I've been working on a QB ranking project, which assigns value to various data points to create a ranking. Please note - this is an adjustable system where you can change the weight of various accomplishments. Personally, I'd have Montana over Manning to begin with and Eli/Rivers would be much lower than 30. This default setting below, though, is as a Hall of Fame measure,
as it's able to go through the first 52 players before it finds a player who fails the Hall of Fame yes/no test (Joe Namath, of course.) Every player before that is either active, not eligible, or
correctly placed above or below the threshhold, as you can see by the gold Hall of Fame designations. It's difficult to do this because if you change one setting or value, it effects every player, so getting all of the Hall of Famers above 10.00 and non Hall of Famers below 10.00 has consquences up the list, especially where you'd like to see some "tiebreakers" come out another way based on common sense.
So, here are the data points that I put in:
- WinDEX: League Championships, Championships Appearances, Playoff Wins & Franchise (a formula using winning percentage). The first three are self-explanatory, but I should mention that Playoff Wins are ideal because they bridge pre-merger and post-merger. They give the modern QBs more opportunity to rack up points because it's harder to win it all. Franchise is a stat I created which is based on winning percentage and years played; it gives some points just for playing (winning at .60 like most QBs) but really rewards guys for long-term dominance. Franchise awards points for winning percentage with regard to seasons played and how far over .500.
- TrophyDEX: MVP, All-Pro, All-Star, All-NFL (that's all-decade or NFL100 team.) These are self-explanatory and just weighted. All of the rankings here are based on the idea that they're connected, so an MVP isn't worth more than an All-Pro because if you win an MVP, you're also winning an All-Pro and and All-Star, so all together that's a lot of points (same with championships, appearances, and playoffs.) Moon Score is something I added when Warren Moon and Georga Blanda kept coming up 20 slots below Hall of Fame and looks for undervalued career consistency that hasn't gotten enough accolade weight.
- RateDEX: I used a simple passer rating for every player on this one. There are definitely better measures of QB skills, but this isn't looking to be precise but just to get a general level of play. It's important to note, for example, a major difference in passer rating between two guys playing in the same era (Young/Aikman, Staubach/Bradshaw.) I created a formula which does two things with passer rating...first, it assigns points for pure passer rating, in a vaccuum, so basically you're just saying how is this guy compared to the most average QB in NFL history playing in 1963 with a passer rating of 72.3. That leads to recency bias, so the other half of it, the heavier weighted half, is to compare passer rating to the average of that era, or an era passer rating. It was pretty easy to calculate this (on average, passer rating goes up about 0.5 per year). I've also tried to create some incentive for long-term success and some disincentive for short term success (Mahomes, Jackson, etc.), but efficiency itself is weighed more heavily than longivity. Both of these categories are adjustable for fine tuning. But please note that by adjustments, I mean must apply to all, so there's no selective changes.
I'll probably post my actual QB rankings (opnion) later on, which doesn't depend on Hall of Fame status/consistency but is scored based on what I see as important, personally.
View attachment 30847
en.wikipedia.org
