A Quarterback’s Rating

By Jim Reese
CompuSports Staff Writer

Both the NFL and the NCAA have devised formulas to accurately rank a quarterback’s passing statistics which more individual high schools, leagues, districts, counties, and regions would do well to consider in determining who are the most efficient passers in their areas.

The system, it should be noted, is used to rate passers, not quarterbacks. These statistics do not reflect leadership, play calling, intelligence, judgment and other intangible factors that go into making a successful quarterback.

While no system I know of has been instituted that specifically addresses high school quarterbacks, either the professional or collegiate model is adequate and although the criteria used to determine the NFL and NCAA numbers is basically the same, high schools more often use the college method rather than the professional standard.

Too often in high school, total passing yardage has been used as the sole criteria for selecting quarterback superiority when, in reality, that might very well be dependent upon the type of offense used and may not adequately reflect the overall contribution of a passer to his team.

For instance, this past year a district in Florida had a quarterback who threw nearly 50% of the time and completed only 40% of his passes, but had more yardage than any other local quarterback simply because of the number of times his coach had him throw. Not surprisingly, his team finished 3-7 and did not make the play-offs. Utilizing the NCAA standard, he had a relatively low quarterback rating of 90.37.

Conversely, that area’s highest ranked quarterback in 2003, at 190.37, threw half the number of passes as the player above, had a higher completion percentage, threw for more touchdowns, had a much lower ratio of interceptions to touchdown passes, and led his team to an 9-3 record and a spot in the play-offs.

The standards used in both the NFL and NCAA draw on completions-per-attempt, yards-per-attempt, interceptions-per-attempt, and touchdowns-per-attempt.

The rankings formula takes into consideration, and penalizes accordingly, the devastating effect interceptions have on a team. Given the limited number of possessions a team has during a game, to lose one by throwing an interception probably causes more defeats than any other aspect of football, save the kicking game. Simply throwing for more yards because you pass more should have less importance than, say, the number of times you give up the ball by throwing an interception.

I believe one of the reasons the existence of passing ratings in high school has been so slow to take hold is because the mathematics required to figure it out was so difficult. Therefore, few coaches attempted to do it. But now there is a site available on the Internet where all that’s required is the plugging in of numbers from the four categories mentioned above and the results become instantly available.

Visit the Quarterback rating site at http://www.primecomputing.com .

Click on the web site above and type in the numbers. The reward will be an appreciation of a passer’s value based upon generally accepted criteria that reflect the full spectrum of the passing game, not some single arbitrary measurement such as total passing yardage.

Jim Reese was a quarterback and assistant coach at the University of Minnesota. He is now retired and lives in Tampa, Florida, where he reports on sports for a local newspaper.

Jim is a Staff Writer for the CompuSports Network, sharing the wisdom he has gained during his career in coaching.