Sunday’s game between the New England Patriots and the Tennessee Titans will be remembered mostly as the day Tom Brady single-handedly assassinated any shred of dignity the Titans had left after an 0-5 start. Brady lit up the Tennessee secondary for 380 yards on 29-of-34 passing, racking up six TD passes in en route to a 59-0 massacre. Tom Terrific ended up posting a passer rating of 158.3 on the day.
And that’s good, right? Any time your quarterback throws six touchdown passes, he has to be doing well. But just how good was Brady’s day, historically speaking? And what about the Titans’ Kerry Collins, who ended up losing seven yards on 2-of-12 passing, not to mention his interception?
To be brief, passer rating is complicated. You take four basic stats (completion percentage, total passing yards, touchdown passes, and interceptions), and then manipulate them to create a number that creates an arbitrary value for the passer’s performance. Clearly, a rating of 158.3 is pretty awesome, but Matt Ryan of the Atlanta Falcons posted a rating of 67.4 in a win over Chicago that same day. Should we be pleased or disappointed with his performance?
Actually, we should probably just be content. The formula is set so that an average quarterback earns a rating of 66.6. Ryan performed well enough to win the game, completing 19 of his 33 attempts with two TD passes, but his two interceptions nearly cancelled that out. Taking Ryan’s interceptions out of the equation would boost his rating up to 93.6.
The scale has an upper limit, meaning that someone throwing 74 TD passes wouldn’t earn a rating in the thousands, although they would probably deserve it. A “perfect” game would earn a rating of 158.3, which, by no coincidence, was the rating Brady posted. A quarterback who threw only incompletions would earn a rating of 39.6.
Is it possible to post a rating lower than that, though? Sure thing — just ask Kerry Collins. The Titans quarterback ended up with negative passing yardage and an interception, giving him an incredible 4.9 passer rating on the day. What’s even more incredible is that he didn’t post the lowest rating of the day. Collins’ backup Vince Young threw just two passes, one an interception and one an incompletion.
His passer rating? 0.0.
In the NFL, passer rating has a lower limit of zero, but such is not the case in the NCAA. Had Young still been playing for the Texas Longhorns and posted that stat line, he would have recorded a mind-boggling -200.0 passer rating on the day.
The NCAA also raises its upper limit for passer rating to over 1500, but it’s difficult to reach such stratospheric heights without playing Tecmo Super Bowl. I’ve played games where Tecmo Joe Montana would have recorded a passer rating of over 1000 by only throwing for 90+ yard TD completions.
So while New England’s beatdown of Tennessee was memorable, it might be even more memorable as the night we saw a perfect passer rating in the same game as a zero passer rating. That’s something to tell the grandkids fifty years from now.
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