Cold, Hard Football Facts.com: 2006 Passing Yards Per Attempt

(Passing yards per attempt is a "Quality Stat" because it has a direct correlation to winning football games. Click here to read more about this "Stat That Matters.")

Where have you gone, Daryle Lamonica?

Passing yards per attempt gives us perhaps the most amazing stat of the 2006 season: Nine teams averaged more yards per rush attempt than the dreadful Raiders did per pass attempt.

Oakland picked up a pathetic 4.36 yards, dead last in the NFL, every time its various quarterbacks dropped back to pass.

Atlanta, Jacksonville, San Francisco, San Diego, Philadelphia, Tennessee, N.Y. Giants, Washington and Denver all gained an average of greater than 4.36 yards every time they ran the ball.

No shock here, meanwhile: The Colts boasted the best passing attack in football this year, based upon the all-important passing yards per attempt figure.

The shock, though, is that three NFC teams rounded out the top four: the Saints, Eagles and Cowboys. It's one area where the NFC playoff participants stack up solidly against their AFC counterparts. But much of that might have to do with the piss-poor quality of defenses throughout the conference: Six of the seven worst pass defenses of 2006 resided in the NFC.

Remember, we like passing yards per attempt because it cuts through the complex clutter of the passer rating formula and has a direct correlation to winning football games. Here's why passing YPA is a "Stat That Matters." Essentially, passing YPA tells you everything passer rating does, but with a much easier-to-understand number.

NOTE: Most stat-keepers do not calculate passing YPA properly! If you want to know why our passing yards per attempt figures are more accurate than any others you'll find anywhere, see the footnotes after the chart below.

2006 PASSING YARDS PER ATTEMPT

	Team	Attempts	Yards	YPA
1	Indianapolis	572	4,308	7.53
2	New Orleans	603	4,503	7.47
3	Philadelphia	572	4,119	7.20
4	Dallas	543	3,836	7.06
5	Cincinnati	559	3,828	6.85
6	San Diego	494	3,262	6.60
7	Pittsburgh	572	3,733	6.53
8	Baltimore	541	3,435	6.35
9	Arizona	580	3,662	6.31
10	Washington	489	3,027	6.19
11	St. Louis	641	3,962	6.18
12	New England	556	3,400	6.12
13	Kansas City	491	3,000	6.11
14	Chicago	539	3,281	6.09
15	Jacksonville	476	2,882	6.05
16	N.Y. Jets	522	3,153	6.04
17	Green Bay	654	3,795	5.80
18	Detroit	659	3,820	5.80
19	Denver	485	2,799	5.77
20	Carolina	571	3,264	5.72
21	Buffalo	478	2,719	5.69
22	San Francisco	480	2,685	5.59
23	N.Y. Giants	548	3,058	5.58
24	Tennessee	476	2,596	5.45
25	Seattle	561	3,054	5.44
26	Minnesota	583	3,123	5.36
27	Houston	524	2,778	5.30
28	Miami	632	3,287	5.20
29	Cleveland	565	2,898	5.13
30	Atlanta	463	2,371	5.12
31	Tampa Bay	568	2,602	4.92
32	Oakland	555	2,420	4.36

Here's a little look at our passing yards per attempt formula and why it's superior to others.

Only our YPA is correct

Most every team yards per attempt figure you see out there is wrong! Or, at the very least, it's not calculated properly. Go to ESPN.com, Yahoo Sports, wherever. Basically, a lot of places like that will publish a net yards figure and then, in the next column, the yards per attempt figure will be based upon gross passing yards. The math just doesn't add up, at least not when you use the published figures.

So here's what you'll find from the Cold, Hard Football Facts. We use only NET passing figures to determine yards per attempt. This is gross passing yards, minus yards lost via sacks, divided by passsing attempts. If we were merely looking at individual quarterbacks and their yards per attempt, we might (might!) be inclined to use gross passing yards, so as not to penalize the quarterback if he has a sieve of an offensive line.

Sacks count as pass attempts

Our yards per pass attempt is a "Quality Stat" – a stat that has a direct correlation to victory. So we're looking at team data. After all, it's teams that win and lose football games.

There's more to our calculations, though. Instead of just dividing the net passing yardage by pass attempts, we add in the number of sacks to the attempts column. We believe this gives a far more accurate gauge of a team's ability to pass the ball. After all, when a QB is sacked, it's because he was attempting to pass. Why shouldn't this attempt to pass count as an attempt?

For example, if a quarterback attempts 10 passes for 100 yards, his yards per attempt is 10.0 YPA. Easy enough, right? But what if that QB was sacked three times and lost 22 yards? Suddenly, the team's passing YPA is a mere 6.0 (78/13).

Hey, the team only gained 78 net yards when attempting to pass. And those 3 sacks came on attempts to pass. So, to accurately measure a team's ability to pass, that's our formula:

Net passing yards/(pass attempts + sacks allowed)