Background reading:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V (Career Passer Ratings)

In the interest of making all data available to you, the reader, the table below shows the averages for each professional football league since 1932 in the relevant passing statistics used to calculate passer rating:

And now, the good stuff. Below are the era-adjusted passer ratings for every player in every season since 1932.  Here’s how to read the table below, which is fully sortable and searchable.  Sid Luckman has the best single season, playing in the NFL for Chicago in 1943.  That season counted for 11.58% of his career pass attempts (useful if you want to calculate a player’s career passer rating), as he threw 202 passes, completed 110 of them for 2,194 yards with 28 TDs and 12 INTs.  That was enough attempts to qualify for the passer rating crown; his actual passer rating was 107.5, and his Era Adjusted Passer Rating was 135.0, the best ever.

One fun thing to do is to type in a franchise code like “nyg” or “gnb” and see the top era adjusted passer ratings for each franchise. Or you could change the “show results’ number in the drop down box fro 20 to 50, type in Manning and see what happens.