PRD: take a toke of some awesome statistical sh*t

By Kerry J. Byrne and Luis DeLoureiro

Cold, Hard Football Facts Tag Team champions

 

It's safe to say we're stoned out of our minds on Passer Rating Differential after taking a massive bong hit of historic data today.

 

This truly is some awesome sh*t, our hazy-faced statistical stoner friends. In fact, here's a little tribute to our discoveries that are about to blow your fragile little eggshell mind.

 

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Our new round of data, compiled by CHFF stats stud Luis DeLoureiro, confirms what we've told you all along: our Passer Rating Differential is the "mother stat" in all of football analysis. (DeLoureiro is the researcher who dared rip the corset off of passer rating to let passing stats hang out in all their heaving, buxom glory.)

 

Those of you already high on the Cold, Hard Football Facts might know that we introduced Passer Rating Differential before the 2009 season. The reason was simple: we knew that passer rating was a complex indicator, but one that always had a much higher correlation to victory than most people realize. Put most simply, quarterbacks with high passer ratings win a lot of games.

 

By the same token, we had already proven the importance of Defensive Passer Rating. It, too, has a very high correlation to victory. Great, successful defenses were almost ALWAYS those with a stingy Defensive Passer Rating, regardless of how well they stopped the run.

 

So naturally, Passer Rating Differential would tell us which teams are the best in worst at passer rating overall on both sides of the ball.

It's proven a nice big fatty of success: New Orleans finished No. 1 in Passer Rating Differential in 2009, the first year of the indicator's existence. The Saints won the Super Bowl. Green Bay finished No. 1 in Passer Rating Differential in 2010. The Packers won the Super Bowl.

 

That's two for two now picking Super Bowl winners simply by looking at the Passer Rating Differential charts.

 

But we needed to know more to prove this was no fluke. And folks, it's no fluke.

 

During the 2010 postseason, we looked at the Passer Rating Differential of every single NFL champion since 1940, the year that saw the very beginnings of the modern quarterback position and modern passing game.

 

It was a treasure trove of data: the average NFL champion over the past 70 years produced a truly incredible Passer Rating Differential of +27.4. That was the average. That's dominance in the passing game, folks.

 

This most recent round of analysis goes one step further: we compiled the Passer Rating Differential of every team since 1940: a total of 1,554 teams ranked from top to bottom in the "mother stat" of football analysis.

 

We'll be rolling out much of our findings in the season ahead, with some of the best material on the upcoming new CHFF Insider. Needless to say, Passer Rating Differential moves lock step with wins and losses.

 

Here's our preliminary report below: a look at the Top 25 teams in Passer Rating Differential since 1960. We decided to go with 1960 because it's a watershed year in NFL history, with the advent of the AFL. But we also began at 1960 because many teams at the very top of the all-time Passer Rating Differential list, and almost every team at the bottom, were from the 1940s.

 

The disparity in teams from that decade stood out as a clear statistical anomaly and spoke to many issues with football in that era: namely, a disparity in modernization – some teams used the new T formation, others didn't – and a disparity in talent, one that was aggravated by the roster depletions caused by World War II.  The 1950s also produced a pretty noticeable disparity from top to bottom, though not as distinct as in the 1940s.

 

PRD: The Fast Track to a Title

Winning Passer Rating Differential is the fast track to winning a championship in pro football. Of the top 25 all time, 14 won NFL championships or Super Bowls. Three others lost in the championship game.

 

Of the 71 champions since 1940, an incredible 26 of them – 37 percent – finished No. 1 in Passer Rating Differential; another 14 finished No. 2 in Passer Rating Differential. In other words, 56 percent of NFL champions were No. 1 or No. 2 in PRD. Now you know why we call it the "mother stat."

 

The average champion ranked 3.4 in Passer Rating Differential.

 

These 25 teams were near impossible to beat, with combined record of 299-63-4 (.822). Put another way, the average record of the Top 25 in Passer Rating Differential was 12 wins against 2.5 losses.

 

Among those in our Top 25 list that failed to win, many were stopped by other Passer Rating Differential juggernauts.

 

The 1960 Browns (No. 1 on the list) were edged out for the Eastern Conference championship, and an appearance in the NFL title game, by Norm Van Brocklin, Chuck Bednarik and the 1960 Eagles (No. 19 on the list). If not for a 31-29 loss to Philadelphia in October, the Browns and not the Eagles would have battled Vince Lombardi's Packers in the 1960 NFL championship game.

 

Ken Anderson's 1975 Bengals are No. 9 on the list. They went 11-1 that year against teams not from Pittsburgh, but lost both meetings with the Steelers (No. 6 on the list). Pittsburgh finished one game ahead of Cincinnati in the AFC Central and ended the year with its second consecutive Super Bowl victory.

 

The 1963 Giants (No. 10) and Bears (No. 13) met in the NFL title game. More on that epic statistical clash below.

 

A who's who of Great Dynasties (and almost dynasties)

Every great "dynasty" and near dynasty of the era is represented on the list, except for the largely overrated Cowboys of the 1990s – a group that went better than 12-4 just once.

 

The rest are all here. The dynasties (1960s Packers, 1970s Steelers, 1980s/90s 49ers, 2000s Patriots) and the near dynasties: (1970s Cowboys,1970s Vikings, 1990s Rams).

 

The Genius of Bill Walsh

The great genius of Bill Walsh, as only CHFF has noted, was not that he popularized the West Coast offense, which changed the way pro football is played. No, the great genius of Walsh was that he popularized the West Coast offense while creating arguably the greatest (and certainly most underappreciated) defensive dynasty in history.

 

For 17 straight years, the 49ers never surrendered more than 300 points in a season and they consistently produced very low Defensive Passer Ratings, usually among the very best in the NFL. We discussed this phenomenon a couple years ago ("Filthy Hippies and Pigskin Passology") and more recently this spring, as it related to Ken Anderson's Hall of Fame cred.

 

San Francisco's two-pronged attack on success is incredibly obvious when you look at this list: three of the top seven Passer Rating Differential in modern history belong to the dynastic 49ers. Three of the top seven all from the same organization in the same brief period of success. F'in amazing.

 

Let's put it into context: the 49ers won five titles not because they had Joe Montana and Steve Young. The 49ers  won five titles because they had Montana and Young and consistently paired these great passers with the best pass defenses in football.

 

The Undefeateds

Two teams since 1960 have produced unbeaten regular seasons: the 1972 Dolphins and 2007 Patriots. Both are on this list.

 

The 'Fins famously rolled to a Super Bowl title without a single blemish. The hard-choking Patriots were upended by the Giants in what is the greatest statistical upset in NFL championship play of at least the past 65 years.

 

BrettFavre's Super Bowl ring

And, yes, even BrettFavre's Super Bowl champion 1996 Packers are on the list. Even at the height of his powers in the mid 1990s, this greatest of all postseason liabilities needed to be paired with the NFL's No. 1 scoring defense and top-ranked unit in Defensive Passer Rating to win a Super Bowl.

 

The Lions: even when they're great they suck

The sad-sack Lions. Yes, we have high hopes for them in 2011. But the Lions can never be counted on to do anything right. After all, even when they field a statistical juggernaut of a team, they still can't win.

 

The 1976 Lions produced the No. 12 Passer Rating Differential of the last 50 years. Yet the 1976 Lions, despite dominating the passing wars that year, somehow managed to stumble through a 6-8 season.

 

They're the only team in the Top 25 with a losing record. In fact, no other team in the Top 25 lost more than four games.

 

The epic 1963 title game

Perhaps no game in history better exemplified the classic meeting of "irresistible force vs. immovable object" than the 1963 title game between the Bears and Giants.

New York was an offensive juggernaut led by Y.A. Tittle, who set a record with 36 touchdown passes. His mark would stand for 21 years, until broken by Dan Marino in 1984.

 

The 1963 Bears were and remain one of the greatest defenses in history. They surrendered just 144 points during a high-scoring year in which the No. 2 defense surrendered 206 points (Green Bay). So Chicago was miles better defensively than any club that year.

 

And both the 1963 Giants and Bears find themselves on the Top 25 Passer Rating Differential list: the Giants were propelled on to the list by an awesome-for-its-era 94.4 Offensive Passer Rating; the Bears leaped on to the list by virtue of an awesome-for-any-era 34.8 Defensive Passer Rating.

 

The game ultimately provided evidence for the "defense wins championship" crowd: the Bears won, 14-10, thanks to a defense that handed Tittle one of the most brutal beatings any quarterback has ever suffered.