It's good that you and IIB have come pretty close with your rankings. It bodes well for the system. But I have to repeat this one last time:
Without touching on anyone but Manning, I'd say that he's still rated too high. But, if you're using the argument that Baugh is being moved because of incomplete information (something I've called a "quirk" in discussions about this elsewhere, I can understand it. And, for the sake of analysis, I could convince myself that, while I still put Young ahead of Manning, one could look at Young's early years as having been wasted enough to push him below Manning in a stats-driven analysis. But, still, putting Manning over Staubach doesn't make much sense to me, and the numbers show Staubach as the one who should be slotted higher.
11 year career, 8 as a full time starter
.78 regular season win pct.
.65 postseason win pct.
2-2 SB record
6 Pro Bowls
First team 1970s All Decade Team
Top 10 in passer rating every year as a starter save 1 a/k/a 7 times
#1 or #2 in league passer rating 5 of 7 seasons as the full time starter
And a bunch of other areas (yards/attempt, etc....) where he was stronger than Manning
Manning should be #9. I can accept an argument over Young, as noted. I can even accept him over Baugh by really squinting hard and talking about quirks, as noted. But #7 is his absolute ceiling, IMO, even with squinting.* So I've said my piece on this for the last time, but thought it deserved one more push.
* And I'm not worrying this bone because I'm picking on Peyton. I'm worrying this bone because Manning's ranking has been reflective of what seems to be a general recency bias (Brees, Favre, and Rogers over Marino and Elway? Seriously?).
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. I've even tried creating an entirely new column to help boost Marino's score, or at least give people the option to, and it would also boost guys like Moon, based on the idea that the lack of postseason success might be a team failure, so let's award some more points. It helps, but not in a major way, and it also boosts a certain Indy/Denver loser because, when you think about it, that's exactly the guy who also has fans clamoring about "10 championships if he played in New England."
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.
