This is the fourteenth and final installment in the series on the most statistically dominant regular season quarterbacks in NFL history. If you’ve been following along, I appreciate it; if not, you may want to check it out from the beginning. Today we’ll be looking at career stats with a cascaded soft inflation adjustment. If you’re not familiar, cascaded is the term I use to describe the act of giving 100% credit to a player’s best season, 96% to his second best season, 92% to his third best season, and so forth.

The soft inflation adjustment is pretty simple too. First, I find the average number of quarterback plays per game for each season since 1932. Then I find the average of the aggregate of all seasons (34.7). Next comes the hard inflation adjustment, which is simply 34.7 divided by a given season’s average. To convert from hard to soft, I just take the average of the hard number and one. It’s that simple.¹

Cascaded Soft Adjusted Career Stats

The following table shows the career cascaded soft inflation-adjusted stats for every qualifying quarterback since 1932. It is initially sorted by value over average (VAL), but you can search and sort to your heart’s delight. Read it thus: Peyton Manning had 9614 plays for 65181 Total Adjusted Yards at 6.78 TAY/P. For his career, he was 1.71 TAY/P better than average. He was also 2.98 better than 75% of average and 3.13 better than one standard deviation below average.² Overall, Manning produced 12253 Total Adjusted Yards over average. He also produced 19658 and 20612 Total Adjusted Yards above replacement.

First off, let’s talk about the effect of cascading players’ seasonal values and what that actually implies from a practical standpoint. The point is to reward players with higher peaks and penalize players who accumulated a great deal of value by virtue of simply playing for a long time (players you might call compilers). Comparing today’s results with the results from the regular soft inflation adjustment, we can see how cascading value actually changes quarterback rankings.

The modern trio of Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees have had extended peaks that have been greater in both duration and amplitude than we are used to seeing. Generally, quarterbacks cement their legacies based on a few great years surrounded by a few more good years. Our 21^st Century Quarterback Trinity sort of skewed public perception on what it means to play like a Hall of Famer.³ Because they have had such tremendous success, and sustained that success over a large number of plays, their rankings don’t change much when we cascade their values. Manning remains on top of every list, while Brady and Brees only drop one spot apiece in both “VAL” and “75REP.”

Otto Graham and Dan Marino switch places, with the Browns legend leapfrogging the Dolphin after cascading adjustments are made. This is because, despite having arguably the greatest season in quarterback history (1984), Marino rarely produced anywhere close to that elite level. For the most part, he was just very good for a very long time. Graham, on the other hand, was so far ahead of his peers that calling them peers almost seems like an insult to Otto.

Joe Montana, another regular season stat monster/noted champion, actually drops a few spots on the list. The reason for this is that, aside from two ultra efficient seasons, he didn’t produce at a historically high level. However, he is one of the few quarterbacks in history to have at least a decade worth of above average play (as measured by TAY/P). Further, he is the only quarterback with thirteen above average seasons and zero below average ones.⁴

Montana’s monkey-ridden successor, Steve Young, actually gains ground here. His case is simple: outside of Tampa Bay, his career was basically nothing but peak years. Cascading his values mitigates the impact of his poor seasons with the Bucs, as well as his forgettable final bout. What’s left is a chunk of seasons comparable to anything Graham, Peyton, or Aaron Rodgers ever gave us. His significant decline in the postseason separates him from his predecessor in the quarterback pantheon of the public consciousness, but when it came to doing the thing to actually get his team to the playoffs, he got the job done.

Brett Favre gets more than his share of grief from the analytics community and stats aficionados. Thus, you’d think that focusing on peak rather than longevity would bring him down significantly. In fact, the opposite is true. He ranked eighteenth in career soft inflated value, but he ranks fifteenth in value in the table above. Favre only had five below average seasons, which sounds like a lot until you realize he offset that with fourteen positive campaigns. The effect of his bad seasons is muffled, while his prime seasons stand out. That’s by value over average, a measure of career dominance. If we use the replacement level rankings, which are more a measure of total actual value added during a career, his fifth place ranking doesn’t change. Stats guys, calm down. Favre was great.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed this superfluous series on regular season quarterback statistical dominance. Thanks for following along.