Season Long NFC North Discussion Thread

The Game Room
1001

Thanks to the guys at Cold Hard Football Facts.com:

Linky

"History also remembers Starr’s Packers as a great running team, and that’s certainly true of their earlier years. But the truth is that they typically passed the ball more effectively than they ran it, especially during their run of three straight, when they were a below-average running team.

In their 1965 championship season, the Packers were 11th in the 14-team league with an average of 3.4 yards per rushing attempt. They were second in the league, with an average of 8.2 yards per passing attempt.

In their 1966 championship season, the Packers were 14th in the 15-team league, with an average of 3.5 yards per rushing attempt. They were first in the league, with an average of 8.9 yards per passing attempt.

In their 1967 championship season, the Packers were 4th in the 16-team league, with an average of 4.0 yards per rushing attempt. They were first in the league, with an average of 8.3 yards per passing attempt (Starr himself that season averaged 8.7 YPA).

Starr averaged a remarkable 7.85 YPA over the course of his entire career, the 8th-best mark in history, and better than that of a slate of quarterbacks who are generally regarded as the best passers in history, including Dan Marino (7.37), Joe Montana (7.52), Roger Staubach (7.67), Dan Fouts (7.68), Sonny Jurgensen (7.56), Fran Tarkenton (7.27), Y.A. Tittle (7.52), Terry Bradshaw (7.17) and Joe Namath (7.35).

Six times in the 1960s, Starr surpassed 8.2 YPA for a season. To put that into context, Peyton Manning has surpassed 8.2 YPA just twice in his brilliant 10-year career.

And, if you want drama, don’t forget that Starr scored the winning TD in the Ice Bowl, probably the most famous game in NFL history. Sure, Montana led his team 92 yards for the game-winning score in Super Bowl XXIII. But he did it on a 68-degree night in Miami. Turn down the thermostat by 86 degrees (it was 18-below in the fourth quarter of the Ice Bowl) and you begin to approximate the conditions under which the greatest quarterback in NFL history operated during his greatest moment in the sport’s greatest game.

And Starr was brilliant on that drive, in the decisive moments of the sport’s most famous game: he completed 5 of 5 passes in ball-busting cold, and then called a run play for the winning score. But instead of handing it off, he decided in his mind, without telling his teammates, that he was going to punch it in himself. It was only fitting: the game’s greatest signal-caller taking matters into his own hands in the sport’s signature moment."

1002

That YPA is inflated by the fact that he threw like 4 passes per game.

I wouldn’t put Bart Starr ahead of Trent Dilfer, much less Brett Favre.

1003

How does that work? (I’m not saying it doesn’t. I just mean the connection isn’t obvious to me.)

1004

Oh, I didn’t “forget.” I referred to it in my last post, in fact. For the first half of my life, give or take, that was the best, nay, the only great Packer story there was :wink:

I’d still be careful comparing yards per attempt, though. Offenses didn’t rely on short passes in the 60s the way they did later. When you threw, you threw deep.

That’s what makes these comparisons hard so hard. Ten years from now we’ll be arguing about whether all of Rodgers’s 4,000 yard seasons mean anything in an era when that’s practically the norm, compared to the 90s when only crappy run-and-shoot teams put up those kinds of numbers, and 3,000 yards was MVP material.

ETA: To clarify, I’m not agreeing with Dio. I’m just saying that the Lombardi Packers didn’t rely on 5-yard screen passes and TE square-outs like the Holmgren offense did, to say nothing of the empty-backfield, 3-yard slant on the goal line that is so common today.

1005

Not worth it.

1006

YPA is still strongly correlated to wins, though. As in, if you only get to look at one stat from a box score and have to predict who won the game based on that, YPA is the stat that will let you correctly guess the winner more than any other.

1007

Fair enough. I didn’t really mean to derail the thread anyway, and I can see that Hamlet also has better things to do.

Besides, the real debate is and will always be: Rodney Peete or Scott Mitchell?

1008

Incompletions. The more passes you throw, the more incompletions you’re going to have, and those are the zeroes that bring down passer YPA’s. Throwing 40 or 50 times is normal these days, and that means a lot more incompletions than the days of Bart Starr throwing 10 or 15 times per game.

1009

I am no match for Diogenes’ alternate universe logic.

1010

I will cut you, fool.

We never mention the name of the player that wore number 19.

1011

I’m reminded of my debate with Omni years ago about Roethlisberger. I argued he was great based on his passer rating, while Omni argued that his rating was inflated due to throwing so few passes. Being the good anal retentive doper I am I downloaded the profrootballreference database and ran the numbers, only to confirm exactly what Omni said. The more passes you throw, the lower your passer rating goes.

I also remember that Ben had crazy high YPA numbers. Looking them up now, he had 8.9 in his rookie season, and then 8.9 again in his second year. Insanely high. He also threw fewer than 300 times in both those seasons.

The conclusion, I guess, is that a good case can be made that the mechanism by which fewer attempts inflates the passer rating is by inflating YPA, which is 25% of the passer rating formula.

I wasn’t actually disagreeing with you. I think your point is dead-on that YPA (among other things) makes comparisons across eras inconclusive. I was just saying that YPA is still a very good stat. We just need to remember that it only works when comparing contemporaries.

1012

WHAT misguided New Math did YOU learn as a youngster??? :smack:
As long as completion percentage rates stay roughly the same, YPA won’t be affected by low or high numbers of attempts. Do the math. :rolleyes:
Oh, wait, maybe you are incapable of that much math. So let’s do it for you.

Attempts: 10; Completions 6 (60%). Yards per each completion: 10. Total yards: 60. Yards per attempt (YPA): 6.0

Attempts: 30; Completions 18 (60%). Yards per each completion: 10. Total yards: 180. Yards per attempt (YPA): 6.0

For the record, Starr only completed 57% of his passes for his career. His best year ever, 1966, he managed a 66% completion rate. By comparison, Peyton Manning’s is 65%, and for the last 8 years has averaged around the best year Starr ever had.

So your statement about Starr is incorrect, Dio. As in WRONG. Totally and completely wrong. Wrong in all ways it can be wrong. :smack:

1013

But you DO mention the name of Rodney Peete? :confused::eek:

1014

While your math is sound, actual stats don’t seem to bear out your premise. Let’s look at just Peyton Manning’s season totals sorted by number of attempts:

2002 591 7.1
1998 575 6.5
2000 571 7.7
2009 571 7.9
2003 566 7.5
2006 557 7.9
2008 555 7.2
2001 547 7.6
1999 533 7.8
2007 515 7.8
2004 497 9.2
2005 453 8.3

There does seem to be a correlation between attempts and YPA.

1015

The only stat with a reliable win correlation is PS/PA.

1016

Actually, scratch that. After digging up that database I ran the numbers for this question, and they show the exact opposite. YPA climbs as attempts increase.

The data is 4-5 years old, but it contains a crapload of player seasons. I filtered out all player seasons with fewer than 200 attempts.


Seasons  Attempts   YPA
-------  --------   ---
     2    650+      6.9
    14    600-649   6.8
    45    550-599   7.1
    90    500-549   7.1
   121    450-499   7.1
   108    400-449   6.9
   107    350-399   6.9
   101    300-349   6.9
    97    250-299   6.8
    97    200-249   6.7
1017

It’s not a causative correlation, I’m sure. I mean, it’s not like you can just throw more and necessarily get more yards per catch. It’s just that good passers throw a lot and throw further, pass-happy offenses throw a lot and throw further.

1018

I think it’s more about throwing more short passes which have a higher completion percentage. There are only so many incompletions you can throw in a single game and still have a chance to win, so if you want to throw more attempts you have to complete a higher percentage of them.

EDIT: I really want to run the same analysis on a per-game basis instead of per-season, but alas I don’t have raw game data, only season totals.

1019

I’m seeing attempts and yards, not completions and yards. If the completions are commiserate with your theory, I accept it. But averages a poor measure of what actually went on, especially because YACs are tacked on. So one 30 yard bomb followed by a sixty yard scamper amid eight incompletions looks the same as nine first-down throws around 10 yards each.

People take stats way too seriously. As problematic as they are in baseball, they at least always reflect a single player’s offensive performance. There’s no variable in football that can be removed from all the others.

1020

But that accuracy rating is going to go down the more passes you throw. It’s easy to go 70 or 80% in the short term than to go 70 for 100 in the long term.