Top Guns: A brief history of NFL air superiority

(Ed. note: this story first ran on January 6, 2011. It's been updated to include the 2010 Packers, another team that won a championship by dominating the passing wars. One of our off-season projects is to produce the Passer Rating Differential of every team since 1940 and find out how many teams that topped Passer Rating Differential won a title. We're fairly certain you'll be amazed by the number.)

What did you do over the holidays?

 

You probably hung out with family. Saw old friends. Sang a couple Christmas carols. Shared gifts with loved ones. Enjoyed a bountiful dinner. Watched old Bing Crosby movies by the fireplace. Reveled in the wide-eyed joy of an innocent child. Drank a little too much egg nog with good ol' Uncle Hal Christmas Eve.

 

Sounds quaint. We're sure you had fun.

 

Our holidays went a little bit differently – well, except for the too much egg nog part.

 

We spent the holidays in the true Cold, Hard Football Facts tradition, gathered around the Christmas can of Spam, the trash can fireplace and the jug of moonshine and calculated the offensive passer rating, Defensive Passer Rating and Passer Rating Differential of every NFL champion since the dawn of the T formation (that'd be since 1940, for those of you keeping score at home).

 

Our research provided an incredible treasure trove of data that slowly begins to make up for the Christmas presents and parental love that we never received as children.

 

You know our theory: winning in the NFL is all about winning the war of passing efficiency.

 

To make a comparison with our other obsession, World War II, you don't invade France without first establishing air superiority. In the NFL, you don't invade Dallas, or any Super Bowl location, without doing the same.

 

Teams that dominate the skies dominate on the scoreboard.

 

To prove this point, we introduced last year what we call Passer Rating Differential – subtracting a team's Defensive Passer Rating from its offensive passer rating and ranking teams by the difference.

 

It's been a homerun. New Orleans dominated the indicator almost from wire to wire and ultimately dominated the Colts on the way to the first Super Bowl title in franchise history. Then came Green Bay in 2010. The Packers also dominated Passer Rating Differential. And, lo and behold, they won a Super Bowl, too.

 

Turns out thes are hardly an isolated incidents.  

 

Here's a look at the Passer Rating Differential of every single NFL champion since 1940.

Our holiday research confirmed what we long suspected: teams that dominate through the air dominate on the scoreboard. Consider that the NFL has crowned 71 champions since 1940.

Only two teams won NFL titles after seasons in which they were upside down in Passer Rating Differential, the 1957 Lions and the 2007 Giants.

 

But in both cases, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Both teams produced incredible postseason turnarounds that saw each of them dominate the skies on their way to an NFL title.

 

Tobin Rote replaced Hall of Famer Bobby Layne as Detroit's quarterback late in the 1957 season. He played the game of his life in the 1957 title game, a shocking 59-14 win over the favored Browns. He completed 12 of 19 for 280 yards, 4 TD, 0 INT and a 146.4 passer rating (he also ran for a  score).

 

Cleveland quarterbacks Milt Plum and Tommy O'Connell were dreadful that day. They combined to complete 9 of 20 for 112 yards, 0 TD, 4 INT. Running back Chet Hanaluk added another pick on his one pass attempt. That's a 20.4 passer rating.

 

In other words, the Lions dominated the Browns that day because they dominated the air.

 

We've long insisted that New York's win over New England in Super Bowl XLII was the greatest statistical upset in NFL history.

 

Our look at Passer Rating Differential proves it. The 2007 Giants boasted both the worst Defensive Passer Rating (83.4) and worst Passer Rating Differential (-10.4) of any champion in NFL history.

 

The 2007 Patriots boasted the second best single-season offensive passer rating in NFL history (116.0) were +37.9 in Passer Rating Differential.

 

But the Giants produced the most improbable postseason run in NFL history because they improbably dominated the skies in the playoffs.

 

Giants quarterback Eli Manning, in fact, produced what might have been the greatest four-game stretch of his career in those playoffs.

 

 

Meanwhile, he cranked out that effort during a four-game stretch in which the Giants defense clamped down a murderer's row of quarterbacks: highly efficient Pro Bowl passer Jeff Garcia, prolific stat machine Tony Romo, all-time leader in everything BrettFavre and the tremendous Tom Brady.

 

These four passers combined to complete 89 of 158 for 910 yards, 5 TD, 5 INT and a 70.39 passer rating.

 

In other words, the Giants posted a Passer Rating Differential of +25.3 during their unexpected playoff run, about the historic norm in the regular season of all NFL champions. The Giants won the Super Bowl because they suddenly found a way to dominate the war of passing efficiency.

Chicago unleashed shock & awe on the NFL with the T-formation – The Bears, led by quarterback Sid Luckman (pictured) adopted the T-formation from the college game in the early 1940s. They used it most notably to beat the Redskins 73-0 in the 1940 NFL title game. It's still the biggest blowout in NFL history.

 

The charts here reveal that the formation was like unleashing shock & awe from the skies upon the rest of the NFL. The 1943 (+73.4) and 1941 Bears (+65.0) easily top our list of NFL champions in Passer Rating Differential.

 

And this list doesn't even include the great dominant Bears of 1942, who were +60.0 in Passer Rating Differential (81.4 to 21.4). They were the most dominant team in NFL history (11-0; 376 PF, 84 PA) before getting upset by Sammy Baugh and the 10-1 Redskins in the 1942 title game.

 

The dearth of talent during the World War II seasons (1942-44) certainly enhanced the divide between the revolutionary Bears and the rest of the league. But looking at this list, we now know in no uncertain terms why the T-formation was such a dramatic development in the history of football – one that also inspired a revolution on the scoreboard (as we discussed over the summer).

 

The rest of the NFL soon caught up and the gap in Passer Rating Differential has narrowed, never matching the numbers the Bears produced in the 1940s.

Even the greatest quarterbacks had a lot of help – Johnny Unitas makes the short list of almost everybody's "greatest quarterbacks ever." He certainly makes our list, too. Unitas is best remembered for leading the Colts to victory over the Giants in the 1958 NFL title game, "The Best Game Ever." Unitas and the Colts beat the Giants again the next year in the 1959 NFL championship game.

 

But those Colts weren't just great on offense. They dominated on defense, too. They topped the NFL in both Offensive Passer Rating and Defensive Passer Rating in both seasons. We believe they're the only team in history to accomplish this feat in consecutive years. Both teams rank among the seven best champs in Passer Rating Differential.

 

Bart Starr and Joe Montana are also on the very short list of best quarterbacks ever. But both these Hall of Famers were aided in their quests for multiple championships by shutdown pass defenses.

 

The gap in Passer Rating Differential has narrowed in the Live Ball Era – The rule changes of 1978 that ushered in modern offense and what we call the Live Ball Era certainly led to an upswing in passing stats. Offensive and Defensive Passer Rating are both higher over the past 33 years. But the gap in Passer Rating Differential has actually narrowed a bit compared to the historic norm.

 

NFL champions since 1978 have posted an average offensive passer rating of 89.6 and a Defensive Passer Rating of 66.3, an average Passer Rating Differential of +23.3.