The system is flawed. It was created when the best quarterbacks in the league would complete about 50% of their passes and today that's a bad game for many of the league's elite. Still pretty cool to have a Jet on an all-time list for something positive.
Yes, but its easy to forget that hes in his first season in an offense thats completely different from anything else hes ever run in his pro or collegiate experience. I think hes done remarkably well, given the circumstances.
Haha seriously. They need to rework that stat, and severely downgrade completion percentage while increasing TD and ypa weight.
Haha, Brian Griese 16th all time in passer rating and he can't get off the bench with Rex Grossman in front of him.
As others have noted, the passer rating was invented at a time when completion percentages were much lower, with many starting QBs having values below 50%. At the time the average value of the passer rating in the NFL was about 75, I believe. There is actually a trivial way to correct for this problem; rather than report passer rating for someone, report their rating value divided by the league's passer rating (combining all QBs together) for that year. Thus, a value of 1.00 is what a QB who is average for the league that year would get. This would easily correct for the way that the game changes over time, and would create a much better measure of relative performance that could be (at least somewhat) meaningful when comparing QBs from different eras. It wouldn't be perfect, but at least nobodies like Brian Griese, Rich Gannon, and Brad Johnson wouldn't be at the top of the list any more. It would also make clearer just how great Otto Graham and Sonny Jurgensen were.
Rich Gannon won a league MVP and went to 4 Pro Bowls. Brian Griese will weed himself off the list should he get another starting job. The difference in the passing game today post West Coast Offense makes it difficult to compare players from different generations. However, the current QB rating system (Yards Per Attempt/Completions Per Attempt/TD-INT per attempt) is the best measure of performance around. You won't find the likes of John Elway or Troy Aikman on that list because, while they played some very big games that defined their careers, they were both very mediocre passers for much of their career who made poor decisions with the football. The quarterbacks job is to move the ball down the field, limit mistakes, and produce points. QB rating is the best measure for the modern system. As it regards older quarterbacks,the only way to really accurately measure their performance is by comparing it to that of their peers. -X-
There is no list in the universe (other than passer rating) that would put Rich Gannon among the top 20 QBs all-time in the NFL. If the rating actually was designed to measure the ability to move the ball down the field, limit mistakes, and produce points, it would weight more heavily passing yards and TDs, and less heavily completion percentage, since the latter measure has little to do with moving down the field or producing points. Since it was invented before the advent of the modern passing game, I don't see anything that suggests that it is the best measure for that system. As I said in my original post, however, it probably isn't too awful in comparing most people playing at the same time, but it does a terrible job of comparing QBs with different styles, whether in the same time period or (even more so) across time periods.
