Who Are The Career Leaders in Total GunslingR?

On Tuesday, ESPN’s DJ Gallo introduced a new statistic called Total GunslingR, designed to measure the gunslinging ability of a quarterback. This immediately brought two questions to mind. First, Gallo claims that Brett Favre is the classic gunslinger (which I would agree with), but is Favre really among the leaders in this statistic? Second, who the active career leaders, the true “heirs to Favre”? The article uses one week of data to conclude that Vince Young, Matthew Stafford, and Mark Sanchez are the next gunslingers. I seek to find out if that is true.

First, here is Gallo’s formula: ten points for touchdown passes in quarters 1-3, 15 points for fourth-quarter TDs and 25 points for TDs in the last two minutes plus overtime. Interceptions are worth six points normally, 12 points in the fourth quarter, and 18 points in the last two minutes and overtime. Passing yards are worth 0.1 point each. The total is then multiplied by the number of pass attempts. Here is the formula in formula form:

(10*TDs+15*4QTDs+25*2OTTDs+6*INT+12*4QINT+18*2OTINT+0.1*YDS)*ATT

Now, for the career leaders:

I simply plugged in their career stats into the formula. I initially thought that it would be unfair to those with fewer pass attempts, but it’s not! True gunslingers go out there and pass as many times as they can, and they should be rewarded for that on a career level. Also, since I couldn’t find individual interception breakdowns anywhere, I assumed the number of fourth quarter/OT interceptions was the same for every player (1/3 of total INTs). For per-game stats, I used starts plus half non-starts in which a pass was thrown.

What do you know? Brett Favre did indeed just go out there and do his best to help the team win! It helps that he kept coming back, because a real gunslinger just can’t stay from the game that he knows and loves! But was Favre the best gunslinger on a game-to-game basis? I was able to ferret out per-game GunslingR from the career stats by first taking the pass attempts away and dividing by games played, then adding back in pass attempts per game to create a per-game total that looks like Gallo’s leaderboard from last week. Here are the leaders:

Gallo’s article did hit on Matthew Stafford. If Stafford can keep up his current pace, he will be in the top ten in career Total GunslingR for sure. Cam Newton is also a surprising sixth in his rookie season. The usual suspects of recent vintage appear as well: Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Kurt Warner, Tony Romo, Tom Brady, and Aaron Rodgers.

Brett Favre, though, is a disappointing eighth. But Favre is a true gunslinger! John Madden agrees! So, what could be missing from the formula? First the length of a QB’s pass attempts should be considered. How much of Aaron Rodgers’ passing yards is Greg Jennings putting the team on his back? Since I couldn’t find quick data for that, I left it out, though I may revisit this in the offseason. The second addition is more controversial, and thus was added for this article. If the QB has ever been accused of a crime, including sexual harassment, domestic violence, and theft, I added a bonus equal to 100 times the number of years the QB has been in the league. My rationale: a true gunslinger takes unnecessary or stupid risks both on and off the field, and usually gets caught. This affects four QBs in my data set so far: Favre, Mark Sanchez, Ben Roethlisberger, and Cam Newton. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

Anyway, here are the adjusted standings:

Now for the active leaders in three permutations of the formula:

Even without laptop theft, Cam Newton would rank eighth on this list!

Some other highlights: Tim Tebow ranks really low using this formula. Sure, he throws fourth-quarter touchdowns, but his lack of interceptions and lack of pass attempts really hurts his gunslinger status. I think “gunslinger” is one moniker we do not need to give Tebow, he will always have a legend all his own. For that matter, all the “running QBs” – Tebow, Young, Michael Vick, and Kordell Stewart – rank low, as they are just as likely to run as pass, especially in the fourth quarter. Terry Bradshaw ranks below average in these stats. The presence of Franco Harris and the fact that the Steelers rarely played from behind harms the fourth-quarter stats needed to be a gunslinger. Meanwhile, Mark Sanchez, who ranked third in Total GunslingR for week 12, is pretty mediocre in per-game GunslingR for his career. He only jumps to 20th among active players when you adjust for his allegations of underage relations.

While researching this, I found that almost all quarterbacks had many more TDs thrown in the second quarter than the other quarters. I think this is because of two-minute drives to end the half, but I’m open to other suggestions.