Interesting analysis. I would be curious to see you back up your last statement with some statistics. How does Favre's TD-pass percentage stack up against the all-time greats? It might be prudent to examine as well a couple of the current touchdown machines, most notably Peyton Manning.
"Nonstopdrivel" wrote:
There are two comparisons to be made. The first is a player relative to the era he played in. I made that in the previous post showing Favre has been better at throwing TDs than the league average during his career. That establishes him as one of the best of his era. To your point, where does that put him versus the other top QBs in history? I'll present several datasets and make a few more comments at the end.
Let's look first at that same list of QBs we examined for INT%, this time for TD% (TD passes/attempts).
Favre 5.0
Elway 4.1
Montana 5.1
Young 5.6
Aikman 3.5
Staubach 5.2
Marino 5.0
Unitas 5.6
Starr 4.8
Fouts 4.5
Brady 5.4
Manning 5.6
Blanda 5.9
You'll see here, Favre falls solidly among the other top QBs. In fact, statistically Favre and Marino are nearly identical in both TDs and INTs. Elway and Aikman surprisingly do not fare as well. You'll notice Blanda has an eye popping 5.9 (I'll explain how this is impacted by the era he played in) which is part of the reason he's in the Hall of Fame. Again, I think Montana and Young come out looking stellar especially when you factor in their significantly lower INT%s. They were ahead of the curve. Some of that can be attributed to playing in a system that was ahead of the league, but they still had to execute that system. Interestingly, Brady's career was much closer to Fouts/Starr until last season skewed his average higher. Manning right now compares with Young.
Next the top ten TD passers:
Favre 464 5.0
Marino 420 5.0
Tarkenton 342 5.3
Manning 333 5.6
Elway 300 4.1
Moon 291 4.3
Unitas 290 5.6
Testaverde 275 4.1
Montana 273 5.1
Kreig 261 4.9
You can see here Favre and Marino are solidly in the middle for TD% for the top ten TD passers. Six of the 10 on this list are in the Hall of Fame, and Favre and Manning will make it 8. Kreig was surprising to me, and if you look at his years throwing to Largent, he had some fantastic TD%s (even leading the league a few times). You'll notice a lot of the same names from the INT leaders. In fact, the top 20 of both lists are pretty much the same players just in a different order.
The fact is that players who turn the ball over at higher than average rates are not in the league very long. The ones who end up at the top of the All-Time lists are the ones who got there because they played more games. They played more games because they were good QBs. It's counterintuitive to think that being an all-time INT leader is an indicator of greatness, but let's be honest, bad QBs don't start for 15 years or get the chance to make it far up the all-time list. That's why the INT total isn't as useful an indicator as the ratio of INTs to attempts or even INTs to TDs.
Lastly, I'd like to point out some long term trends. The TD% over time has been largely stable. From the 40s through the 60s the league average was a little more than 5%. From the 70s to the present it has been consistently around 4%. This shows again that teams are passing more, but they're also becoming more sophisticated thereby keeping the number stable. The INT% has come down steadily. In the 40s-60s it ranged between 7-10%. In the 60s-80s it was between 5-6%. In the 80s it was about 4%, and over the last 20 years has been in the 3s. This is why it's useful to compare a QB against the average for the era in which he played. It shows, for example, how a George Blanda can be in the Hall of Fame with such a high INT%. Those numbers are indicative of the era he played in. This season for the first time in history, the league average was below 3% at 2.8%.
For comparison, Rodgers this year was at 2.4 for INTs which is close to the league average. However, on TDs he was at 4.9% well above the league average of 3.9%.
Where does this leave us? It shows again that Marino, Manning, Young, Montana, Unitas, and Favre are the top QBs of all-time. Each had his strengths to give support to their case for being the best ever. What sets Favre apart is his longevity, both in how long he has played and how many games he's played. Those factors along with things like the evolution of the passing game and the additional games (16 week season vs 12 or 14 in the past) account for Favre's high totals. He wasn't throwing a record number of TDs each year, but he was throwing them at a higher than average rate consistently for a longer period than anyone else had.