Let's dig into this. I just imported the passer rating from every NFL season, so that we get a precise era-adjusted score based on each season, run separately for each QB. Here are their passer ratings for each player, adjusted 100% for their era (example: Young's passer rating is 96.8; an average QB who played in the seasons he played in, would be 20.5 points lower, at 76.3.)
Young - 20.5
Staubach - 17.6
Montana - 17.5
Manning - 14.2
This is where I'm saying there's an opportunity for Manning to be de-ranked because he wasn't an outlier, and there were outliers. The problems with Young and Staubach are their shorter careers; I've tried to bridge the gap via USFL and Navy credit, and as I indicated in the last post, taking a look at what happens when we focus more on the raw efficiency instead of multiplying it by seasons played. But with Manning, the other problem is his postseason stuff isn't perfect, but there's a big volume of it, too.
On the Marino/Elway part, I can understand why it looks like recency bias, but I don't think recency bias is really what's happening here when I look at why the rankings are coming in that way. Here are the era-adjusted passer ratings:
Rodgers - 16.3
Brees - 13.3
Marino - 10.2
Favre - 6.7
Elway - 3.7
I can understand a case for Elway. He won two Super Bowls and made it to five. With the formula on there, he's basically at the top (besides Brady) along with Montana and Bradshaw for postseason points. It seems like a reasonable argument that he's a stronger overall player than Brees, Rodgers, and Favre, and perhaps his stats don't tell the entire story because he also had the legs.
With Elway, though, his case as a winner is somewhat maxed out with his postseason success because his career winning pct doesn't put him in some outlier class with the likes of Staubach, Brady, Montana, etc. Here are the overall winning percentages:
Rodgers - .66
Elway - .64
Marino - .63
Favre - .63
Brees - .60
Not a lot here to ramp up Marino either. With Marino, I've spent hours and hours searching for a hidden, missing component. And that's why I have the awards index, to look for cases like this where someone stands out and their performance isn't being picked up by the passer rating stat, winning pct, or postseason success. And the awards index
does help. Without them, Marino would be lucky to be in the top 35. But the awards index stops being effective when you run into other players who also have some major accolades:
Marino - 8 All-Pros, 9 Pro Bowls, 1 MVP
Elway - 3 All-Pros, 9 Pro Bowls
Breees - 6 All-Pros, 13 Pro Bowls
Favre - 6 All-Pros, 11 Pro Bowls, 3 MVPs
Rodgers - 4 All-Pros, 9 Pro Bowls, 3 MVPs
I've tried to find some way to milk Marino's All-Pros, though it's arguable that is overall awards index is even the best of that group; they all have some weight in different areas, and the overall flavor is: they're all really good players, good enough that one isn't standing out head and shoulders.
So, if you're seeing something I'm missing, I'm all open to it. I can't tell you how frustrated I've been in trying to find ways to uprank Marino and finding that there's dead ends everywhere. It has to raise the possibility that he was simply not as good as he appeared at his peak; after the 84 season, he's very good but a lot closer to Favre good; a 34 TD, 14 INT type of guy. We can start getting into some big statistical feats like touchdowns thrown, big time seasons, records, etc., but we are comparing him to other guys who have build their careers on the same type of stuff.
As for Elway, I'm thinking that perhaps another index besides passer rating (like net yards/attempt) might be able to look at him with his running stats too and perhaps find something that can boost him up (and not just him but others.) As it stands now, though, I think he's somewhere in that 10-13 range. Changing him in the intra-rankings wouldn't be that difficult to do because those guys are all within a few points. He may be ranked down there a little lower on some lists you've seen, and that, ironically, was due to an attempt to uprank Marino but putting less emphasis on titles
Tarkenton is the guy who can be moved up quickly based on some formula adjustments by emphasizing (a) longevity and (b) hsi era-adjusted passer rating. He can fly up the charts in the way that I had hoped Marino would be able to, but Tarkenton is an actual statistical outlier who can overcome his lack of postseason success; Marino just isn't...yet...until there's some new information that can be used.
