The Methodology

We used the Play Index at pro-football-reference.com to look at each quarterback’s seasons in two splits: his team’s first 7 games, and then his team’s last 9 games.

Why not use a perfect 8/8 split? It’s the 7th game ugg saleuggs saleugg sale bootsthat often concludes the month of October, and that’s exactly where we are in the season. Every team has completed at least 7 games in 2011.

Deciding which quarterbacks to use was difficult, as someone like Matthew Stafford just completed his only real early season split in three years,uggs boots for saleuggs boots on saleugg for cheap and he missed practically the entire second half of 2010. There’s also the problem of rookies that start late in the season (that’s what Eli Manning did in 2004) and may have bad numbers that season, with no bad early-season numbers to balance it out.

On the reverse side, someone like Ryan Fitzpatrick has rarely ever played a lot of games at the start of the season. He has this year, and is having the best stretch of his career, which slants the numbers because the early-to-late ratio of games is too low.

In a perfect world, many quarterbacks would start all 16 games in multiple seasons, keeping the exact 7:9 ratio to examine, but only Peyton Manning has done that.

Games played include all game appearances (not just games started). Keep that in mind when looking at the team record. Games started would definitely have to be factored in for the true record, as players such as Matt Cassel can come in late for an easy New England win and get credited for Tom Brady’s win. Since this is more about passing performance rather than team record, take such records for quarterbacks that had a lot of non-starter appearances with a grain of salt.

All stats used are from the regular season only.

Quick Math Reminder: With a stat like passer rating, the higher your rating the harder it is to maintain. Even if two quarterbacks had the same number of attempts, but one had a rating of 105.0 and the other had a rating of 70.0, anuggs outletugg boots for cheapuggs boots for cheap interception on each passer’s next attempt would decrease the 105.0 rating by a larger number than the 70.0 rating. It may not be a huge difference, but these things can add up in a hurry. A five-point drop from 70.0 compared to 105.0 does not require the same amount of bad plays.more