Where Have all the QBs Gone?
By Appaloosa
January 2006
It was Christmas 2000 that I remember having a conversation with my step-dad, a part-time Jets fan who only takes an interest in the NFL when the Jets are winning. The past few years had seen the retirement of John Elway, Dan Marino, and Steve Young, and Troy Aikman was also on his way out. My step-dad was lamenting the passing of all the great quarterbacks and feeling depressed that it appeared that no one was waiting in the wings to take their place. I replied that I thought it might be the end of an era, but not the end of great quarterbacking – I said that Brett Favre would assume the role of elder statesman and that there were a bunch of young guys in their first few years in the league or still in college who would take the place of the QBs who left the league at the end of the 20th Century. I think time has shown that my prediction was correct. In recent years QBs every bit as good as the greats of the past who adorn the Hall of Fame have emerged in the NFL. Still, there are a number of sportswriters and others who complain that the current quality of quarterbacks is nowhere near as good as it was in the past. There is always a tendency to look at the past and remember only the good and forget the bad. I thought it was likely that those who complain about the current state of quarterbacking are only remembering the best of yesteryear and have forgotten the many forgettable passers who passed through the league. The only way to filter out the tint of rose-colored glasses was to use the statistics of the past and compare them to the present.
To try to make things as even as possible, I assembled the year’s stats of the top fifteen QBs in the league in five-year intervals starting in 1970 (the year of the NFL-AFL merger). I chose the top fifteen because that would provide enough depth to get past just the top few performers in any one year. It would have been difficult to assemble stats for more than fifteen QBs without using a selection process that would have biased my statistics. I wanted to get a close approximation of average QB play for the past 35 years. Once I had assembled the passing yards, completion percentage, touchdown passes, interceptions, and attempts for the top fifteen QBs (based on passing yardage) for each of the selected years, I calculated the QB ratings. Then, to obtain an overall view of the quarterbacking quality for that year, I averaged the calculated ratings. Due to rule changes to encourage the passing game and improvements in training and conditioning, the average QB rating has risen in the past 35 years. The most remarkable thing about that fact is that the rise has been remarkably steady over the years. There have been few anomalously high or low years, but the mean QB rating has remained at a steady 86 to 87 since 1995.
In an earlier article on the comparative careers of Hall of Fame and probable Hall of Fame QBs since WWII, I calculated a regression line for QBs ratings. The calculated regression (slope of the line) was 0.421, which means that QB ratings among Hall of Fame QBs have improved by an average of 4.2 points per decade. The regression for the top fifteen QBs since 1970 is an astoundingly similar 0.433. In other words, it’s not the just best who have been getting better, but everyone else has been keeping pace, hardly an indication that the overall quality of QBs has been going downhill.
But just in case you might think that a few really elite QBs are keeping up everyone’s average, I calculated a standard deviation (variation around the average) for each of the years in question. Again, the numbers were remarkable for their stability. As can be seen in Figure 1, the standard deviation shows virtually no deviation from about 1985 until the present. The only year that the standard deviation exceeded 11 was 1975, when the average raging was at its lowest.
Based on the results of the statistical tests described above, I think we can say that the level of quarterbacking in the NFL has not taken as much of a dive as some writers seem to think. There has been a change of guard at the position starting in around 1999, but by no means indicates any true decrease in quality.
