Pro Football Reference Blog

The San Diego Chargers are on a four game winning streak, lead the league in yards gained, yards allowed, net yards per pass and net yards per pass allowed. So don't feel bad if you haven't done a good job of following the Kansas City passing game the past three weeks -- I hadn't either.

Then I noticed that Dwayne Bowe had 14 touchdowns, the third most through 11 games in the last 50 years. And Matt Cassel -- who ranked 25th in ANY/A last season -- ranks 5th in that metric in 2010. He's thrown 22 touchdowns and against just 4 interceptions. Here's a list of all players in the past 50 years with 20+ touchdowns and no more than 5 interceptions through 11 team games:

                                               Pass

Rk           Player Age Year  Lg  Tm  G  W L T  Cmp Att  Cmp%  Yds TD Int  Rate  Y/A  AY/A

1         Tom Brady  33 2010 NFL NWE 11  9 2 0  236 356 66.3% 2703 23   4 105.8 7.59  8.38

2       Matt Cassel  28 2010 NFL KAN 11  7 4 0  195 323 60.4% 2307 22   4  99.7 7.14  7.95

3       Brett Favre  40 2009 NFL MIN 11 10 1 0  248 358 69.3% 2874 24   3 112.1 8.03  8.99

4     Aaron Rodgers  25 2009 NFL GNB 11  7 4 0  249 380 65.5% 3136 22   5 104.9 8.25  8.82

5         Tom Brady  30 2007 NFL NWE 11 11 0 0  284 392 72.4% 3439 39   4 127.9 8.77 10.30

6        Drew Brees  25 2004 NFL SDG 11  8 3 0  206 313 65.8% 2458 21   3 108.0 7.85  8.76

7    Donovan McNabb  27 2004 NFL PHI 11 10 1 0  224 350 64.0% 2892 23   5 105.8 8.26  8.93

8       Rich Gannon  35 2001 NFL RAI 11  8 3 0  236 360 65.6% 2626 21   4 101.9 7.29  7.96

9     Roman Gabriel  29 1969 NFL RAM 11 11 0 0  176 325 54.2% 2212 22   3  94.3 6.81  7.74

Um, yeah. Last year, Jason wrote an article about how Cassel was so conservative that he'd be better off throwing more incomplete passes and interceptions. This year? Well, according to the raw numbers, he looks like a viable MVP candidate. Which, of course, shocked me as a sign that something was up.

The most likely culprit in these situations? Strength of schedule. As it turns out, Cassel has faced a super easy schedule this year. But enough about him: let's take a look at every team's passing offense and passing defense this season. There are many ways to do that, but here's what I did.

1) Calculate each team's offensive ANY/A for each game. Compare each team's ANY/A to the league average -- as of now, 5.88 -- and give each team a grade for each going. If a team had 28 pass attempts and 2 sacks, and averaged 6.88 ANY/A for the game, they'd have 30 pass plays and averaged 1 more ANY/A than average. That's a grade of 30. If a team has 46 pass plays, 4 sacks, and a 3.88 ANY/A average, that's a grade of -100. Calculate an offensive grade for each team in each of the 176 games each season.

2) Give each defense the opposite score of the offense. If an offense scores +50, the defense scores -50. By grading each offense and each defense in each game, that gives us 704 game-scores for the season. All game scores, of course, sum to zero.

3) Then, we can use the Simple Rating System to adjust each game score for strength of schedule. So passing offenses are adjusted based on the strength of the defenses they faced, which are adjusted based on the strengths of the offenses they faced, which are adjusted based on the strengths of the defenses they faced, and so on. After several hundred iterations, the ratings converge, and we receive true ratings for each teams.

Those ratings are presented below, in terms of adjusted net yards each offense produces above average per game:

The Chargers lead the league by a huge margin in terms of adjusted net yards produced above average, coming in at 24 ANY/G over the second best team, New England. It just so happens that they've faced the easiest slate of defenses in the league -- even after adjusting for games against San Diego -- while the Patriots have seen the second hardest set of defenses. As a result, after adjusting for strength of schedule, it's New England's offense that comes in at #1. And by quite a large margin. The Panthers and Cardinals, to no one's surprise, grade out as the least efficient passing offenses in the league. St. Louis also ranks in the bottom five -- not only are Sam Bradford's raw numbers not impressive (for a veteran), but he's faced a super easy schedule. Yes, he's a rookie, and yes he's got little help around him, but Bradford's numbers this year are much less impressive than a lot of people seem to realize. As for Cassel and the Chiefs? They come in barely behind San Diego as far as easiest schedules. After adjusting for opponent strength, they fall just outside of the top ten.

How about the pass defenses? A positive number means the defense is doing well; the Bears lead the league with a defense that's allowed 68 fewer ANY/G than average. In the strength of schedule column, a positive number means a team has faced a bunch of good passing offenses. The Colts have faced the toughest set of opposing passing games in the league, thanks to seven games against the Patriots, Chargers, Broncos, Eagles, Texans (x2) and Chiefs.

The top five doesn't have many surprises: the Bears, Packers, Titans, Chargers and Steelers defenses have been strong all year long. Last year's top defense, the Jets, have faced a pretty tough schedule this year, and it only gets tougher this week. Still, Gang Green is coming up far shy of last year's production against the pass, although they are coming off their best performance of the season. The Houston Texans have been skewered in the media for their porous pass defense, and with good reason. But the Jaguars actually rank just a hair behind Houston as far as ANY/G below average, and the Broncos look even worse once you account for strength of schedule.

Want to take a look at every game this season? See which units had the best and worst performance of the year? No problem: