Griese among Top 20 all-time passer rating leaders

 

Many of the NFL's all-time passer rating leaders had monster games in Week 3, including Kurt Warner, Donovan McNabb and Tom Brady, and each padded their career numbers with the peformances. McNabb, for example, pitched a perfect 158.3 on Sunday, and jumped past Jake Delhomme and Brett Favre into a tie with Matt Hasselbeck for the 13th spot on the all-time list.

 

Bad games by the likes of Marc Bulger and Drew Brees dropped them down a few notches. Brees, for example, tossed four INTs, and fell behind the legendary Dan Marino on the all-time list.

 

You'll notice that 15 of the all-time Top 20 are active players, which simply goes to prove just how much easier it's become to pass the ball in the modern NFL.

 

The oldest player on the list, for example, is Joe Montana, who entered the league in 1979 and essentially ushered in the era of the inflated passer rating, through the short, high-percentage passing game that replaced the "bombs away" model of previous generations.

 

It proves that Montana was not only a great quarterback, but an important figure historically (along with the architect of his new-style passing game, Bill Walsh).

 

Four of the five former quarterbacks on the list are all in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Young, Montana, Marino and Kelly, denoted with * below). The fifth, Rich Gannon, was good enough to earn NFL MVP honors in 2002.

 

This list was culled from the Pro Football Hall of Fame archives, which offers a list of every quarterback with 1,500 or more pass attempts ranked by passer rating (as of the start of the 2007 season). We simply updated the numbers for active players (who appear in bold).

 

Rank	Player	Rating
1	Steve Young*	96.8
2	Peyton Manning	94.6
3	Kurt Warner	94.2
4	Joe Montana	92.3
5	Carlson Palmer	91.9
6	Daunte Culpepper	90.7
7	Marc Bulger	90.2
8	Chad Pennington	90.1
9	Tom Brady	89.9
10	Trent Green	87.1
11	Jeff Garcia	86.8
12	Dan Marino	86.4
13	Drew Brees	86.0
14	Matt Hasselbeck	85.5
14	Donovan McNabb	85.5
16	Jake Delhomme	85.2
16	Brett Favre	85.2
18	Rich Gannon	84.7
19	Brian Griese	84.5
20	Jim Kelly*	84.4

minimum 1,500 pass attempts