In the NFC Championship Game, Carson Palmer was really bad.  He completed 23 of 40 passes for 235 yards, with three sacks that lost 8 yards.  That by itself is not very good — it translates to a 5.3 net yards per attempt average — but the real damage came when it comes to turnovers.  Palmer threw one touchdown againt four interceptions, giving him an Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt average of just 1.56.  And even that inflates things a bit, as Palmer also fumbled twice, with both fumbles being recovered by Carolina. On the season, Carolina allowed 4.46 ANY/A to opposing passers, the best in the NFL, so that does mitigate things a bit.  As a result, Palmer’s game is considered -125 ANY below expectation, because he was 2.9 ANY/A below expectation over 43 dropbacks.

That’s bad, but nowhere near as bad as the worst performance from even this year’s playoffs (Brian Hoyer) or the last Cardinals playoff loss (thank you, Ryan Lindley).  But the reason Palmer’s performance appeared so bad was precisely because it came from someone like Carson Palmer, and not a Hoyer or a Lindley.  Palmer, after all, was arguably the best passer in the NFL this season.  He led the NFL in Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, at 8.11, which was 2.14 ANY/A better than league average.

[Note: The initial version of this post had some errors in it. Those have been fixed now.]

One way to handle that is to only look at top quarterbacks, defined as a quarterback who averaged at least 2.00 ANY/A better than league average during the regular season. Let’s use Daunte Culpepper’s 2000 NFC Championship Game as an example. During the regular season, Culpepper had a Relative ANY/A of +2.07, so he qualifies. His opponent in the NFCCG was the Giants, and New York’s defense was pretty good: it allowed 0.52 fewer ANY/A than the average team in 2000, so the “SOS” cell is filled in with -0.52. In the game, Culpepper was a disaster, producing a -2.34 ANY/A average. The league average ANY/A in 2000 was 5.21, so Culpepper gets an single game RANY/A of -7.55. We give him credit for facing a tougher defense than average, so his grade relative to league average after adjusting for strength of schedule is -7.03. That’s denoted in the “Rel LgAvg (SOS-A)” column. Finally, he had 32 dropbacks, so if we multiply -7.03 by 32, we get a value grade of -225.

Among top quarterbacks, that’s the worst playoff game ever by this formula. As for Palmer? It’s the 5th worst playoff game ever,

Another thing we could measure is the quarterback’s performance not just compared to league average, but to his own great baseline. In other words, we take the number above, but then subtract the quarterback’s regular season RANY/A from his grade. This will actually help Palmer, since most quarterbacks in this data set (+2.00 RANY/A and above) have a higher RANY/A than Palmer, but it will help look at the biggest “outlier” performances.

By this measure, Culpepper still has the worst game ever, but there is otherwise a lot of shuffling. One interesting result is with Aaron Rodgers. Because of how good he was in 2011, his playoff game against the Giants that year grades out as worse than Palmer’s game. That might seem odd, given that Rodgers produced a decent 4.72 ANY/A in the loss to New York, while Palmer was at just 1.55 ANY/A against Carolina. So how do we make up that 3.17 ANY/A difference?

• Rodgers was at +3.49 during the regular season; as a result, he is “expected” to be about 1.35 ANY/A better than Palmer.

• The Panthers defense is really good (-1.81), while the ’11 Giants defense (-.03) was not. So here, Palmer makes up about 1.78 ANY/A.

Those two numbers almost entirely cancel out Rodgers’ raw production advantage. Now, because of shifting league averages, Rodgers does make up some of what he lost — he wins up being 4.65 ANY/A below his own individual expectation, while Palmer is at 5.04 ANY/A below his individual expectation. But because Rodgers had 50 dropbacks, compared to only 43 for Palmer, that’s enough to vault Rodgers’ game as worse.

There are some fascinatingly bad games on this list, including ones that came in losing efforts like George Blanda and Ron Jaworski (actually, Jaws has two games from the ’80 playoffs on the list).

Anyway, my apologies for the earlier errors in the article. Those are on me. Please leave any questions or thoughts in the comments.