Comeback Kings
Quarterback Performance in the 4th Quarter 1970-2008
By Appaloosa
February 2009
Introduction
One aspect of quarterback play that really sticks in the memory of the NFL fan is the fourth quarter comeback. Nearly 20 years later, Elway’s “The Drive” is still famous. Several quarterbacks have been nicknamed “Captain Comeback” because of their fourth quarter heroics. The reputation for being “clutch” is one of the things that can get a quarterback voted into the Hall of Fame. However, there is no really quantitative way of assessing the “clutchness” of a quarterback, so the arguments over who is a comeback king versus who is merely a joker often come down to selective memory or raw totals of career comebacks. In the following article, I attempt to assign a number to the clutchness of a quarterback and try to answer some of the questions I have seen on various NFL message boards.
Before I venture into the meat of my study, I would like to mention a few caveats. As has often been stated, the glamour boy quarterbacks always get too much credit when his team wins and too much blame when the team loses. Many fourth quarter comebacks have been the result of the defense getting a timely turnover or special teams running a kick back for a touchdown. Fourth quarter losses can be due to things beyond a signal caller’s control such as fumbles by running backs or stupid penalties by the defense. Because of the scope of this study, these factors have been largely ignored. However, I believe that good luck and bad luck generally cancel each other out and that ultimately most fourth quarter comebacks and blown saves (to use a baseball term) are the responsibility of the quarterback.
Data Selection
This study of comebacks is based on the careers of all quarterbacks who entered the league after the 1970 merger and who started a minimum of 100 regular season games. Fifty-five signal-callers from Terry Bradshaw to Drew Brees meet these criteria. For each quarterback I recorded total number of starts, number of wins, number of losses, number of fourth quarter wins, number of blown saves, the number of points the quarterback contributed to his team, the total number of points scored by the team when the quarterback started, and career passer rating. All numbers are for the regular season only because most of the statistics available are for the regular season. As playoff statistics are generally kept separate from regular season statistics, including playoff statistics would have required recalculating a lot of career numbers.
For the purposes of this study fourth quarter wins were defined as victories won when the team was behind or tied at the end of the third quarter. In the case of overtime, fourth quarter efforts that tied the game followed by a victory in overtime were counted as come from behind victories. Overtime losses after game tying efforts were not counted.
Blown saves were defined as losses in which the team led at the end of the third quarter. Again, in the case of overtime, the only losses that counted against the quarterback were ones where his team blew the lead and lost in overtime.
As a rough measure of a quarterback’s contribution to the total scoring of his team, I added up each player’s career touchdown passes and rushing touchdowns and multiplied the result by 7. This number was compared to the total number of points scored by the quarterback’s team in each game in started. As described below, these numbers were used in an attempt to identify which quarterbacks were most responsible for their team’s success instead of being mainly game managers.
By the Numbers
Currently the titleholder for most fourth quarter comebacks in a career is Dan Marino with 33 based on the definition given above. Marino is followed by Warren Moon and Peyton Manning (28 each), Jake Plummer (24), and John Elway and Vinny Testaverde (23 each). The quarterback with the fewest fourth quarter comebacks to date is Kurt Warner with 6 followed by Bobby Hebert (7) and Archie Manning, Jim Everett, Richard Todd, and Matt Hasselbeck with 8 each.
The player with a minimum of 100 career starts with the fewest blown saves is Tom Brady with only a single regular season blown save to his name. Tied for second place are Neil O’Donnell and Kurt Warner with 4. Dan Pastonini, Joe Theismann, and Jake Plummer each had 9 career blown saves. The all time champion for career blown saves was Vinny Testaverde with 30, followed by Boomer Esiason with 26. Dan Fouts, Warren Moon, and Drew Bledsoe are tied for third with 24 a piece.
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