Yesterday, we looked at which teams had the most pass attempts (including sacks) in individual games relative to league average. Today, we will analyze things on the season level.

Let’s use Tobin Rote as an example. As Brad Oremland noted, Rote was stuck playing for terrible Packers teams in the ’50s that were weak on defense and light at running back. In 1951, Green Bay ranked 12th in the 12-team NFL in rushing attempts, rushing yards, and rushing touchdowns, and 11th in points allowed and yards allowed. The Packers often went with just one running back in the backfield — a rarity in those days — which is a sign that the emphasis on the passing game wasn’t just a result of the team’s losing record. Green Bay also went with a quarterback-by-committee approach: Rote started 11 of 12 games, but he finished the year with 256 pass attempts, while backup Bobby Thomason had 221. Individually, neither had great numbers, but together, they helped Green Bay finish with 50 more pass attempts than any other team in football.

The method I used yesterday, and will be using throughout this series, is to give the starting quarterback credit for all team pass attempts in that game. The reason? If a quarterback gets injured and finishes a game with just 5 attempts, that will kill his average in a misleading way. That would do more harm, I think, than giving him credit for all attempts in the game. But that decision has its drawbacks, and in particular, it seems ill-suited for teams in the early ’50s that employed a QBBC approach. This is particularly relevant here, because “Rote’s” 1951 season checks in as the most pass-happy on our list.

So the Rote line for ’51 should really be thought of as Rote and Thomason. Rote’s 1956 season also makes the top ten, and there’s no fine print necessary there. Rote started 11 of 12 games and threw 308 passes, while Bart Starr started the remaining game and had just 44 attempts that season. The ’56 Packers were not very good, ranking last in both points and yards allowed, and last in rushing attempts, too.

The table below shows the top 300 seasons (minimum 7 games started) in terms of pass attempts relative to league average. You can use the search function to see that Rote’s season in 1954 with Green Bay also makes the cut. To explain what’s in the table below, let’s use season #15 on the list, Shane Matthews in 1999, as an example. That year, Matthews started 7 games, but in those games, the Bears averaged an incredible 47.1 dropbacks per game, the second highest rate ever. Matthews shared some snaps with rookie Cade McNown that year, so you wouldn’t know it just by looking at Matthews’ raw numbers, but the ’99 Bears were insanely pass-happy under Gary Crowton. The league average was 36.3 dropbacks per game, so the Bears in “Matthews games” were 10.8 attempts above average, and 129.8% above league average.

• Frank Tripucka was the first Broncos quarterback, and his performances in ’60, ’61, and ’62 make the top 50. Tripucka’s pass-happy days — which made Lionel Taylor produce stat lines straight out of 2014 — were most notable in ’61 and ’62, where he incredibly produced two of the top six seasons in the above table.

• Another AFLer, George Blanda, is the only quarterback with three top-25 seasons. I did not separate the AFL and NFL when generating this data, and this shows that there is some truth to the conventional wisdom that the AFL was a pass-happy league.

• Warren Moon is the first quarterback with 4 seasons on the above list, narrowly edging out Blanda. Moon’s high-octane attack in ’90, ’91, and ’92 with the Oilers made the top 70, while his work during his first year with the Vikings (1994) checks in at #38. Moon’s ’93 is number 90 on the list, making him the first player to show up with five seasons. But Blanda, by virtue of the 98th and 100th most pass-heavy years, is the first to six.

• Two other quarterbacks famous for great stats but not winning it all have four top-100 seasons: Fran Tarkenton and Dan Fouts. Tarkenton gets there in ’71 with the Giants and each year from ’76 to ’78 with the Vikings, when the defense had eroded from its once dominant level. Fouts’ 1984 season was extraordinarily pass-happy, and then he has 8 other seasons where the Chargers threw between 114% and 120% as many times as the average team.

• Fouts, Blanda, and Moon dominate this list, which is not filled with many modern quarterbacks. But Drew Brees does manage to show up 7 times: each of the last 8 seasons other than the year the Saints won the Super Bowl. Dan Marino has 6 top-300 seasons, while the four quarterbacks with 5 top-300 seasons offer two surprises: Tarkenton, Brett Favre… and Marc Bulger and Kerry Collins.

What about the least pass-happy years? The 1988 Patriots are taken right out of a Rex Ryan fan fiction piece: The team ranked last in pass attempts, first in rushing attempts, and in the top 5 in points allowed, yards allowed, and first downs allowed. New England went 9-7, going 6-3 in the games started by Doug Flutie, and 3-4 in the other seven. Flutie’s nine starts came in weeks 6 through 14, and he took the vast majority of snaps. ^[1]The first of those 9 games was a disaster, and Steve Grogan threw seven passes in mop-up duty in a 45-3 thrashing by the Packers. During those 9 games, New England had just 179 dropbacks — a hair under 20 per game! — while every other team had at least 235 dropbacks during those weeks. ^[2]Also, check out that Miami Dolphins sack rate during this stretch! That’s insane, and it led to Flutie’s 1988 season going down as the least pass-happy season ever. Flutie may have been a great quarterback, but he could never earn the trust of his head coach, Raymond Berry, who chose to slap handcuffs on his diminutive quarterback.

Below are the 300 least pass-happy seasons since 1950:

My guess is you don’t know much about Scott Hunter, the Packers quarterback in the early ’70s. The Packers and Jets both tried to replace their HOF Alabama quarterbacks with, well, more Alabama quarterbacks. For the Jets, Richard Todd was a disappointment with the 6th overall pick, but started 94 games for the team. Hunter was a three-year starter at Alabama during a rare three-year down period for the Tide. He was a low round draft pick, like Starr, and then replaced Starr in 1970 when the Hall of Famer quarterback was limited with an arm injury.

The Packers asked very little of Hunter, who mostly excelled as a vertical passer. Over the two-year period from ’71 to ’72, he was in the bottom four in completion percentage but in the top four in yards per completion. Combined with an above-average sack rate, and Hunter ranked above league average in Net Yards per Attempt.

But it’s Starr who is the real stand out on this list. He has a whopping 9 top-300 seasons here! Perhaps more interesting, his pre-Lombardi seasons in ’57 and ’58 cracked the top 300 of the first list, but each of his seasons from 1960 to 1967 make this list. The Lombardi Packers were very run-heavy, and this is pretty good evidence of that. It’s also why it’s so difficult to compare someone like Starr to someone like Fouts.

As it turns out, no other quarterback has even six top-300 seasons. Three other quarterbacks have five top-300 seasons here, and two of them also played on dynasties. Bob Griese makes the list in every year from 1970 to 1975, ’72 excepted due to injury (but, given the circumstances, it probably would have been his least pass-happy season of the lot). Terry Bradshaw checks in with his 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, and 1978 seasons. The only quarterback with five top-300 seasons of low-octane passing without multiple Super Bowl rings is…. Frank Ryan. The Browns quarterback during the middle of the ’60s won one title in ’64, but his career was dominated by handing off to Jim Brown and then Leroy Kelly.

And, given the talk of Griese and Ryan, let’s not forget that Paul Warfield and his stat line had the misfortune of playing in both of these offenses.

Check back tomorrow for part III, where we analyze the data on the career level.