Feed your fragile little mind

Loyal readers know that yards per pass attempt is one of the most critical statistics in football, if not in all of sports.

 

We've chronicled this concept numerous times over the years, and use YPA among our Quality Stats. We don't want to rehash it all here. But the bottom line is this:

• Teams that win the passing YPA battle typically win the game
• Quarterbacks with a high YPA average are typically very successful

So, given this data, we like to keep tabs on which quarterbacks top the YPA list each and every year. So below you'll see our updated all-time leaderboard through the start of the 2009 season. It offers plenty of familiar names, including last year's Super Bowl combatants, Kurt Warner and Ben Roethlisberger, as well as a few surprises.

 

Here are just a few of the conclusions you can draw from the passing YPA leaderboard.

 

Last season's Super Bowl featured two of the six most effective passers in history based upon YPA: Warner (No. 4) and Big Ben (No. 6). No title game in NFL history ever pitted two passers so prolific.

 

Their meeting is made all the more amazing by the fact that the top of the YPA leaderboard is dominated by quarterbacks from the 1940s, 50s and 60s, decades that put a premium on aggressive long-ball passing compared with the short-pass control game in vogue today. So Warner and Big Ben are both historic anomalies ... though success has followed these YPA leaders as it has historically followed other YPA leaders.

 

It's a Cold, Hard Football Facts maxim that if you look at any major list of offensive success in pro football history, you'll invariably find Paul Brown's imprint all over it.

 

The YPA leaderboard is further proof. It's led by Otto Graham, the most effective passer in history and, of course, Paul Brown's right-hand man on the great Browns of the 1950s (the list here includes only NFL data, it does not include Graham's AAFC years, which were even more impressive).

 

The rest of the list is littered with passers who played for Brown or for Brown disciples such as Weeb Ewbank, Don Shula and Bill Walsh. These quarterbacks include Steve Young, Johnny Unitas, Earl Morrall, Joe Montana and Frank Ryan. That's a pretty impressive list. Between the group of them, they appeared in 20 NFL title games or Super Bowls and won 15 of them.

 

Like we said, YPA success = team success.

 

Tom Landry is best known as one of the great defensive innovators in the history of the game. After all, he's the guy who invented the 4-3 defense in the 1950s, the base defense still favored by most NFL teams today.

 

But it's amazing to note that almost every starting quarterback who led Landry's Dallas teams over the years is on the list of most effective passers in the history of the game: Roger Staubach (No. 13), Eddie LeBaron (No. 23), Don Meredith (No. 24) and Danny White (No. 25).

 

The only regular Landry starter not on the list? Craig Morton. He just misses the cut, at No. 28 all time (7.37 YPA).

 

However, here's something interesting: Morton averaged 7.63 YPA during his days playing for Dallas (11,789 yards on 1,545 attempts). It's a mark that would have put him in the Top 15 all time.

 

Grogan might be the biggest anomaly on the list. He had little postseason success, though he is something of a legend among Patriots fans: he was one of the great running quarterbacks in modern history, and famed for his toughness. In fact, he spent his later days playing with a neckbrace. A QB taking snaps in a neck brace?! That's bad ass.

 

But we were shocked, shocked!, to find Grogran among the most effective passers in the history of the game (No. 21). His career average (7.48 YPA) is just a statistical micro-fraction behind the great Joe Montana (7.52 YPA).

 

Grogan certainly benefitted from playing behind one of the best ground games in history -- the 1978 Patriots, as noted earlier this week, still hold the single-season record for rushing yards in a season (3,165). It's a mark that will probably never be broken, given the nature of the game today. He also played much of his career with wide receiver Stanley Morgan, one of the great deep threat of his day. But still, No. 21 is No. 21. Grogan could get the ball down field.

 

The NFL requires a minimum of 1,500 career attempts to qualify for official records. We use the same standard.

 

But that standard leaves a small handful of current quarterbacks on the outside looking in.

 

Tony Romo has averaged 8.08 YPA in his career, a mark that would be good enough for fourth all time, and best of the past half century, just a shade ahead of Kurt Warner. With 1,307 career attempts, he'll join the official list sometime this season, and probably pretty high up.

 

It's amazing that this guy came out of nowhere and has quickly put up numbers that stand among the best ever. Of course, as we noted earlier this year, Romo's former teammate, Terrell Owens, has always had the effect of making his batterymates look better than they otherwise would. So it will be interesting to see if Romo can keep up this pace without TO.

 

Philip Rivers is just 52 career attempts shy of 1,500. He's averaged 7.49 YPA in his career. He should enter the list sometime in late September, probably right around the all-time top 20.

 

Jay Cutler, meanwhile, has averaged 7.40 YPA in his career and has an outside shot of climbing into the Top 25 this year with the Bears. He's 280 attempts shy of the 1,500 qualifying mark.

 

One set of names is notoriously absent from the list of the most effective passers in history: guys who played in the AFL. We spent much of the off-season this year debunking the widespread mythology that the AFL offererd a more exciting, wide-open brand of football (read our take here, here, here and plan to watch it here).

 

Yet there's only a single AFL name here on the list of the 25 most effective passers in history: the great Len Dawson (pictured here), easily the best quarterback from the AFL.

 

If quarterbacks from the upstart league really were so much better at attacking defenses through the air, you'd think at least a couple of them would have made this list. But they didn't make the list. So you do the math.

 

	Player	Yards	Attempts	YPA	Title games	Titles
1	Otto Graham*	13,499	1,565	8.63	6	3
2	Sid Luckman	14,686	1,744	8.42	5	4
3	Norm Van Brocklin	23,611	2,895	8.16	5	2
4	Kurt Warner	28,591	3,557	8.04	3	1
5	Steve Young	33,124	4,149	7.98	1	1
6	Ben Roethlisberger	14,974	1,905	7.86	2	2
7	Ed Brown	15,600	1,987	7.851	1	0
8	Bart Starr	24,718	3,149	7.849	6	5
9	Johnny Unitas	40,239	5,186	7.76	4	3
10	Earl Morrall**	20,809	2,689	7.74	3	2
11	Dan Fouts	43,040	5,604	7.68	0	0
12	Len Dawson	28,711	3,741	7.675	2	1
13	Roger Staubach	22,700	2,958	7.674	4	2
14	Peyton Manning	45,628	5,960	7.66	1	1
15	Daunte Culpepper	23,208	3,042	7.63	0	0
16	Trent Green	28,475	3,740	7.61	0	0
17	Sonny Jurgensen	32,224	4,262	7.56	0	0
18	Y.A. Tittle	33,070	4,395	7.524	3	0
19	Joe Montana	40,551	5,391	7.522	4	4
20	Frank Ryan	16,042	2,133	7.521	2	1
21	Steve Grogan	26,886	3,593	7.48	0	0
22	Lynn Dickey	23,322	3,125	7.463	0	0
23	Eddie LeBaron	13,399	1,796	7.460	0	0
24	Don Meredith	17,199	2,308	7.45	0	0
25	Danny White	21,959	2,950	7.44	0	0

* Includes NFL years only

** Includes only those championship seasons in which Morrall played a key role for his respective teams (1968 Colts, 1970 Colts, 1972 Dolphins)

By Kerry Byrne