All Time QB Rankings

In honor of the NFL starting out a new season tomorrow night, I'm going to do a ranking of the top 25 QBs in league history.

Now, how do you go about doing something like that? Anyone's list is ultimately going to be based on opinions, but nobody's opinion will be based on seeing the entire careers of more than a couple of players. Broad opinions are necessarily going to be based on secondhand reports, hearsay, and guesswork. This is why, while statistics are not capable of conveying the whole story, they are fundamental to any attempt to rank players, even across eras.

What goes into making up a good quarterback? Well, to get the whole picture, you need to know how good one is as a passer, clearly. Some quarterbacks make a huge contribution to their team with their legs as well, so evaluating them as runners is also very important. If you compare John Elway to Dan Marino and don't take Elway's running into consideration, you've failed miserably. While it's hard to quantify, a quarterback's qualities as a leader are also important, though impossible to quantify. Some passers are better at avoiding sacks and fumbles than others, and while they aren't a huge part of the picture, they are significant. How long a quarterback plays is also important. A player who plays at a high level for fifteen years has had a better career than one who plays for seven.

And then there's winning. While evaluating one player, even one as important as a quarterback, by a team accomplishment might seem ridiculous, it's generally a hugely important part of how people evaluate quarterbacks. And really, while many of the lists people produce purport to rank players by their ability, in practical terms, they rank them according to the quality of their actual careers, which are influenced by a myriad of other factors.

But how to compare quarterbacks across eras? A young modern fan, upon looking up the statistics of a luminary of yesteryear, say, a Bart Starr or a Roger Staubach, is unlikely to be impressed by their passing accomplishments. The game has changed. What I will be relying upon will be the "+" statistics available from the indispensable Pro Football Reference site. Staubach's completion percentage of 57.0 might not look terribly good in the context of the modern game, but his completion percentage +, or Cmp%+, of 114 tells us that he was actually well above the standards set by his contemporaries in this area.

And what categories will we use? Well, in passing, we'll use the + statistics derived from three of the four elements that go into the NFL's official passer rating.
1) Yards per attempt plus (Y/A+)
2) Touchdown percentage plus (TD%+)
3) Interception percentage plus (INT%+)

Now, why not the fourth statistic, completion percentage? Well, if you think about it, yards per attempt can be seen as a combination of two other statistics, completion percentage and yards per reception. One of the major drawbacks of the NFL's official passer rating is that it drastically overvalues completion percentage, counting it once as a full quarter of the system by itself, and then as one of the component parts of yards per attempt. Advanced methods of analyzing passing statistics always come to the same conclusion: yards per attempt is the most important simple statistic you can look at to determine the quality of a passing game, and in practice, it is the least important of the four categories in the NFL's official rating. Now, since the Football Reference site doesn't have a category for Yards Per Reception Plus, we'll simply eliminate completion percentage from our calculation and count Y/A+ more heavily.

Next, we'll cover the running ability of quarterbacks. That will be accomplished by looking at their average yards per game.
4) Rushing Yards per game.
This isn't perfect, or even close to it, but it will give us a rough estimate of how much a player's running ability impacted his team.

Next, we'll cover two often overlooked and very much entwined aspects of a quarterback's game, his fumbling, and his ability to avoid sacks. People often assume that a quarterback being sacked is the fault of his offensive line, if blame must be assigned. In fact, a quarterback's style and habits have an awful lot to do with how much he winds up being sacked. Good or bad sack percentages follow quarterbacks from year to year and team to team with more regularity than their TD% or INT%, indicating strongly that there is a real ability involved. Quarterback fumbles have been discussed in this space before. There is a wide range to the spectrum of how good quarterbacks are at holding onto the football. How likely they are to be hit is also a major factor in how often they drop the ball, so their proclivity for running or being sacked has an impact here. So, we'll have:
5) Sack%+
6) Fumble%

Then we'll also have to give quarterbacks points for winning and for longevity.
7) Winning
8) Longevity
Leadership, as we discussed, is important, but we'll have to assume that good leadership must lead to more positive results on the field, so we're already measuring it via the other categories.

I'll do lists in all eight categories, showing the top 25 in each. The tenth post in this series will compile them all, and reveal my picks for the top QBs of all time.