It was October 10, 1995. Blake had a perfect passer rating. And you were right, the commentator was Pat Haden.

I’ve been too distracted reading comments on your articles so I somehow missed this one until now…

Let me start by saying Danny’s conclusions don’t entirely make sense to me, either. Taking sacks and throwing interceptions are obviously bad in a general sense, so it doesn’t compute that ignoring them completely would make ANY/A more accurate. But at the same time I believe that ANY/A systematically overrates pedestrian passers who don’t really contribute to winning. Fitting you mention Jason Campbell, because he was my inspiration for exploring this idea in the first place.

I agree that negative plays are begging for context, and in recent years I think ESPN’s QBR has done the best job of incorporating said context. Unfortunately for people interested in historical comparisons like you and I, precise data simply doesn’t exist for most of NFL history.

In that vein, my goal is to create a better version of ANY/A, and this article was essentially a brainstorming session in that direction. Perhaps ANY/A would be improved by lowering the INT penalty without discarding it entirely, or making the formula nonlinear in the way the components are weighted. I wholeheartedly agree with you on the merits of Y/C, so I would give an exponential penalty for Y/C below a certain threshold. This would bring down the ratings for the checkdown artists like Campbell no matter how well they did in other areas. Similarly I would give an exponential bonus for QB’s above a threshold for Y/C provided they maintain at least an average comp %. Another idea regarding INT’s…penalize them only above or below one standard deviation from league average. Everyone within one SD would fall into the randomness zone and rate the same.

I may tinker with some of these ideas and write a follow up article. Thanks for your input and willingness to explore out-of-the-box ideas, it’s more fun that way!