Any article of mine typically takes multiple afternoons of work.
My writing pace is about one hour to 800 words, which is quite fast from what I understand, but on something like this that's 11K words long, it still eats up a lot of time. The only thing that takes slightly longer than that are the lists, which take longer because I have to learn the basics of 20 different stories instead of just one.
It's really bad for business, because if I took one of those afternoons every week and dedicated it to promotion instead of the finer details of whatever I'm writing, my subscriber count could be triple what it is now, but I'm not here for business. I'm here to write quality stuff. My interest is not really whether anybody reads it or not.
So yes. That's the answer. About an hour to 800 words, which for how long most of my things are means multiple afternoons worth of writing every week.
I think going through the questions is a good way to help determine who should be in the Hall and is something I've seen only one other time. While I agree with your conclusions, I don't think the voters will. I think Ben being in the good good stats, lots of winning category will get him in and I think the mythos created around Eli is too strong to overcome for Rivers. I think if Rivers would have won an MVP and won in 06 and 07 against the Patriots, he would be in.
I would also be interested in a further dive into Jim Everett, because even based on NY/A and ANY/A, he has only 2 seasons in the top 5 and 3 other seasons in the top 10. In your formula, what is giving him this boost compared to other numbers?
I truly think Philip (and not Eli, key point) would've been the one to stop the 2007 Patriots, if he'd been given a real chance at it. He'd just played perhaps the best playoff game of all time the week before, but then tears his ACL in the fourth quarter. You can't play the QB position moving one leg at a time. The Chargers should've just started Billy Volek, and I'm not entirely sure he wouldn't have beaten the Patriots. He certainly was a better QB than the -0.05 EPA/Play, -5 CPOE Eli Manning in 2007.
What I'm trying to get at is that the Chargers lost, and Philip Rivers was the reason they lost, in both 2006 and 2007, but there are extenuating circumstances (worst luck of all time one season, trying to play on a torn ACL the next) that ought to be taken into account there. This is the Philip Rivers what-if. We've talked about the Chad Pennington what-if before, and this is the Philip Rivers version.
In retrospect, I can quite confidently say the 2007 Patriots were dead. It took everything they had to beat the Jaguars in the second round game harder than anybody remembers it being, and after working so hard to finish an undefeated regular season they were just out of gas, particularly on offence. They couldn't move the ball at all against either the Chargers or the Giants, and it was the luck of fools and Patriots that they ran into a hobbled (to put it lightly) Philip Rivers and one of the worst QBs in the league in Eli Manning, allowing them to nearly pull it off anyway. Like I said in the article, I believe any of the top 11 QBs in the NFL (from Donovan McNabb upwards) would've beaten the Patriots in those 2007 playoffs, some by multiple scores.
What if Philip Rivers makes it through the Colt game unscathed? That's the what-if. It's purely supposition on my part, but the Patriots were limping, looking for somebody to lose to. The real Philip Rivers would've proved more than good enough for that, and with that win on his (and the Chargers') resume, where do they go from there? It almost surely gets them out of this playoff loser mentality, that they still remain in today, because they almost surely defeat the New York Giants in the SB with that defence they had in 2007. I'm not sure if the Giants would've scored a point that day. They only put up 17 on a pretty mid 2007 Patriot defence.
With the Chargers as 2007 Super Bowl champions (a reality that I think was closer than anybody thinks), the roster still takes a pretty big nosedive from there, but had enough changed in the interim to make things different in SD? The team would almost certainly still be in SD, and Philip Rivers would be the cause of that. He would certainly be in the HoF.
All of that gone, as a result of just one knee injury. Onto Jim Everett.
As with all my arguments, Jim's relies on peak performance. Let's go season by season.
Jim's prime begins in 1988, where despite a rush offence not worth using that got used A LOT, putting him in a lot of bad positions, Jim posted 1293 football outsiders DYAR, which puts him in the mix with Dan Marino and Boomer Esiason for the most in the league, all almost 500 ahead of anybody else. His rate stats are fantastic also, finishing fourth in DVOA and fifth in ANY/A despite an astonishing (for 1988) 609 touches. Mix this in with Boomer touching the ball only 491 times in 1988, you find that Jim is second on my QB tier list that year.
Onto 1989, where the rush offence is even worse, and gets even less touches, leaving Jim to pick up even more of the offensive workload. He parlays this into being the only QB in the NFL even close enough to see Joe Montana's dust in DYAR, and being much closer to the pack but still second place in DVOA and ANY/A. Combining this with the fact that he played all 16, compared to Joe Montana missing three starts in 1989, leads me to put Jim number one that season. He did not even make the Pro Bowl this season by the way, but he was without doubt the best QB who started all 16.
1990. Jim's only good teams that he will ever play on are already behind him, but he's still fantastic. The rush offence is horrendous. The defence is horrendous. His receivers are not what they used to be, but Jim is still chucking. Ninth in ANY/A and ninth in DVOA are not great on a rate basis, but on a volume basis on a team that DESPERATELY needed the volume, Jim was top five in DYAR again, and became the first player in NFL history not named Dan Marino to put up 600 touches three seasons in a row, a level of durability that's very difficult to maintain in this era. Combine this with a lot of the names above him on the rate lists being guys like Jay Schroeder (430 touches) and Jim Kelly (418 touches), and Jim finds the top five for the third season in a row.
Perhaps all this work got to him, because in 1991 he's an uninspiring 11th, even despite being about 16th on a per-play basis, due to the same 'all the guys better than him in the rate stats have 400 plays to his 600, so what would they have done on the horrendous Rams?' dichotomy.
He's trying Marc. He's really trying. By the time we get to 1992, Henry Ellard and Flipper Anderson are not what they used to be, and as the Rams are truly beginning to fall into the toilet as a franchise, there are no other offensive players you've ever heard of. Nevertheless, 6th in DYAR, 6th in DVOA on that typical Jim Everett volume land him 6th on my 1992 tier list.
He finally misses time in 1993, and is horrendous when he does play, so finally the Rams (who had not drafted a QB throughout this whole process of four losing seasons in a row, an important acknowledgement both contemporaneously and in retrospect that QB was not the problem in LA) decide to make a move, trading Jim Everett for a seventh round draft pick (LOL). Immediately after this, that franchise would fall into the pits of despair, moving to St Louis for their trouble.
Unfortunately, Jim got to New Orleans just as they were falling into the pits of despair. Challenge Marc. Name me one New Orleans Saint (other than Jim Everett) from 1994 to 1996. The rush offence was not worth using. The defence was horrendous, and Jim carried all of this to a 7-9 record with his 1101 DYAR (3rd), and 0.193 DVOA (5th) on that typical Jim Everett volume, landing him in the top five of my tier list again.
1995 is much the same story, with the same Saints roster, the same 7-9 record, but this time with 1168 DYAR (5th) and 0.190 DVOA (8th). With improvement leaguewide, roughly the same numbers only got him 7th place this time. He tried it again in 1996, but it was over, and you didn't hear much about Jim Everett after that.
That's eight prime years, and his tier list finishes in those eight years are 2, 1, 5, 11, 6, 29 (in the injury-shortened 1993), 4, 7, almost all of it on awful rosters, perpetually putting him in bad positions. Four top five finishes plus two additional top ten finishes (that was almost three) in an eight year prime has very rarely been done. He's not Peyton Manning (top five every year from 2003-2010), but look at the prime of Hall of Famer Jim Kelly, who played around the same time as Jim: 11, 9, 11, 9, 7, 3, 5, 9.
That's not Jim Everett calibre.
ANY/A hates Jim Everett, because he turned the ball over a lot, and that stat really overrates the importance of preventing turnovers, but stats like DYAR love his volume, and stats like DVOA back up that it wasn't all volume. He was top five on a rate basis as well several times, which gets exponentially harder when your awful rosters consistently ask you to crank out so much volume. Ask Josh Allen in 2024 the statistical benefit of decreasing the volume a little bit.
Adding all of this together, we find Jim Everett's position on my all-time QB ranking, which we all know is peak-performance based. If I had to have a QB for a four season stretch, I would take Jim Everett with my 15th pick. Behind Tom Brady (12th), Kurt Warner (13th), and Philip Rivers (14th), but ahead of Brett Favre (19th), Warren Moon (29th), Boomer Esiason (31st), and John Elway (33rd).
People tend to laugh when I bring this up, and point out that Jim's career record is 64-89, as if I don't know that. He only won two career playoff games. He only played in four of them, but for a man who spent a whole career having to deal with such trash rosters, he turned a lot of it into chicken salad. This is not basketball. Jim was not putting up great stats on bad teams just because he could like he was Zach LaVine or something. Football doesn't work like that. He was put into horrendous positions over and over and over again, and he showed his mettle.
I often wonder what could've been if Jim Kelly came into the league on the 1986 Rams, and Jim Everett came in on the 1986 Bills. Would it still be the case that Kelly is in the Hall of Fame, while Everett isn't? In my opinion, absolutely not, but we can only guess about questions like that.
So there. That's a surface level look into the career of Jim Everett. NY/A doesn't like him because it discriminates against bad rosters without a lot of RAC. ANY/A doesn't like him because he turned the ball over a lot, but for somebody like me who takes pains to discriminate against neither bad rosters nor people who turn the ball over a lot, I think Jim Everett is the 15th best QB of all time.
Thanks for that explanation on Jim. In addition to DVOA and DYAR liking him, his teams passing first downs are pretty high which I think helps explains the gap between his yards based numbers and his DVOA based numbers. Also, what led you to choosing 4-years instead of 3 or 5?
It's not actually a strict four. It's a minimum of four seasons that MUST be included. Beyond that, up to three seasons are allowed to be excluded entirely, for falloff or rookie reasons. However, three seasons do not have to be excluded if keeping them will improve the score. This generally leaves room to ignore the falloff of a player's career, or a few bad seasons to start it, but not both of these things.
It's basically a peak performance metric, with very little sympathy for extended falloffs or taking a long time to get going. The perfect player according to my formula is somebody like Peyton Manning or Dan Marino, who came into the league a finished product, and fell off quickly. This makes sense though in my opinion, because that's very few bad plays in a career.
The same does not apply to somebody like Tom Brady, because even once you exclude 2001, 2002, and 2019, you're still not out of sub-tenth place seasons. Therefore, he fares worse than a lot of people think he would, mostly because he took so long to get going. On a career-based ranking like mine, this hurts, and it should hurt in my opinion.
Because of this mechanic of punishing long lead-in times, and punishing long falloffs, it's not a true prime performance metric. It's a career performance metric, but peak performance is basically what it captures. It basically just captures peak performance, with punishment built in for having a lot of off years, be they in the front or on the end or in the middle, my formula doesn't care. This is in contrast to the public eye, which generally tends to just ignore off-years in the middle as if they didn't happen at all.
The impetus for the cutoff being four is actually Kurt Warner, who made the Hall of Fame with just four truly great seasons. Since you can be a Hall of Famer now with just four great years, I built a formula that doesn't discriminate between four great seasons and twelve of them.
With my excluding seasons method, Kurt's ranking on this list doesn't have to deal with his 2002, 2004, or 2005, instead using only his 1999, 2000, 2001, 2007, 2008, and 2009 seasons to calculate his performance level, and come to his ranking of tenth place, just above Tom Brady. At their peaks, they were about the same, but Kurt came into the league finished already, compared to Tom taking a few years to get there. That's the only difference.
If we look at somebody like Jim Everett, the formula sees him as his 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1995 seasons, entirely ignoring the lead-in year in 1987, the injury shortened 1993, and the falloff in 1996. If there were more than three bad qualified seasons, I would've had to punish him for them, but there weren't.
You may say this punishes newer players, who often are forced onto the field sooner, and therefore have a lot more bad plays than some of the older guys, and I say that's a feature. Not a bug. The newer guys who play bad as rookies and second year players just have more bad plays in their careers. I don't feel bad for my performance formula punishing them for that, even if it's not their fault since they shouldn't be playing in the first place.
There are also some other things about the aggregation method that put extreme value on the top-end performance while perhaps nullifying some of the bad, that I don't think I'm able to explain in a Substack comment box. One part I can explain is that there's quite a hefty buff a career gets for ever having been the best QB in the NFL in any season, which one can argue with, because it's relative. For instance, Carson Palmer gets it but Drew Brees does not, because Drew's prime basically coincides with the best parts of Brady and Manning's careers, and Carson wrangled his way into the top spot in a rather weak QB season in 2015. The strength of this number one position basically carries Carson on its own to 53rd all-time, a position he would've been nowhere near without the first place buff.
Anyways. I've gotten way into the weeds. Basically, it's an augmented peak performance ranking that punishes careers with a lot of bad plays in them (i.e. Tom Brady). I chose four seasons because that's how many top ten seasons Kurt Warner had, and he is currently in the Hall of Fame. Two of those four seasons are first places, which drives my formula crazy and pushes him all the way up to tenth place, but you know what? First place twice is the same number that Tom Brady had, so I think it's right to reward it that much. My method is designed to answer questions like this, and it's also designed to answer questions like Daunte Culpepper, who had a fantastic season in 2000, then two bad ones in 2001 and 2002, then two more great ones in 2003 and 2004, and a whole bunch more bad ones after that. Most formulas (like Kevin Cole's, which was my main problem with his ranking methodology) have trouble with stop-start careers like this, but mine does not.
Loved the article Robbie.
I just want to know, though. How long does it take you to write this? Days?
Any article of mine typically takes multiple afternoons of work.
My writing pace is about one hour to 800 words, which is quite fast from what I understand, but on something like this that's 11K words long, it still eats up a lot of time. The only thing that takes slightly longer than that are the lists, which take longer because I have to learn the basics of 20 different stories instead of just one.
It's really bad for business, because if I took one of those afternoons every week and dedicated it to promotion instead of the finer details of whatever I'm writing, my subscriber count could be triple what it is now, but I'm not here for business. I'm here to write quality stuff. My interest is not really whether anybody reads it or not.
So yes. That's the answer. About an hour to 800 words, which for how long most of my things are means multiple afternoons worth of writing every week.
I think going through the questions is a good way to help determine who should be in the Hall and is something I've seen only one other time. While I agree with your conclusions, I don't think the voters will. I think Ben being in the good good stats, lots of winning category will get him in and I think the mythos created around Eli is too strong to overcome for Rivers. I think if Rivers would have won an MVP and won in 06 and 07 against the Patriots, he would be in.
I would also be interested in a further dive into Jim Everett, because even based on NY/A and ANY/A, he has only 2 seasons in the top 5 and 3 other seasons in the top 10. In your formula, what is giving him this boost compared to other numbers?
I truly think Philip (and not Eli, key point) would've been the one to stop the 2007 Patriots, if he'd been given a real chance at it. He'd just played perhaps the best playoff game of all time the week before, but then tears his ACL in the fourth quarter. You can't play the QB position moving one leg at a time. The Chargers should've just started Billy Volek, and I'm not entirely sure he wouldn't have beaten the Patriots. He certainly was a better QB than the -0.05 EPA/Play, -5 CPOE Eli Manning in 2007.
What I'm trying to get at is that the Chargers lost, and Philip Rivers was the reason they lost, in both 2006 and 2007, but there are extenuating circumstances (worst luck of all time one season, trying to play on a torn ACL the next) that ought to be taken into account there. This is the Philip Rivers what-if. We've talked about the Chad Pennington what-if before, and this is the Philip Rivers version.
In retrospect, I can quite confidently say the 2007 Patriots were dead. It took everything they had to beat the Jaguars in the second round game harder than anybody remembers it being, and after working so hard to finish an undefeated regular season they were just out of gas, particularly on offence. They couldn't move the ball at all against either the Chargers or the Giants, and it was the luck of fools and Patriots that they ran into a hobbled (to put it lightly) Philip Rivers and one of the worst QBs in the league in Eli Manning, allowing them to nearly pull it off anyway. Like I said in the article, I believe any of the top 11 QBs in the NFL (from Donovan McNabb upwards) would've beaten the Patriots in those 2007 playoffs, some by multiple scores.
What if Philip Rivers makes it through the Colt game unscathed? That's the what-if. It's purely supposition on my part, but the Patriots were limping, looking for somebody to lose to. The real Philip Rivers would've proved more than good enough for that, and with that win on his (and the Chargers') resume, where do they go from there? It almost surely gets them out of this playoff loser mentality, that they still remain in today, because they almost surely defeat the New York Giants in the SB with that defence they had in 2007. I'm not sure if the Giants would've scored a point that day. They only put up 17 on a pretty mid 2007 Patriot defence.
With the Chargers as 2007 Super Bowl champions (a reality that I think was closer than anybody thinks), the roster still takes a pretty big nosedive from there, but had enough changed in the interim to make things different in SD? The team would almost certainly still be in SD, and Philip Rivers would be the cause of that. He would certainly be in the HoF.
All of that gone, as a result of just one knee injury. Onto Jim Everett.
As with all my arguments, Jim's relies on peak performance. Let's go season by season.
Jim's prime begins in 1988, where despite a rush offence not worth using that got used A LOT, putting him in a lot of bad positions, Jim posted 1293 football outsiders DYAR, which puts him in the mix with Dan Marino and Boomer Esiason for the most in the league, all almost 500 ahead of anybody else. His rate stats are fantastic also, finishing fourth in DVOA and fifth in ANY/A despite an astonishing (for 1988) 609 touches. Mix this in with Boomer touching the ball only 491 times in 1988, you find that Jim is second on my QB tier list that year.
Onto 1989, where the rush offence is even worse, and gets even less touches, leaving Jim to pick up even more of the offensive workload. He parlays this into being the only QB in the NFL even close enough to see Joe Montana's dust in DYAR, and being much closer to the pack but still second place in DVOA and ANY/A. Combining this with the fact that he played all 16, compared to Joe Montana missing three starts in 1989, leads me to put Jim number one that season. He did not even make the Pro Bowl this season by the way, but he was without doubt the best QB who started all 16.
1990. Jim's only good teams that he will ever play on are already behind him, but he's still fantastic. The rush offence is horrendous. The defence is horrendous. His receivers are not what they used to be, but Jim is still chucking. Ninth in ANY/A and ninth in DVOA are not great on a rate basis, but on a volume basis on a team that DESPERATELY needed the volume, Jim was top five in DYAR again, and became the first player in NFL history not named Dan Marino to put up 600 touches three seasons in a row, a level of durability that's very difficult to maintain in this era. Combine this with a lot of the names above him on the rate lists being guys like Jay Schroeder (430 touches) and Jim Kelly (418 touches), and Jim finds the top five for the third season in a row.
Perhaps all this work got to him, because in 1991 he's an uninspiring 11th, even despite being about 16th on a per-play basis, due to the same 'all the guys better than him in the rate stats have 400 plays to his 600, so what would they have done on the horrendous Rams?' dichotomy.
He's trying Marc. He's really trying. By the time we get to 1992, Henry Ellard and Flipper Anderson are not what they used to be, and as the Rams are truly beginning to fall into the toilet as a franchise, there are no other offensive players you've ever heard of. Nevertheless, 6th in DYAR, 6th in DVOA on that typical Jim Everett volume land him 6th on my 1992 tier list.
He finally misses time in 1993, and is horrendous when he does play, so finally the Rams (who had not drafted a QB throughout this whole process of four losing seasons in a row, an important acknowledgement both contemporaneously and in retrospect that QB was not the problem in LA) decide to make a move, trading Jim Everett for a seventh round draft pick (LOL). Immediately after this, that franchise would fall into the pits of despair, moving to St Louis for their trouble.
Unfortunately, Jim got to New Orleans just as they were falling into the pits of despair. Challenge Marc. Name me one New Orleans Saint (other than Jim Everett) from 1994 to 1996. The rush offence was not worth using. The defence was horrendous, and Jim carried all of this to a 7-9 record with his 1101 DYAR (3rd), and 0.193 DVOA (5th) on that typical Jim Everett volume, landing him in the top five of my tier list again.
1995 is much the same story, with the same Saints roster, the same 7-9 record, but this time with 1168 DYAR (5th) and 0.190 DVOA (8th). With improvement leaguewide, roughly the same numbers only got him 7th place this time. He tried it again in 1996, but it was over, and you didn't hear much about Jim Everett after that.
That's eight prime years, and his tier list finishes in those eight years are 2, 1, 5, 11, 6, 29 (in the injury-shortened 1993), 4, 7, almost all of it on awful rosters, perpetually putting him in bad positions. Four top five finishes plus two additional top ten finishes (that was almost three) in an eight year prime has very rarely been done. He's not Peyton Manning (top five every year from 2003-2010), but look at the prime of Hall of Famer Jim Kelly, who played around the same time as Jim: 11, 9, 11, 9, 7, 3, 5, 9.
That's not Jim Everett calibre.
ANY/A hates Jim Everett, because he turned the ball over a lot, and that stat really overrates the importance of preventing turnovers, but stats like DYAR love his volume, and stats like DVOA back up that it wasn't all volume. He was top five on a rate basis as well several times, which gets exponentially harder when your awful rosters consistently ask you to crank out so much volume. Ask Josh Allen in 2024 the statistical benefit of decreasing the volume a little bit.
Adding all of this together, we find Jim Everett's position on my all-time QB ranking, which we all know is peak-performance based. If I had to have a QB for a four season stretch, I would take Jim Everett with my 15th pick. Behind Tom Brady (12th), Kurt Warner (13th), and Philip Rivers (14th), but ahead of Brett Favre (19th), Warren Moon (29th), Boomer Esiason (31st), and John Elway (33rd).
People tend to laugh when I bring this up, and point out that Jim's career record is 64-89, as if I don't know that. He only won two career playoff games. He only played in four of them, but for a man who spent a whole career having to deal with such trash rosters, he turned a lot of it into chicken salad. This is not basketball. Jim was not putting up great stats on bad teams just because he could like he was Zach LaVine or something. Football doesn't work like that. He was put into horrendous positions over and over and over again, and he showed his mettle.
I often wonder what could've been if Jim Kelly came into the league on the 1986 Rams, and Jim Everett came in on the 1986 Bills. Would it still be the case that Kelly is in the Hall of Fame, while Everett isn't? In my opinion, absolutely not, but we can only guess about questions like that.
So there. That's a surface level look into the career of Jim Everett. NY/A doesn't like him because it discriminates against bad rosters without a lot of RAC. ANY/A doesn't like him because he turned the ball over a lot, but for somebody like me who takes pains to discriminate against neither bad rosters nor people who turn the ball over a lot, I think Jim Everett is the 15th best QB of all time.
Thanks for that explanation on Jim. In addition to DVOA and DYAR liking him, his teams passing first downs are pretty high which I think helps explains the gap between his yards based numbers and his DVOA based numbers. Also, what led you to choosing 4-years instead of 3 or 5?
It's not actually a strict four. It's a minimum of four seasons that MUST be included. Beyond that, up to three seasons are allowed to be excluded entirely, for falloff or rookie reasons. However, three seasons do not have to be excluded if keeping them will improve the score. This generally leaves room to ignore the falloff of a player's career, or a few bad seasons to start it, but not both of these things.
It's basically a peak performance metric, with very little sympathy for extended falloffs or taking a long time to get going. The perfect player according to my formula is somebody like Peyton Manning or Dan Marino, who came into the league a finished product, and fell off quickly. This makes sense though in my opinion, because that's very few bad plays in a career.
The same does not apply to somebody like Tom Brady, because even once you exclude 2001, 2002, and 2019, you're still not out of sub-tenth place seasons. Therefore, he fares worse than a lot of people think he would, mostly because he took so long to get going. On a career-based ranking like mine, this hurts, and it should hurt in my opinion.
Because of this mechanic of punishing long lead-in times, and punishing long falloffs, it's not a true prime performance metric. It's a career performance metric, but peak performance is basically what it captures. It basically just captures peak performance, with punishment built in for having a lot of off years, be they in the front or on the end or in the middle, my formula doesn't care. This is in contrast to the public eye, which generally tends to just ignore off-years in the middle as if they didn't happen at all.
The impetus for the cutoff being four is actually Kurt Warner, who made the Hall of Fame with just four truly great seasons. Since you can be a Hall of Famer now with just four great years, I built a formula that doesn't discriminate between four great seasons and twelve of them.
With my excluding seasons method, Kurt's ranking on this list doesn't have to deal with his 2002, 2004, or 2005, instead using only his 1999, 2000, 2001, 2007, 2008, and 2009 seasons to calculate his performance level, and come to his ranking of tenth place, just above Tom Brady. At their peaks, they were about the same, but Kurt came into the league finished already, compared to Tom taking a few years to get there. That's the only difference.
If we look at somebody like Jim Everett, the formula sees him as his 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1995 seasons, entirely ignoring the lead-in year in 1987, the injury shortened 1993, and the falloff in 1996. If there were more than three bad qualified seasons, I would've had to punish him for them, but there weren't.
You may say this punishes newer players, who often are forced onto the field sooner, and therefore have a lot more bad plays than some of the older guys, and I say that's a feature. Not a bug. The newer guys who play bad as rookies and second year players just have more bad plays in their careers. I don't feel bad for my performance formula punishing them for that, even if it's not their fault since they shouldn't be playing in the first place.
There are also some other things about the aggregation method that put extreme value on the top-end performance while perhaps nullifying some of the bad, that I don't think I'm able to explain in a Substack comment box. One part I can explain is that there's quite a hefty buff a career gets for ever having been the best QB in the NFL in any season, which one can argue with, because it's relative. For instance, Carson Palmer gets it but Drew Brees does not, because Drew's prime basically coincides with the best parts of Brady and Manning's careers, and Carson wrangled his way into the top spot in a rather weak QB season in 2015. The strength of this number one position basically carries Carson on its own to 53rd all-time, a position he would've been nowhere near without the first place buff.
Anyways. I've gotten way into the weeds. Basically, it's an augmented peak performance ranking that punishes careers with a lot of bad plays in them (i.e. Tom Brady). I chose four seasons because that's how many top ten seasons Kurt Warner had, and he is currently in the Hall of Fame. Two of those four seasons are first places, which drives my formula crazy and pushes him all the way up to tenth place, but you know what? First place twice is the same number that Tom Brady had, so I think it's right to reward it that much. My method is designed to answer questions like this, and it's also designed to answer questions like Daunte Culpepper, who had a fantastic season in 2000, then two bad ones in 2001 and 2002, then two more great ones in 2003 and 2004, and a whole bunch more bad ones after that. Most formulas (like Kevin Cole's, which was my main problem with his ranking methodology) have trouble with stop-start careers like this, but mine does not.