Passer rating

Passer rating is the name of the method for evaluating the performance of quarterbacks and any other passers officially used by the National Football League.

Criticisms

The Passer Rating System has many critics, who have objected to it on several different grounds.

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The most frequently-voiced objection is that plays on which the quarterback is sacked to do not count toward compiling the rating; this actually gives a quarterback an incentive to deliberately take a sack rather than throw the ball away and have an incomplete pass devalue both his completion percentage and his yards per attempt.

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Another criticism is the fact that rushing yards gained by a quarterback do not result in his getting a higher rating — a particularly important contemporary issue due to the recent emergence of many excellent running quarterbacks in the NFL, most notably Steve Young, Daunte Culpepper, Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick.

Related Topics:
NFL - Steve Young - Daunte Culpepper - Donovan McNabb - Michael Vick

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Some observers have proposed replacing yards per attempt with yards per play as one of the rating's components, counting both sacks and rushing attempts (in addition to passes actually thrown) as plays, thereby resolving both of the above issues.

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A third complaint concerns the placing of artificial limits (both upper and lower) on the points that can be earned in the various categories. Critics claim, for example, that it is unfair not to give a quarterback a higher rating for completing 90% of his passes than for completing 77.5%, or for averaging, say, 15 yards per attempt as opposed to only 12.5 (the limit of 2.375 applying in each instance) — although this is likely to affect only the rating for a single game and not for an entire season. As well as encountering problems when approaching the arbitrary limits for performance, the system is biased inasmuch as some of the "benchmarks" are more achievable than others: A 2.00-worthy performance in Completion % is far easier to obtain than a 2.00 in the Touchdown % category. In fact, until recent years, the league norms in each non-Completion % category were below the formula's expected "average" figures.

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Yet another criticism is that the formula overemphasizes Completion Percentage. While Completion % in and of itself makes up 25% of the rating's calculation, the use of Yards per Attempt rather than Yards per Completion adds to the weight of Completion %, since incomplete passes are penalized under yds/attempt. Thus, many critics feel that the Passer Rating formula automatically is skewed in favor of quarterbacks, like Steve Young (who held the single-season record until 2004), who play in a West Coast scheme that favors many high-percentage (but low-yardage) pass plays.

Related Topics:
2004 - West Coast

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The most simple complaint may be that the weighting of each category is, on the whole, arbitrary. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Completion %, Yards/Attempt, Touchdown %, and Interception % are of equal value (25% each) in terms of an offense's efficiency (or if those stats, in that combination, have any correlation to scoring at all!). The system also does not account for changing offensive conditions in the NFL over time; for example, when the formula was devised, a score of 66.6 was supposed to represent an average quarterback. And in 1970, the average passer scored a 65.6, a figure almost perfectly in line with the rating-creators' vision. But in 1980, the average was 73.7; in 1992, the average quarterback had a rating of 75.3; and in 2004, a record-setting year for passers, the league's mean passer rating was 82.8. Thus, scores have no significance when doing cross-era analysis.

Related Topics:
1970 - 1980

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