Of Fumbles and Quarterbacks (part 2)

What I did to start was take every passer in NFL history who threw more than 2000 passes in his career. This gave me 126 quarterbacks, the guys who have (arguably) played the position the most. Obviously, you can't simply look at their raw numbers of fumbles... 64 fumbles by Jay Schroeder isn't the same as 64 fumbles by Jim Everett, who played roughly twice as much in his career. So, using pass attempts as an analog for playing time, I divided fumbles by attempts to get a working rate.

This resulted in a fairly normal distribution (a bell curve) around 1.81%. The average quarterback in the pool fumbled 1.81 times for every 100 attempts. The standouts? There were five quarterbacks under 1.00: Joey Harrington, Joe Montana, Joe Namath, Peyton Manning, and Bert Jones. There were also five above 3.00: Rodney Peete, Don Meredith, Tony Banks, David Carr, and Daunte Culpepper.

The top group looks like we're playing a game of "which one of these things is not like the others", doesn't it? (Some younger fans might not remember Bert Jones all that well, but he did win an MVP award.) More importantly, there's a huge difference between the top and bottom of the list... Daunte Culpepper fumbles once per 31.36 attempts; Bert Jones dropped the ball once every 174.88 attempts. That's an enormous gap, and clearly meaningful.

However, this isn't precisely fair, is it? Running quarterbacks are getting the shaft, since they will as a group have far more rushes than pocket passers, and this quick and dirty method looks pretty dirty as a result. So we'll keep working.