Personally, I still don’t see the point other than to try to clear things up for people who don’t understand how to put things into historical context. Comparing players against other players in their own era is one thing, but just adding fake volume to artificially adjust for inflation just doesn’t do it for me. Primarily, as I said before, because I don’t believe the good QBs or bad QBs would maintain the same level of great or poor performance over nearly double the dropbacks. Granted, some would, but I think the majority would not.

For QBs, you’re getting into double prorating because you’re adding extra attempts per game, and then you’re adding extra games (with those extra attempts). I think it’s silly to basically give Otto Graham credit for double the dropbacks he actually took just to satisfy some abstract notion of fairness. Otto Graham did what he did, and it was better than what anyone else in his era did (sorry, Kibbles). That should be enough. If I prorated, it would be an extra column or two that was just a “hey check that out,” but it wouldn’t serve as the focus of my argument by any means.

When measuring career value added, I think it is fair to keep older guys behind because, by taking so many fewer dropbacks and playing in so many fewer games, they absolutely added less career value. That doesn’t mean they were just as good; it just means there was less value to be added, so it was impossible for them to add much more than they did. I could see comparing value added in a season versus what everyone else added per season and giving them a score based on that.

I’d be comfortable saying that if Otto Graham had 1,000 units of value, while the average QB had 600 units, we would give him 1.67 points. And if Peyton Manning had 4,000 units of value, but the league average was 2,400 units, we’d also give him 1.67 points. So even though Manning had quadruple the RANY (or whatever), the two earn the same score. This effectively does the same thing as prorating, but it doesn’t involve just inventing games and plays that never happened.