The Ten Best Passing Seasons in Purple

I told you I'd get back to football, didn't I? Anyway, one of the things I love about the statistical revolution in baseball is how easy it is to compare seasons across eras. With the advent of OPS+ and ERA+, which normalize OPS and ERA by comparing them to the league average that year, it's strikingly easy. Football, like baseball, has changed over the years, making it exceedingly hard to use counting stats to compare individual seasons. Is it fair to penalize a quarterback from the 70s because of how little teams passed then? Or to penalize a quarterback from before the spread of the West Coast offense for his low completion percentage?

Baseball's advantage in coming up with stats to rely on for this purpose is their ability to look at rate stats that can encompass an entire performance, like OPS and ERA. Football doesn't really have a whole lot of those types of stats. In fact, football really only has one stat that's used as a catch all to describe a player's performance--Quarterback Rating (though I think I'll probably end up trying to apply this to teams as well). Of course, the stat has it's flaws (like the fact that it doesn't factor in running ability), but so do most stats, but it still allows us to use the principles behind OPS+ and ERA+ to compare individual seasons across eras. Basically, I found these by taking the QB Rating, dividing it by the league QB rating for that year (found by using the stats for the entire league) and multiplying by 100. Like the baseball stats, these stats are normalized so that a QB Rating+ of 100 is exactly average and an increase/decrease of one point of QB Rating + means it is 1% better/worse than average. For example, a QB Rating+ of 110 is 10% better than average and a QB Rating + of 90 is 10% worse than average. All of these stats are from Pro Football Reference.com.

So without further ado, the ten best QB Rating+ by a Vikings' Quarterback (in reverse order). The asterisks mark seasons in which the Vikings' missed the playoffs, and I apologize in advance for the tables.

	Year	CMP	ATT	YDS	TDs	INT	LG QB Rating	Viking QB Rating	QB Rating+
10	Daunte Culpepper 2003*	295	454	3479	25	11	76.6	96.4	125.8
9	Daunte Culpepper 2000	297	474	3937	33	16	76.2	98	127.8
8	Tommy Kramer 1986*	208	372	3000	24	10	71.5	92.6	129.5

Daunte makes the list three times (as you can probably guess, his 2004 season is further up), while this is Kramer's only appearance. 1986 was the only season Kramer had a QB rating over 77.8, and his 92.6 rating was the best in the league. For that, he was rewarded with his only Pro Bowl appearance and shared the Comeback Player of the Year award with Joe Montana. The Vikings' still didn't make the post season, but unlike in 2003, when a poor defense (23rd overall in points allowed) torpedoed their chances, it was the Vikings' schedule, along with two losses to 5-11 teams that kept them out of the playoffs. The Purple's other five losses were to teams that were 10-6 and better, including the 12-4 Redskins, the 12-4 Browns, the 14-2 Giants and the 14-2 Bears. Kramer did miss three games that year due to injury, including the Vikings loss to the 10-6 Bengals. A 10-6 record still would have been enough to get the Purple in the playoffs, edging the 10-6 Rams for the Wild Card spot, but considering the Vikings' lost to the Lions and the Bucs, both of whom were 5-11, with Kramer playing, it's hard to use Kramer's injury as an excuse for missing the playoffs.

	Year	CMP	ATT	YDS	TDs	INT	LG QB Rating	Viking QB Rating	QB Rating+
7	Wade Wilson 1988	204	332	2746	15	9	70.6	91.5	129.5
6	Fran Tarkenton 1964*	171	306	2506	22	11	68.0	91.8	135.1
5	Daunte Culpepper 2004	379	548	4717	39	11	80.9	110.9	137.1

I'll be honest--I was surprised to see Daunte's 2004 season so low here. He set the franchise record for QB Rating, Touchdowns, Completion Percentage and Passing Yards and he blew away the second best in each category. He was penalized by the fact that 2004 was an amazing year for quarterbacks (three other quarterbacks had QB ratings that cracked the top twenty all time, and Peyton Manning set the record), and the only one I've seen so far that had a league average rating that cracked eighty. Daunte was good folks. He was really good. This is an odd group of three, even aside from the fact that Daunte only made it to 5th. Wade Wilson's 1988 season probably doesn't deserve to be on here, since he only started 10 games that year, but he did make the Pro Bowl, so I figured he played enough to make the cut. Finally, the 1964 Vikings didn't make the playoffs, but not because they didn't deserve to--at the time, only the winner of each division made the postseason, and the Vikings finished second, behind the Baltimore Colts, who went on to become the last team to lose to a Cleveland team in a title game.

	Year	CMP	ATT	YDS	TDs	INT	LG QB Rating	Viking QB Rating	QB Rating+
4	Randell Cunningham 1998	204	332	2746	15	9	76.2	106	139.1
3	Fran Tarkenton 1976	255	412	2961	17	8	63.6	89.3	140.4
2	Fran Tarkenton 1975	273	412	2994	25	13	62.8	91.8	146.3

One of the things I've always been fascinated by was Cunningham's transformation from "out of football stone mason" to "star quarterback" in 1997 and 1998. And his 1998 season was special--everyone here knows that, but one of the things that I think the Vikings' offense did there was complete the transformation of the league from one where running orientated offenses ruled to one where teams had to pass to keep up. I'm going to have to look and see when that happened exactly at some point (probably soon, when I've completed my "league average QB Rating" spread sheet), but I really think that Vikings' team is one of the main reasons that the passing game is so important now.

	Year	CMP	ATT	YDS	TDs	INT	LG QB Rating	Viking QB Rating	QB Rating+
1	Fran Tarkenton 1973	169	274	2113	15	7	61.7	93.2	151.0

So now you know--if anyone asks, 1973 was Fran Tarkenton's best year as a passer, a year when he was 51% better than the average quarterback. His QB Rating+ in 1973 was so good, it was better than Peyton Manning's 2004 score and better than Tom Brady's score from last year. It says something for my system that the two best quarterbacks to play for the Purple (Daunte and Tarkenton) appeared the most often on this list, and that the best quarterback to don the Purple and Gold had the best three seasons, two of which ended in the Super Bowl, and one that ended with a whiskey bottle.