Passing yards becoming a meaningless stat?

[JameisLoseston]

I'm noticing a worrying trend. Thus far in the season, the top 5 passing yardage leaders are:

Matt Ryan
Deshaun Watson
Joe Burrow
Josh Allen
Teddy Bridgewater
And for the sake of argument, let's throw in Dak Prescott, who'd be #1 if not injured.

What's the pattern? Besides these being some very surprising leaders, all of them except Allen play for palpably bad teams, including the top 3 all on one-win teams. Besides Allen as well (and Dak), taking this season only into account, all of them have also been something fairly near average NFL quarterbacks. None of them are the reason why their team is losing, but they also aren't good enough to be the solution. Ryan and Watson have been much better before, of course, and I believe Burrow will be great, but not one of these guys is sniffing an MVP vote; for his part, both Allen and his team have looked bad for all of October. Hanging out behind these guys, meanwhile, are the likes of Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Russell Wilson, who nearly all would agree have been some of the best quarterbacks in the NFL this season. We kind of saw this last year too with like Jameis and Goff, but there usually isn't such a huge disjunction between passing yards and the actual best passers, and they also played for considerably better teams than this year's bunch. This year, it's almost like these guys chucking it all over isn't even helping anyone.

So if the passing leaderboard is becoming made up of nothing but alright QBs on bad teams with the worst defenses, is there really much to be said for the stat at all anymore? Will we routinely see MVPs who aren't near the passing leaders in coming years? Or is this just an aberration that should normalize given time, if not this season then over the next several?

[RichardBak]

One of the biggest beefs I've had with the NFL over the last 20 years is the way rule changes have turned the game into basketball-on-turf. Seems like everybody and their mother routinely throws for 5,000 yards, 30+ TD passes, 70% completion pct., etc. Given a decent O-line and a standard set of receivers, I think even my 92-year-old aunt could turn into "Slingin' Sophie" Wisniewski and ring up some impressive numbers. (Assuming she was sober, of course.) Perfection and near-perfection are boring.

[lastcat3]

Yeah I'd say that passing yardage isn't nearly as important as it used to be. The reason a lot of those qb's are getting as many yards as they are is because they are playing on teams with average to poor records so they are just chucking the ball downfield more than normal in order to try to come back. And defenses these days are happy to give up yardage for time taken off the clock and if they are up by two or three touchdowns they don't mind giving up a td or two. All that matters in todays football is if the team gets the win or not.

I think the only real way to judge qb's in todays game is how many wins they bring to the table in comparison to other quarterbacks. Pretty much every offense is built around the qb position so he is going to get his stats more times than not regardless. The big question mark is how many wins he brings the team.

[Jay Z]

Here's the winning percentage for passing yards leader by decade:

1930s .643
1940s .686
1940s AAFC .741
1950s .592
1960s .536
1960s AFL .614
1970s .566
1980s .605
1990s .581
2000s .675
2010s .591

So it really mattered in the early years.

1960-79 it barely mattered at all. 1960-69 NFL, NONE of those teams made the playoffs. Jurgensen 5 times, Brodie twice, Unitas twice, Charley Johnson. 1970-79 was 9 different players in 10 years.

The player with the most championships (6 alone, a seventh in 2014 when he tied with Rothlisberger) is Drew Brees. Not surprised at that I guess. He had 7-9 records in several of his leading seasons, same as Winston last year.

I think I'd hold off a bit before declaring any trend.

[JWL]

My team still passes like it is the 1990s.

[JohnH19]

Passing yards have never been an accurate indicator of team success. Teams that used to pass a lot were behind a lot.

[Jay Z]

Jameis Winston isn't starting this year because he threw 30 picks last year, which would be the equivalent of 45-50 in the old days. You can't turn the ball over 40 times in a league where the average # of turnovers is 20.

[Lee Elder]

Bad teams are usually behind in games, so they have to pass more. OBs for those teams tend to build up the yardage, if not the points. Better teams have something closer to a balance between rushing yards and passing (although in today's football, everyone throws the ball around the yard a lot). So the QBs on poor teams build up some -- not all-- stats.

It is also true that some very good passers play for some bad teams. To avoid comparing current passers, we can go back to a different era. Sonny Jurgensen played on a long string of bad teams in both Philadelphia and Washington. He had a lot of yards, TD passes and interceptions. His teams seldom won half their games until Lombardi and then Allen coached the Redskins, but Jurgensen was a league-leading passer. Joe Namath was the same way, a classic pocket passer who played in a total of three playoff games, all of them early in his career. Playing on some really bad teams, Namath threw the ball a lot and suffered a lot of interceptions, but he also built up a lot of passing yards.

Not sure I answered your question, but I tried!

[RyanChristiansen]

Tell me about it. Sam Bradford completed 71.6% of his passes in 2016 on 552 attempts for 3,877 yards for the Vikings. He was 7-8 in those contests. You can't pass your way to championships. Dan Marino almost did it in 1984, though. It puts fans in the seats and makes for good NFL Films material.

[NWebster]

I see that Joe Flacco just passed Joe Montana on the all-time passing yards list. Case closed.