CHFF ranks top passing seasons

Using their own insane criterea.  Brees’s 2009 at #2?  No.

9. Peyton Manning, Colts, 2004

Regular season (12-4): 336 of 497, 67.6%, 4,557 yards, 9.2 YPA, 49 TD, 10 INT, 121.1 rating

Postseason (1-1): 54 of 75, 72.0%, 696 yards, 9.3 YPA, 4 TD, 2 INT, 107.4 rating

Manning has been football’s Chosen One since the day he was born in a stable to the Virgin Olivia in 1976. He fulfilled the pigskin prophecies with a season for the ages in 2004. His 121.1 passer rating makes it the most efficient season in NFL history.

In fact, how’s this for efficiency? Dan Marino needed 564 pass attempts to set the touchdown pass record of 48 back in 1984. Twenty years later, Manning needed just 497 attempts to achieve his record 49 touchdowns. Three years later, Tom Brady would break Manning’s TD pass record. But the Patriots QB needed 578 attempts to do it.

Manning also led the league with a phenomenal 9.2 YPA, while leading the Colts to what was, at the time, the fifth-most prolific scoring output in NFL history (522 points).

But a season that seemed destined to end with the Chosen One’s ascension into the heavens fizzled to a disastrous end at Peyton’s own personal gridiron Golgotha: Manning and the Colts, who averaged a league-leading 32.6 PPG in 2004, couldn’t even find the end zone in a 20-3 loss to the Patriots in the divisional playoffs.

Relative to regular-season output, it was the most spectacular postseason offensive failure of the Super Bowl Era, and it soured a passing season that might have gone down as the greatest ever.