Last year, I wrote a post explaining a method of translating quarterback stats across different eras based on the league's average numbers. I followed that up with a pair of posts that looked at peak QB performance using the translation method and an estimate of Football Outsiders' YAR (Yards Above Replacement) metric. Today, I want to apply that same methodology to all single-game QB performances (regular-season and playoffs) since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970...

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Play Index: Team Game Finder

Searching for the most rushing yards in a loss or the fewest pass attempts by a team in a game is so much easier using the Team Game Finder. Check it out before the season starts.

In the Football Outsiders Almanac 2010 (which I highly recommend, btw), Aaron Schatz compared Jake Delhomme's ongoing presence as an NFL starting quarterback -- despite all evidence that he could no longer perform in that capacity -- to this Onion article about a CEO whose rise through the ranks was attributable to nothing but his "unbelievable handshake", a.k.a. his ability to make people like him and convince them that he's a strong leader. With all due respect to Delhomme's firm handshake, though, I think one of the men he's replacing in Cleveland has possibly surpassed him as the master of that charade.

That man, of course, would be Derek Anderson, picked up from the scrap heap this offseason by Arizona. Despite a giving vote of confidence to longtime QB-in-waiting Matt Leinart during OTAs and training camp, Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt has soured on the former USC star to the point of giving Anderson the starting nod (which in turn has made Leinart so disgruntled that the team is considering trading him). What went wrong? The turning point for Whisenhunt was apparently Arizona's August 23 game vs. Tennessee, in which Leinart was unable to lead the offense to any kind of sustained ball movement and was pulled in favor of Anderson during the 2nd quarter.

Chief among Leinart's sins that night: a 2-yard completion on 3rd-and-3; a 7-yard completion on 3rd-and-16; and a deep incompletion on 3rd-and-1 when (ironically) one of his patented short checkdowns would have been enough for a 1st down. For Whisenhunt and the Cards' staff, it was a microcosm of Leinart's struggles since being named Kurt Warner's successor -- particularly when you compare Leinart's skills to those of Anderson, whose famously strong arm theoretically offers more big-play ability for an offense that has been starved for it (especially with Larry Fitzgerald injured).

That's the conventional wisdom, at least. However, if we look at the two quarterbacks' preseason performances on the whole, we see that even with Leinart's unimpressive play, Anderson has still done nothing to warrant supplanting him for the starting gig:

And this isn't the first time Anderson has passed a QB on the depth chart despite statistical evidence that he was the inferior option. As I noted last November, Anderson also convinced Eric Mangini to start him over Brady Quinn (who, granted, wasn't exactly enjoying a banner year either) even though he was having one of the worst seasons by a quarterback in NFL history.

Just like the CEO with the amazing handshake, Anderson apparently has the special ability to come across as the best man for the starting job, even when his actual on-field performance doesn't back that up. Now, Anderson supporters will obviously counter by pointing to his breakout 2007 season, when he went to the Pro Bowl and almost led the Browns to the playoffs... but you can include that season in his numbers and he still comes out as the league's 2nd-worst QB to receive 1,000 attempts since 2006.

Is Leinart necessarily a good quarterback? No, he's actually been well below-average according to the numbers so far. But the evidence we have on Anderson says that he's actually even worse -- worse over his entire career (including 2007), and worse so far this preseason. I'm all for a good QB competition, but at least give the spoils to the on-field victor rather than the guy with the better handshake.

The 2010 San Francisco 49ers intrigue me. I'm not the only one: David Fucillo of the blog Niners Nation wonders whether this is the most important season in franchise history. Let's take a look at how they got here:

• From 1983 to 1998, the 49ers won at least 10 games in every season. Joe Montana captained the team for the first half of the run, while Steve Young drove the offense for the last eight seasons. The team won five Super Bowls.

• In '99 and '00, the team fell apart, but rebounded with double digit wins in '01 and '02 as Jeff Garcia, Garrison Hearst and Terrell Owens led a dynamic offense under Steve Mariucci. The 49ers went 7-9 in '03 under Dennis Erickson, and after the season, Jeff Garcia went to Cleveland and Terrell Owens went to Philadelphia. Their star young linebacker, Julian Peterson, was lost for the '04 season after five games. The team finished just 2-14, ranking 30th in points, 32nd in points allowed, and posting an SRS score of -13.6.

• San Francisco drafted Alex Smith with the first overall pick in the '05 draft. He had one of the worst rookie seasons in history with 1 TD, 11 INTs and a horifically bad 1.1 ANY/A average. San Francisco had a -11.1 SRS score, and ranked 32nd in the league in both total offense and total defense. Despite ranking 30th in both points and points allowed, the 49ers won four games by five or fewer points, en route to an overachieving 4-12 record.

• In 2006, the 49ers weren't much better. They ranked 24th in scoring and 32nd in points allowed, and had the league's second worst SRS score at -8.7. The 49ers were a terrible team that somehow managed to win 7 games. Doug blogged about how bad they were for a 7-9 team, as their points differential was the worst of any 7-win team in league history. Then, the 49ers won their first two games in 2007 -- by a total of four points, of course -- despite being outgained by 257 yards. That prompted this post by me where I wondered how could San Francisco be so bad over an 18 game stretch but still win half of their games? The answer: they were really, really lucky. The 49ers lost their next eight games, most of them in embarrassing fashion, and ended 2007 with a 4-12 record.

The 49ers from 2004 to 2007 were a perennial doormat in the league with an average SRS score of -11.3 points below average. But some interesting things have happened since then. Frank Gore, a 3rd round pick in '05, developed into a franchise running back. Patrick Willis, the 11th pick in the '07 draft, played like a dominant linebacker from the moment he first stepped onto the field. Vernon Davis, the 6th pick in the '06 draft, broke out in a huge way in 2009, tying the NFL record for touchdowns in a season by a tight end. Michael Crabtree frustrated fans and was frustrated by a long holdout in '09, but he eventually signed with the team and played very well for a rookie receiver. Justin Smith -- yes, that Justin Smith, the 4th pick in the '01 draft -- came to San Francisco after seven years with the Bengals and made his first Pro Bowl in 2009. Smith, who failed as an elite edge rushing end, fit in perfectly as part of the 49ers 3-4 front. And nose tackle Aubrayo Franklin has become one of the games' hidden young gems. Oh, and Alex Smith no longer stinks.
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Note: This post was originally published at the new College Football at Sports-Reference site, so when you're done reading, go over and check it out!

Today, it's time to finish our list of the top 20 college football programs of the modern era. As a quick refresher, I defined the "modern era" as 1946-present, because 1946 was the first true postwar season and the year before (1945) was the final time a service academy would win a National Championship. Also, the rankings are determined by the Simple Rating System (SRS), which measures team points per game differential relative to the NCAA average, adjusted for strength of schedule. Here's a recap of the rankings so far:

20. Georgia Tech (+7.70)
19. Michigan State (+8.69)
18. Arkansas (+8.95)
17. Auburn (+9.59)
16. Miami (+10.00)
15. UCLA (+10.04)
14. Georgia (+10.42)
13. LSU (+10.52
12. Florida State (+10.97)
11. Tennessee (+11.89)

With that in mind, let's move on to the Top 10, which (just as alert reader JW Lewis predicted) features "three teams from the current Big 10, two from the SEC, three from the current Big 12 (with one of those being from the old SWC and two from the old Big 8), one from the Pac-10, and one independent":

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Back in March we hosted an NCAA basketball tournament contest here at this blog, promising the winner (1) honor, (2) glory, (3) a podcast on the player or team of his or her choosing. The winner was Matt Stephans, and the honor and glory were delivered immediately. The podcast took a bit longer, but here it is. Sorry for the wait, Matt.

Matt is a Cowboy fan and wanted to hear about the life and times of former Cowboy kicker Rafael Septien. We also created an all-international team in Septien's honor and did a team segment on the 1983 Cowboys.

Congratulations, Matt. We hope you enjoy it.

Listen here, subscribe here if you know how, and read this if you don’t. It’s free, of course.

OK, I've gotta toot our own vuvuzela for a second here: I just found out that the Sports-Reference family of sites has been named to TIME Magazine's list of the 50 Best Websites for 2010! It's a great honor for us, and a thrill to know that our users get so much enjoyment & utility out of the sites. Here's to being your favorite sports stats destination for many years to come...

This one is more of a trivia marathon than a blitz. I think the format makes for a fun game. Please let us know if it also makes for good listening and playing along.

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Last month, Doug wondered what the NFL equivalent of the Miami Heat would look like, and there were several great comments about how that team might perform. Today, I'm going to take a look at teams judged similar in career AV of the starters, but which had different distributions of career value. To do this, I looked at team average career AV of the 22 primary starters, and the standard deviation for the career AV of the 22 primary starters. I'll refer to these as "talent balanced" teams, and "talent dispersed" teams. Now, there is a correlation between overall team quality and standard deviation. Good teams tend to have superstars, and those superstars have career AV's that cause the standard deviation, or talent dispersal, to rise. Bad teams tend to lack star players, and have lower standard deviations because, well, very few players turn out to be very good.
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Sponsoring a page is fun, fast, and easy way to support what we're doing here at Pro-Football-Reference. With a sponsorship, you can:

• Show your support for your favorite player or team.
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• Make your voice heard by the tens of thousands of people who visit Pro-Football-Reference every day.

Here's all you have to do to get involved:

1. Create a membership account.
2. Find the page(s) you'd like to support, and click "sponsor" (available pages).
3. If the page you want is already sponsored, click "Alert Me!" to be informed when the current sponsorship expires.
4. Follow the instructions to create your message and make your payment.
5. Your message and links will be visible on the page after we approve them (usually in less than 24 hours).

And who knows, if you're clever enough, your message might end up on lists like these.

If you go to PFR's leaderboard page, you can see that Tony Romo ranks 4th all time in yards per pass attempt, and all three quarterbacks ahead of him retired by 1960. Romo also ranks first in net yards per attempt (PFR has NY/A data beginning in 1969, which is the earliest year for which we have complete individual sack data) and first in adjusted net yards per attempt among all players. You can use PFR-'s play index to see a list of the top active quarterbacks in yards per attempt, and I've heard multiple sources cite Romo's incredible career average in that category.

My initial take when I heard such propaganda was that is was incredibly misleading. Why?

1) Romo obviously plays in a much more pass-friendly era than nearly every quarterback in league history.
2) Romo, because he was an undrafted free agent, didn't see the field during his early years. Young quarterbacks tend to play poorly, and sitting on the bench during your first couple of years will help boost your career averages, especially when you have only played for a few seasons. Which brings me to ...
3) Romo just turned 30 years old in April; he hasn't yet played during the final years of his career, when most quarterbacks tend to kill their career averages. For example, the Patriots Steve Grogan retired with a career yards per attempt average of 7.48, but from age 25 to 34, Grogan averaged 7.98 yards per attempt. Romo, unless he retires early, will sink his career averages at least a little bit by the end of his career.
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Ronnie Brown rushed 20 times for 115 yards and 2 touchdowns against the Bills last October; that sounds like a great game, until you realize that there were five better rushing performances by individuals against Buffalo in 2009. Below are the stat lines for all running backs who had at least 10 carries against the Bills last year:

Most of the chart is self-explanatory; allow me to explain the Grade column, by which the table is sorted. To rank running back performance against a team, I wanted to combine rushing yards, yards per carry and rushing touchdowns into one metric. The simple, back-of-the-envelope formula I used was rushing yards over two yards per carry plus ten yards for each touchdown. So 30 carries for 100 yards would get you a grade of 40; if you scored two touchdowns, that would bump the grade up to 60. Similarly, a grade of 60 could be earned by rushing 15 times for 80 yards and one score. I'm not arguing that this is a perfect measure of running back performance, but it was relatively simple and should provide reasonable results in most cases -- i.e., Jones had the best performance against the Bills last year.

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For the last 8 months, the New York Jets have been doing almost everything they can to position themselves for a Super Bowl run. The Jets reached the AFC Championship Game in 2009, thanks to seven key players all 26 years of age or younger; then, New York added a quartet of stars in the off-season. They brought in two veterans with a combined 11 Pro Bowls to their name in RB LaDainian Tomlinson and OLB Jason Taylor. They were joined by two young stars who have mixed great success on the gridiron with off the field troubles in WR Santonio Holmes and CB Antonio Cromartie. After having by far the league's #1 pass defense and overall defense in '09, the team looked to be even stronger on defense with NT Kris Jenkins back from injury, Taylor, Cromartie and rookie CB Kyle Wilson. Then, came the Revis hold out.

Rex Ryan has invoked the names of Todd Bell and Al Harris when talking about Revis. What's the connection? In 1984, Todd Bell was in his fourth season with the Bears, and made his first Pro Bowl. The starting strong safety had an AV of 15 that season, and was named 1st-team All-NFL by the Sporting News and honored as a second-team All-Pro by the Associated Press. Al Harris was the 9th pick in the '79 draft for Chicago, and sat on the bench for the first two years of his career. In '81 and '82, he was Chicago's starting right defensive end. Then, to make room for Richard Dent, Dan Hampton and Steve McMichael on the defensive line, the Bears moved Harris to RLB, where he could replace Gary Campbell. In '83 and '84, Harris started 27 games for the Bears. But in 1985, both Bell and Harris were unhappy with their contracts. Both were starters on a Bears defense that finished 1st in the league in total defense and rushing defense and second in passing defense. They never caved, and sat out the entire season. As you know, the 1985 Bears weren't worse for the wear, as Wilber Marshall and Dave Duerson replaced Harris and Bell, and that unit went on to win the Super Bowl and go down as one of the greatest defenses of all-time. Ryan's father, Buddy, was the Bears defensive coordinator that season, and Rex had no problem bringing up that memory when discussing the Revis situation: "They were replaced and missed out on a Super Bowl, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Ryan said.
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Note: This post was originally published at the new College Football at Sports-Reference site, so when you're done reading, go over and check it out!

When you want to know what happened in a given college football season, the Years Index is the place to look. We have every CFB season on the site going back to 1869, and from the years portal you can access all of them. Click any year to find:

• Weekly AP Poll results for the season (see also: Expanded Polls)
• Season award winners
• All-America teams
• Individual stat leaders for seasons 2000 or later (see also: Expanded Leaders)
• A combined Schedule/Results page for every major school
• Season standings
• Bowl Game results
• Expanded individual stats: Passing ▪ Rushing ▪ Receiving ▪ Kicking ▪ Punting ▪ Scoring
• All major schools' coaches

Here's an NFL Films special with the late Bill Walsh, plus Joe Montana, Roger Craig, Jesse Sapolu, Brent Jones, and more:

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Yesterday, I was reading Brian Burke's great Advanced NFL Stats blog, and I found a post on Bill Walsh's randomizing strategy (for blitzing, run-pass mix, etc.). The post is interesting, but the link contained therein is solid gold -- Brian directs us to Fast & Furious Football, a site devoted to football playbooks. Although it looks like a pay site at first glance, it actually has an amazing archive of free playbooks from NFL, college, and high school teams (including many recent squads like the 2003 Patriots). I never played football beyond middle school, but I absolutely love this kind of thing... it really gives ordinary fans like me an inside look at the terminology and complexity of the game.

One of the most exciting plays in football is when a punter is standing at the opponent's 40 yard line, waiting patiently as the play clock ticks down slowly to zero. You need to get some more space for the punter to work his magic. For those that have played golf, this probably feels like a good strategy. I know that I would rather hit a full sand wedge into a green rather than be 40 yards closer. Then again, I don't have data for how accurate I really am from 115 versus 75 yards out (which is a good thing) to measure if my subjective feelings are actually correct, or whether I am remembering specific shots that are skewing my perception. In the NFL, we can measure the average starting position based on where a punt occurs. Is it actually a good play to take a delay of game to create more room? Let's look at the 2009 numbers.

First, I want to thank Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats for his play by play database that he has made publicly available. I'm working on cleaning up a punting database to do some further research, in line with what I talked about punts inside the 20, and so far I have only touched 2009 and have been testing it. I thought I would go ahead and post this, which may interest only me, since I know punters are H-O-T. These are numbers from the 2009 season with net yards by field position, from the team's own 40 yard line and closer to the end zone.

To smooth the data out, this next table has the same info, but uses the yard line, as well as the results from the 1 yard before and after it, to put a net yardage by field position. The "diff" column represents the difference in net yards at that yard mark, versus five yards further back. In order to justify a delay of game five yard penalty, we would need to gain at least five net yards from moving back.

It looks like taking a five yard penalty to gain more punting room for the punter is not justified by these numbers. Sure, it helps the punter's stats, as net yards are lower the closer to the end zone you get. It is arguably a break even strategy at around the 36 yard line and in, but then again, you probably should be going for it anyway if you are inside the opponent 36. Beyond that, well, it is costing teams somewhere on the order of 1.5 to 2 yards on average by moving back. That doesn't consider other factors, such as moving back reduces the chances of a first down by a penalty such as running into the kicker or offsides.

No coach is going to lose his job or win a Super Bowl by foregoing a delay of game penalty on a punt. Honestly, it's not that big of a deal, and you can count on one hand the number of times most teams do it during a season. But coaches are a generally meticulous bunch, so it surprises me that they would willingly give up 1 to 2 yards of anything. Plus, it's really annoying to watch a guy wave his arms back and forth for twenty seconds waiting for a delay of game penalty.

Last July we did this podcast episode, where JKL and I tried to name our all-80s offense purely from memory and without consulting any recorded data at all. Chase, barely alive during the 80s, was on hand with lots of analysis of the relevant data to let us know how our at-the-time perceptions align with a more disinterested and objective accounting of things.

Almost exactly a year ago, we recorded the defense episode (as promised) and now here it is. [Why did it take a year to edit the thing? It's a long story, so don't even ask, but as with all podcast problems so far, it's my fault and not Chase's or JKL's.]

More podcasts coming soon...

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Just for kicks, I plugged last year's results (regular-season + playoffs) into the SRS formula -- except instead of using point differential as the inputs, I used per-game yardage differential, a quick-n-dirty favorite of oddsmakers when determining if a team has played above or below what its W-L record would indicate. Broadly speaking, the outcome of a game can be retrodicted reasonably well using some combination of yardage differential and turnover differential, and we know that turnover differential is somewhat unreliable from year to year, so this SOS-adjusted ypg differential could provide insight into which teams will play better or worse than expected in 2010:

What this basically says is that to produce a prediction for a game's yardage differential last season, you subtract one team's rating from the other's and add the HFA term to the home team. Doing this for every game last season, this set of ratings produced the smallest squared error.

What jumps out? The Super Bowl participants (Indy & New Orleans) rank surprisingly low; the Cowboys could very well validate Chase's gut feeling about a big year in 2010; the Jets were probably better than their record would indicate (as evidenced by their playoff run); the Patriots might not be finished quite yet; and trendy hopes for a 49ers resurgence (beyond winning the weak West) could be misguided.

Of course, none of this takes into account offseason player movement or the million other factors at play here. But it is interesting as an additional piece of info about which teams played better or worse than you might have thought last season.

Note: This post was originally published at the new College Football at Sports-Reference site, so when you're done reading, go over and check it out!

The Schools Index is your one-stop destination for info about any "major" school in the last 141 years. On the main portal you'll find a table with 289 major schools, and:

• Their range of seasons played
• Their all-time overall W-L-T record and W%
• Their all-time bowl record & W%
• Their all-time Simple Rating System score and its Strength of Schedule component
• Their AP poll appearances
• Their conference championship totals

On the individual school pages, we also have year-by-year records and SRS scores, along with conference affiliations, AP poll rankings, bowl appearances, and (nearly complete) coaching histories.

Click on any of the seasons in the school's yearly results table, and you'll go to their team that year. For seasons from 2000-09, these pages will include complete passing, rushing, receiving, scoring, special teams, and defensive stats; for the team's game scores, click "Schedule and Results".

At the moment, clicking on years prior to 2000 will send you directly to the schedule/results page, but we plan on adding a great deal of historical individual stats to the pages of older teams in the near future. Also, once the 2010 season begins, check back with us because we will be generating current-season school pages, updated weekly with in-season stats and scores.

Thanks for checking out the new College Football @ S-R, and as always, let us know if you have corrections, questions, or comments via our feedback form.