Here are a few videos about some of the best mobile QBs of all time:

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Chris Brown of Smart Football turned us on to this SportScience video about Drew Brees' uncanny passing accuracy -- watch it and be amazed:

Yes, Brees is standing a lot closer to that target than the Olympic archers would be, but the fact that he was able to hit such a small area with such precision and consistency goes a long way toward explaining how a 6'0" 2nd-round draft pick with a surgically-repaired throwing shoulder was able to become arguably the best pure passer in the game this season. (BTW, Chris has another post about Brees and one of his favorite plays here.)

In the second PFR tutorial vid, we take a look at what the Player Season Finder can do for you.

In the comments of yesterday's post about the best SRS teams of the 2000s, loyal PFR reader MattieShoes took issue with lumping together all incarnations of a team into one decade-long SRS calculation:

I don't think a decade-long SRS calculation is very good though -- Take the Raiders. They had some very good teams early on and some very bad teams more recently, so they average out to be a bad team for the decade. But now every team that lost to them in 2000-2002 is being adjusted as having lost to a BAD team, which isn't right.

I think it'd make far more sense to calculate yearly SRS and average those, since team strength is less likely to change drastically over the course of a season, and any errors caused by teams changing strength over the course of one season are limited to just that, one season.

I agree with that -- it probably won't impact the ratings much, but the method really does need to be changed to reflect the strength of each opponent when a team plays them, instead of using their decade-long strength rating. So here's the new deal: I calculated SRS for each season of the 2000s unto itself, and then took a weighted average of those SRS scores (by game played per season) to find the decade-long SRS rating. The results:

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I'm going to do some team similarity scores like what Doug did a couple of years ago. I'm not going to use the same methodology (not that either is better than the other), because I'm not going to look at specific game results. Rather, I am going to look at a team's overall profile, in terms of wins/losses, points scored and allowed, and yardage for and against.

Like Doug, I'm not putting a tremendous amount of time into deciding how to weigh each factor. I just went with adjustments that generally felt about right, and then made sure the results passed the sniff test.
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That's right, fans, forget about those silly wins and losses... They're so passe compared to what's being tracked in these "standings" sent to us by PFR reader Aidan Henry. Aidan explains:

"I'm a huge stat junkie. This is why I got my company to make an NFL team merchandise scoreboard. It's based on the last 30 days of eBay data (we are an eBay data company) and it updates daily. The scoreboard shows divisional standings as if they were based on total sales. Average ticket prices and jersey prices are also given."

It's also perhaps the only set of standings on earth where you'll see the Raiders ranked ahead of the Colts. So I guess that's two pleasant surprises in a week, Oakland fans... Enjoy.

We've done a Players of the Oughts (or at least 90% of them) post, so I figured it was time to put out a preliminary list of the teams of the decade. The ranking method? SRS, of course. I used all games, regular-season and playoffs, and accounted for home-field advantage by adding 2.66 points (the average home-team margin of victory this decade) to the margin for away teams & subtracting the same amount from home teams.

And no, playoff games are not arbitrarily weighted more than regular-season ones, other than the fact that they will boost your strength of schedule score. I'm certainly open to different weightings, but they have to be grounded in something more legitimate than "I feel like playoff games should count five times as much", or whatever.

Anyway, here are the best NFL teams by SRS from 2000 through yesterday's games:

On a day where Tom Brady made Doug Williams' second quarter in Super Bowl XXII look pedestrian, there was some horrific QB play going on a few miles south of Gilette Stadium. It's rare when you can really blame one player for a loss, but Mark Sanchez today is that guy. Some agonizing footnotes in one of the most unbelievable losses in Jets history:

• For only the fifth time since 1960, and only the second time in twenty years, a team had a 210-yard rusher and lost. Thomas Jones' historical day -- 22 carries, 210 rushing yards, 1 TD -- went for waste. Since 1960, teams with a 200-yard runner are now 101-7 in the regular season.

• You might think that teams with a 200-yard rusher should have an even better record. Well, that's because in the first six losses, the losing team with the 200-yard rusher allowed an average of 35.5 points to their opponents. Those games were high scoring affairs where both offenses were clicking. That's what makes the Jets loss so spectacular; to have a dominant runner and to hold a team to 16 points is almost always a recipe for victory. Right? Before today, Walter Payton held the "record" for most rushing yards in a loss where his team allowed 16 or fewer points. On Thanksgiving Day 1981, Payton rushed for 179 yards and the Bears held the Cowboys to 10 points. Only problem? The Bears scored nine.

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You know, sometimes we love to debate whether Tom Brady is better than Peyton Manning, or where he ranks among the all time greats, and that's fine -- but other times, you just have to appreciate history when it's made:

http://www.pro-football-reference.com/play-index/tiny/SRgkn

Last week, I introduced the first iteration of the 2009 college football simple rating systems. All explanations and limitations of the system are explained in that post and/or the links embedded therein.

After another exciting weekend of college football, the top of the rankings have changed quite a bit:

Gms	MOV	 SOS	RAT	conf	team
6	23.7	 5.4	29.1	SEC	Florida (6-0)
7	20.7	 7.5	28.2	SEC	Alabama (7-0)
6	22.2	 5.8	28.0	B12	Texas (6-0)
6	26.5	 0.1	26.6	BigE	Cincinnati (6-0)
6	17.2	 6.7	23.8	B12	Oklahoma (3-3)
7	10.6	11.5	22.1	ACC	Virginia Tech (5-2)
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Sporcle time again, as we they ask: Can you name the alma maters for all of the 2009 opening day NFL starting quarterbacks?

Courtesy of Matt Knobbe and the Tecmo Super Bowl Repository, here's your Tecmo Super Bowl Game of the Week for Week 6, featuring the New York Giants and the New Orleans Saints. The highlights:

(How did we do this? Matt and the other dedicated folks at the Knobbe.org message board have spent a lot of time over the years updating this classic Nintendo football game, including the introduction of a 32-team ROM a few seasons ago. Sounds complicated, but don't worry, it's easy for you to enjoy the fruits of their labor: just get yourself an NES emulator, download the 2009 version of Tecmo here, and play to your heart's content. And be sure to check back at Matt's site for roster updates and more Tecmo-related goodness all season long.)

Two weeks ago, I compiled a list of the top peak regular-season quarterbacks of all-time by averaging together their best 6 seasons (or all of their seasons if they didn't have 6 seasons) in a metric that attempts to estimate Football Outsiders' YAR (yards above replacement) via linear regression. The results were somewhat surprising -- underrated Cincinnati signal-caller Ken Anderson was ranked #1! -- but the concept was a hit, and many readers made suggestions to make the rankings better, so I figured I'd revisit our Peak QB list today and make some changes to the method.

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Here are some facts that will blow your mind. I know they caught me off guard, because I haven’t really paid much attention to Dick Jauron’s coaching career.

If he coaches seven more games, Dick Jauron will rank in the top fifty all-time in games coached in the NFL. Take a moment and let that sink in for a bit, before we get to the names around him.

Now, take another moment, and let it sink in some more. Top fifty all-time. No, really, think about it.

Since he debuted in 1999, the only men who have coached more games are Andy Reid, Jeff Fisher, Jon Gruden, Tony Dungy, Mike Holmgren, Tom Coughlin, Mike Shanahan, and Bill Belichek.

So far this year, he has passed Doug’s boy Wally Lemm, Vince Lombardi and Bobby Ross in games coached. He will pass Steve Mariucci, Joe Kuharich, John Madden, John Robinson, Brian Billick, and Jimmy Johnson if he can avoid the axe for seven more games. He will then rank right behind Buck Shaw and Bill Walsh in games coached.

Only Norm Van Brocklin has a lower winning percentage than Jauron’s among coaches currently in the top 50 in games coached. And Van Brocklin basically coached two expansion teams: the Vikings for the first six years of their existence, and the Falcons starting in their third season. He had five non-losing seasons. Jauron has one.

I am actually hoping that the Bills show signs of life, rebound for a good stretch, and that Jauron makes it to the end of the season. It's like a poker hand where you've hung around too long. Why fold now, at the river? You've put a lot of chips in the pot, let's just make sure that they've got your 10 high beat.

At this point, we are pot committed on Dick Jauron finishing in the top fifty, so let's make it happen. Please.

Remember how mediocre Eli Manning was for the majority of the 2007 season? Remember how Tiki Barber called him out on television, questioning his leadership skills? Remember how well he played against the perfect Pats in Week 17 of '07, and how he followed that up with a shockingly un-horrible postseason run (culminating in a Super Bowl win)? Remember how a lot of MSM types trumpeted that Eli had "turned the corner" and was suddenly a good quarterback based on that 5-game sample? Remember how all of us statheads cried "fluke!"?

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Joe Posnanski pointed out that the Redskins will be playing a team without a win for the sixth straight game, and also made the following observation:

Washington plays the winless Kansas City Chiefs this week, a Chiefs team that has lost 28 of their last 30 games. I wish there was a streak report on Football Reference like there is on Baseball Reference … I cannot imagine many teams in NFL history have lost 28 of 30 games.

In fact, think about this: We know no NFL team has lost 30 games in a row. So the worst a team has been over 30 games is 1-29. That’s just not much worse than 2-28, is it?

Well, we may not have a streak report, but we can look up these sorts of things. (For those of you dying for your Dayton Triangles coverage, wait no further.) The Kansas City Chiefs have lost 28 of their last 30 games, a streak that began after a 4-3 start to the 2007 season. Equally amazing, another franchise has a similar run over the exact same stretch, as the Detroit Lions have lost 27 of their last 30 games. Because the 30th game for the Lions was a win, if the team loses to the Packers on Sunday, they will match the Chiefs with 28 losses over a 30 game stretch. You may soon be able to throw in the Rams, who have lost 25 of their last 30 games. Because games #28 and #29 were consecutive wins during a brief stretch of the Rams' 3-13 season in 2007, if the Rams lose their next three games (the third one appropriately coming against the Lions), they will also have lost at least 27 games over a 30 game stretch.

The following list is every franchise that has lost more than 26 games in a 30 game stretch. I list the inclusive dates where the team met that criteria (so often times, the streak was longer than 30 games). I count ties as half-wins and half-losses. This "opposite of elite" list is in roughly descending order of how bad the streaks were.
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Last week on the New York Times Fifth Down blog, Toni Monkovic pointed out that Eli Manning has a better record on the road than at home as a starting quarterback. Several theories were posted in the comments, ranging from the winds at the Meadowlands to the Giants' fans behavior. One that was not mentioned, though, was the effect that sharing a stadium with the New York Jets may have on the home field advantage at the Meadowlands. In the past, I have written about the possible role of road team familiarity on home field advantage when discussing similar climate division rivals, when looking at the effect of new stadiums, and when looking at playoff rematches.

The two franchises have shared a home stadium since 1984, when the Jets left Shea stadium. The Giants had been playing at the Meadowlands since 1976. This situation is virtually unique in American sports. The only other situations I am aware of where two professional football teams shared a stadium at the same time (other than occasional games or emergency situations) were in the early days of the AFL, when both Dallas teams played in the Cotton Bowl, and when Oakland played in Kezar stadium, home of the San Fransisco 49ers, in 1960. And in those cases, the leagues and opponents did not intermix. The franchises will continue the shared stadium relationship when they move into the New Meadowlands complex next season.
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Here's an epic Sporcle quiz you guys should love: Can you name every QB to start a game during the 2000s? (through 10/1/09)

At 5-0, the Minnesota Vikings are off to a terrific start. Part of the reason? Minnesota's two big additions in the off-season -- Brett Favre and rookie wide receiver/running back/returner Percy Harvin -- have paid significant dividends already for the Vikings. The New York Times NFL Blog, The Fifth Down, reminded me of something interesting -- Harvin won the national championship last year with the Florida Gators and is on a pretty good team in the pros. If he were to win the Super Bowl this season, he'd join a pretty exclusive club: only three players have won a college championship their last season in college and then were starters on a Super Bowl champion the following year: Randall Gay (LSU, New England 2004), William Floyd (Florida State, San Francisco 1994) and Tony Dorsett (Pittsburgh, Dallas 1976). Percy Harvin actually isn't a starter yet (he's started in 2 of 5 games, but is generally behind Sidney Rice and Bernard Berrian on the depth chart), but his impact on the team may be more significant than that of any other receiver on the Vikes.

Whether Harvin starts or not, he'll still join an exclusive club. There haven't been many players to win a national title and then earn any amount of playing time and a Super Bowl ring the following season. The complete list is presented below, including the approximate value the player contributed to his team in his rookie year:

player   	 rkyr	tm	college	        AV
Eric Alexander	 2004	nwe	lsu	         0
Randall Gay	 2004	nwe	lsu	         5
Marquise Hill	 2004	nwe	lsu	         0
Brian Griese	 1998	den	michigan	 0
Tyrone Williams	 1996	gnb	nebraska	 2
William Floyd	 1994	sfo	floridast	 8
Derrick Lassic	 1993	dal	alabama	         3
Danny Stubbs	 1988	sfo	miami(fl)	 2
Tony Dorsett	 1977	dal	pittsburgh	16

Percy Harvin isn't the only one who can make history, however. Eagles tight end Cornelius Ingram tore his ACL in August 2008, and watched his Florida Gators win the championship while he was on injured reserve. After being drafted by the Eagles in April, Ingram tore the ACL on the same knee in August 2009 and was placed on injured reserve. If the Eagles win the Super Bowl this season, he'll instantly become the luckiest unluckiest football player ever.

(And before anyone points out, I know there was a third player drafted from the Gators this season. Unfortunately, he was drafted into football purgatory.)

As we all know, the Denver Broncos defeated the New England Patriots in come-from-behind fashion yesterday to secure a 5-0 start, their first in over a decade. With that in mind, I wanted to look at some of the best-ever performances in the season's first 5 games by members of the Broncos, and see how this year's crop matches up.

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