	GNB	5.94	707
Brett Favre		1995	GNB	6.62	1040
Steve Young		1994	SFO	7.53	1407
Steve Young		1993	SFO	6.96	1262

And finally the top 20 career values (this is career to date for active players. They can rise or fall in the coming years.)

rank       QB                       att     rate 
 1	Dan Marino		8358	8593
 2	Peyton Manning		5405	7946
 3	Steve Young		4149	7739
 4	Fran Tarkenton		6467	7140
 5	Joe Montana		5391	7006
 6	Dan Fouts		5604	6672
 7	Johnny Unitas		5186	6211
 8	Ken Anderson		4475	5974
 9	Roger Staubach		2958	5680
10	Len Dawson		3741	5604
11	Brett Favre		8758	5107
12	Norm Van Brocklin	2895	4688
13	Sonny Jurgensen		4262	4525
14	Otto Graham		1565	4250
15	John Elway		7250	4123
16	Bart Starr		3149	4101
17	Boomer Esiason		5205	4013
18	Kurt Warner		2959	4004
19	Tom Brady		3642	3845
20	Roman Gabriel		4498	3844

The active or recently retired players that appear between 21st and 75th:

22. Trent Green

28. Steve McNair

29. Jeff Garcia

33. Daunte Culpepper

38. Donovan McNabb

42. Mark Brunell

51. Drew Brees

52. Vinny Testaverde

59. Brad Johnson

65. Carson Palmer

74. Marc Bulger

75. Doug Flutie

So in only 10 seasons Peyton Manning has thrown for the 2nd most value in NFL history, had 5 of the 50 best seasons for a QB ever and been the best QB in the league in four straight seasons. Peyton is likely only one more Peyton-level season from passing Marino for the title of best QB in NFL history.

They also did a worst QBs post, but we wouldn't know much about that here.

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Comments

great example how stats can skew reality

Peyton’s dad is listed as the 4th all time worst qb when nothing could be further from the truth.

Archie Manning was every bit as good as Peyton, he just happened to play on very bad Saints teams, but as an indivdual player, he was as good as any qb in his era.

You put Peyton on those bad Saints teams and give Archie all the great talent he was surrounded by his entire career, I think you’ll see their names reversed on those lists.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 24, 2008 3:40 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

whew

I almost though Terry made a rational argument on a topic that isn’t addressed in the adjustments to the stats.

Archie Manning had one of the 4 worst seasons ever for a QB. He doesn’t even appear on the career worst lists.
47% completion, 7 TDs to 20INTs is awful no matter what your supporting cast.

I got Summer hatin' on me cuz I'm hotter than the sun
Got spring hatin' me cuz I ain't never sprung
Winter hatin' on me cuz I'm colder than y'all
And I will never, I will never, I will never fall
-Lil' Wayne "Mr. Carter"

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by shake n bake on Jun 24, 2008 4:09 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Depends

Depends on your cast. When your line can’t block and your WRs can’t catch, it can make any good QB look like Ryan Leaf.

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by BigBlueShoe on Jun 24, 2008 4:44 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

So how come..

.. Peyton played terrific last year? It wasn’t like he had the greatest supporting cast.

by jocre on Jun 24, 2008 5:14 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Of course I'm...

...just proving a point. Manning is great, and probably also better than his dad.

by jocre on Jun 24, 2008 5:21 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

yeah you're right

Wayne, Clark, Addai, Saturday..those guys all suck.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 24, 2008 10:18 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I never saw the 1975 Saints

but unless they were comically inept, Archie had an awful awful year. It’s not like that was a normal year for him. He got a lot better.

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by shake n bake on Jun 24, 2008 5:22 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I did and they were comically inept

for most of their franchise’s exsistence. Guess who was the first team that lost to the Bucs team that lost 26 straight games, arguably the worst team of all time.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 24, 2008 10:20 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

He played badly

for whatever reason. I don’t think the reason matters that much on the single season worsts. It’s not like they are saying he sucked as a QB like the numbers say about Joey Harrington or any of the other worsts.

He was a good QB that had a very bad season on an awful team. That a good QB had a bad season doesn’t prove that the method is flawed. If he was up there on the career worsts like you had thought after misreading the article then you would have an argument.

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by shake n bake on Jun 24, 2008 10:28 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

my whole point

is you can’t pass judgment on a QB by numbers because his play is absolutely dependent on 10 other guys which is why using numbers in football for individual players is ridiculous.

This isn’t baseball where numbers are a very accurate indication of how good a player is. Baseball is essentially a one on one game, pitcher v. hitter, whereas football is the most team oriented sport there is. If a QB has receivers who can’t run routes, get open or catch the ball he isn’t going to complete passes, its that simple, no matter how good he is. He also isn’t going to succeed if his OL doesn’t block for him or his RBs, if he’s always in 3rd and long situations.

To me, the ultimate worth of a QB is this..does he get his team in the endzone on a regular basis and when it matters the most and like i said, thats totally dependent on the talent around him. All the other stats are really meaningless unless you play fantasy football.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 25, 2008 8:54 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

That is pathetic.

You argue that stats don’t matter because a QB depends on a supporting cast to get them, which is out of his control. Then you say that what matters is getting his team in the endzone on a regular basis (which would show up in the stats) and when it matters the most, which you then admit is dependent on his supporting cast, which again is out of his control. Same thing. If the support stinks, either way he suffers. Your “ultimate worth” is just as flawed.

I realize that you are desperate to discount stats so that you can better defend many Cowboys players who don’t have good stats, but please. Soon all that is left to measure a player is blind homerism, which you are particularly good at demonstrating.

Best QB in football? Joey Harrington. Never mind his stats or his endzone appearances or whatever. He doesn’t have a good supporting cast, so the stats don’t matter. He is better than Romo by far. If he had Romo’s tools (including the “best OL in football”), he would post better stats than Romo. I said so, and I know football talent when I see it.

by coltsfanawalt on Jun 25, 2008 10:06 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

They really sucked

Their fans wore bags on their heads. They really sucked

by BetterD on Jun 25, 2008 5:01 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Where the hell does Terry come up with this crap to argue about? I mean seriously, Archie was as good as Peyton? Wow.

Go Colts!

by KingRichard on Jun 25, 2008 1:47 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

did you ever see Archie actually play King Dick?

If not, you have no room to say anything.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 25, 2008 8:41 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Another stupid argument

I never saw Babe Ruth play, but am convinced that he was one of the all time greats. One does not need to have personal experience to evaluate a player, that’s ludicrous. In your world, 99% of sports analysis would be impossible.

As for Archie, I did see him play. He was a very good QB, whose numbers would have undoubtedly be better if he had not been stuck on wretched teams all his life. However he was clearly no Peyton. You, all the Pats fans, and everybody else who tries to claim that Peyton is good but not great fails miserably. This is not just blind homerism. Ask any objective sports analyst. As shake n bake points out in this post, in only 10 seasons, Peyton already has five of the top 50 seasons for a QB. He is racing up the charts of every major QB statistic and - barring injury - will likely own all the records before he is through. People can legitimately argue whether he is the greatest, but nobody who knows anything about football can legitimately argue that he is not at least one of the greatest.

Here again, you see the world in black and white. Your tendency to do this dooms almost every argument you make. Yes stats don’t tell the whole story about a player. That is a given. But that doesn’t mean that they tell ABSOLUTELY NO story either. Good models do what they can to adjust for the deficiencies of stats, as this model has.

I find it interesting that in the past you have made comments about the Colts’ supporting cast that imply that the only reason they’re so good is because of Peyton. For one example, in a recent discussion about Terry Glenn, you said that he was as good as Marvin and would have similar stats if he had a QB as good as Peyton throwing to him throughout his career. To me (and to any reasonable person) this means that you believe that Marvin’s success is possible because of Peyton’s superior play.

Now however, you seem to be implying that Archie was just as good as Peyton and that Peyton’s success is possible because of the superior play of his supporting cast.

Let’s review: you’re saying that Peyton is not as good as he looks and only has the success that he does because of his supporting cast which is not as good as it looks and only has success because of Peyton. Whew, now there’s a Terry argument if I ever heard one!

Now go ahead and talk about how you never made any of those arguments, or about how your logical inconsistencies don’t really exist because you say so….

by ctnyc on Jun 25, 2008 11:43 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

those aren't logical inconsistencies

those are very consistent arguments. First of all, I never said once Manning wasn’t a great qb, you just assume that because I’m comparing him to his dad who you only thought was very good.

My argument is that every football player, especially skill players, are completely dependent on each other to succeed, that is a fact whether you want to admit it or not.

So of course Mannings success depends on Harrison’s and his depends on Mannings. Thats true of every team and all players. To judge football players by stats is worthless, always has, always will be because their stats and success is completely dependent on factors outside of their control, such as their teammates playing well also.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 25, 2008 1:56 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

tired agrument

Terry is doing the same thing that everyone that doesn’t like a change that is being made does. They scream and shout that the new way isn’t perfect. And it isn’t. There will never be a perfect way to evaluate players. But stats can give you a better look at a player. The great baseball example is from Moneyball. Paraphrased it’s:

The difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter is a hit a every two weeks. The difference between an average hitter and a great one is a hit every two weeks. It’s possible a team reporter who see every game could sense this difference over the course of a season, but it’s unlikely. How can a fan who sees maybe 3/4ths of their teams games tell the difference. There’s a good chance the .275 hitter has more hits in the games the fans sees.

Most don’t see and remember every play of a season and what/how each player does. Just watching the games isn’t a great way of telling how good a player is. Plays by a player will be forgotten, missed or unnoticed. It’s obviously better than not watching the game and pulling names from a hat, but it’s not perfect. Stats can give you a complete picture of what a player did, it may be distorted for various reasons, but many of those distortions can be corrected for pretty well. Stats aren’t perfect, but they allow a fan to get a full picture of what a player did and can put it into context on a level that the mind won’t remember (FO’s corrections for down, distance, score, time, etc).

Just because something new and imperfect comes along and changes the way we do something, that it’s imperfect doesn’t matter as long as it’s better than before. So lets stop arguing against progress and we’ll “get off your lawn”, “turn down our music” and “cut our damn hair, hippy”.

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by shake n bake on Jun 25, 2008 3:43 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

by using baseball as an example

you have proven my point that the only way to evaluate football players is to watch them, while stats is really the only way to evaluate baseball players. The evaluation process between football and baseball is like night and day.

and I have no clue what you mean by new way, stats have been in existence forever and misused by fans like yourself forever.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 25, 2008 4:31 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

the baseball example is about how just watching

fails, in player evaluation. Stats are being used more and more, new stats are being recorded and are being used in different ways. Look at the stuff Football Outsiders do. That’s new use of statistics.

Football has so much going on that it doesn’t just make it hard for statistics to separate out who is responsible for what it’s impossible for a person watching to see, recognize and remember everything that happens. Bluebulb1’s point on the specialization and levels of complexity in football applies to watching a game as well as stats. You don’t know by watching what was suppose to happen on the play.

I’ll take an unbiased objective recording of events to go along with by own observations, while you just spout homerism and claim it’s the undeniable truth even when it isn’t supported by what has actually happened.

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by shake n bake on Jun 25, 2008 4:56 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I've never claimed anything

to be an undeniable truth, just an opinion like every one else spouts on this site.

Problem is, you try to disguise your homerism by using numbers which is actually far worse IMO.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 26, 2008 11:15 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

yes using an objective record of events

to back my opinions is awful.

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by shake n bake on Jun 26, 2008 11:17 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

anybody knows

that you can use stats to make any kind of argument you want. They don’t tell the whole story. They can’t be used black and white proof that something is true or false, at least not in football, the sport just has too many variables outside of the control of the individual you’re evaluating.

In Romo we Trust

by Terry on Jun 26, 2008 11:32 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

All right, I'm back in

I was gonna let Terry continue to dig his own grave, but I gotta comment on one thing:

“To judge football players by stats is worthless, always has, always will be because their stats and success is completely dependent on factors outside of their control….” That is beautiful and quintessentially Terry. It’s a grandiose generalization that looks at only one aspect of a complicated question and makes an absolutist statement that is completely unsupported by real events.

Using that logic, all players are essentially equal. It doesn’t really matter who you have at QB. Ryan Leaf=Peyton Manning=Joey Harrington=Joe Montana. Some have good stats and success, but they’re actually all interchangeable. This is because any success they might enjoy is not due to their talent, but is “completely dependent on factors outside of their control.”

Now Terry will likely claim that this is not what he meant. But it does not matter. His argument is obviously logically flawed. It’s basically scientific method: Terry has put forth a theory. The theory can be used to “prove” things that are obviously not true and can be easily disproved by better, more rigorously tested theories (i.e. a player’s talent IS related to his success). Therefore Terry’s theory is invalid.

Kind of like how the theory that the Sun revolves around the Earth is invalid. None of us can leave the solar system to watch the relative movements of celestial bodies, but only the ignorant or insane still make the argument that it’s the Earth that is the center of everything.

Of course Terry would argue that since we haven’t actually observed the Earth revolving around the Sun, we “have no room to say anything.”

by ctnyc on Jun 26, 2008 12:00 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I like your posts.

by coltsfanawalt on Jun 25, 2008 1:57 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Stats have a place, but it's not always where you think it is

I love the Moneyball point (my favorite non-fiction book of all time). But before you jump on the stats bandwagon, you must be careful. In Moneyball, Lewis makes a point of showing that while stats are important, not all stats are important because they involve things that are not in the player’s control. RBI is a great example for this because it depends a lot on who got on base before the player comes to the plate.

Now in another book “America’s Game” the author talks about how specialized Football is. And how it’s ridiculous for someone who doesn’t know what the play was to criticize the execution of the play. (This applies to even football professionals who aren’t on the team – let alone lay people like 99% of the viewers.) Behind every dropped catch there are a lot of factors that come into play – did the QB throw right, did the WR run the route properly, did the O-line fail to block, or did the offense play perfectly but were they flat-out outplayed by the defense? Same goes for every made play – did the WR bail out the QB or did the QB avoid the rush to make a clever play? What stat book will show everything that went into the Manning-Tyree catch?

I will go to my grave believing that Peyton is the greatest QB of all time, but that’s not because he appeared on this list which could not possibly have taken into account the details of every single play every QB ever played. Of course, it’s sweet to see his name on this list but that’s about it.

by Bluebulb1 on Jun 25, 2008 4:02 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

not perfect, better

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by shake n bake on Jun 25, 2008 4:07 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Sometimes I wonder

if Terry isn’t actually this ignorant, but maybe he says outlandish things that he knows are ridiculous to cause a stir. Maybe he sits at home while sipping coffee and grins over the fact that we think he is actually as dumb as he sounds. Then he thinks of another farfetched statement and eagerly types it for a response by puzzled Colts fans. That seems just as likely as the notion that he means the things we read.

Then again, maybe he is that crazy…

by coltsfanawalt on Jun 25, 2008 5:31 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs