After hearing everyone slurp Brett Favre’s skills and bash Jake Delhomme’s for the past year, I decided I wanted to take a quick look at whether the praise and venom were warranted.
Personally, I have always viewed these two quarterbacks as similar players: Southern gun-slingers who can win or lose a game for you with their arms. Delhomme certainly doesn’t have the pedigree and the mythology that Favre has. But if you asked me to put money down, I would say that Delhomme’s stats would bear him out as, essentially, a poor man’s Brett Favre.
Tonight, I tested that theory. Here’s what I found in some simple passing metrics:
*Note: to try to give the most accurate view, I’ve removed the following outlier seasons from the calculations:
- Favre’s first season in Atlanta (where he threw only 4 passes)
- Delhomme’s two seasons as a back-up in New Orleans (where he threw only 76 and 10 passes, respectively)
- Delhomme’s 2007 campaign with Carolina (where he played in only 3 games and threw a mere 86 passes).
CAREER PASSING STATISTICS (Favre | Delhomme)
Completion %: 62.0 | 58.9
Yards / Pass Attempt: 7.1 | 7.2
Avg TD / season: 27.6 | 18.7
Avg INT / season: 17.5 | 14.7
TD to INT ratio: 1.58 | 1.27
INT%: 3.22 | 3.53
TD%: 5.11 | 4.18
Career Win %: 63.5 | 58.7%
So what do we learn from this comparison? I would argue that it proves my basic premise (which I think is a first for when I do a real analysis of one of my hunches). Favre makes a bigger impact on scoring and winning percentage than Delhomme. He throws significantly more picks per season than Delhomme, but only from a raw numbers standpoint. Based on percentage of passes intercepted, Favre is actually +0.3% more accurate than Delhomme. But that’s a marginal difference.
However, I have one more trick up my sleeve.
I noted in the above the stat comparison that I was removing outlier seasons, which is to say, statistical anomalies. In the first table, I did that strictly by taking out any seasons where the two QBs threw fewer than 90 times.
But as we all know, Brett Favre had easily his best statistical season in 2009 at age 39. This is, in a sense, the mother of all outliers. So if we remove Favre’s epic first season with the Vikings from the equation as well, the comparison changes to this:
CAREER PASSING STATISTICS (Favre | Delhomme)
Completion %: 61.8 | 58.9
Yards / Pass Attempt: 7.0 | 7.2
Avg TD / season*: 27.3 | 18.7
Avg INT / season*: 18.1 | 14.7
TD to INT ratio*: 1.51 | 1.27
INT%: 3.32 | 3.53
TD%: 5.04 | 4.18
Career Win %: 62.5 | 58.7%
Perhaps the greatest lesson to learn from the revised table is this: when a guy plays for 19 years, removing one of those years—even if it’s his best—doesn’t make all that big a difference. But it’s also worth noting that 2009 was only Favre’s 6th best in terms of TD% and 5th best in terms of raw number of TDs. It was, however, his career best in terms of completion %, yards per attempt, raw interceptions, and INT%.
But the big take-away for Browns fans remains this: Jake Delhomme doesn’t provide as much firepower as Brett Favre, on either a raw or a percentage basis. However, his decision-making and accuracy are comparable. All signs point to Delhomme throwing fewer overall INTs than Favre and being roughly equivalent in INT%, only slightly worse in Completion %, and ever so slightly better in yards per pass attempt in 2010.
In short, if you look at any other category besides the number of points on the board, it’s reasonable to say that Delhomme nearly duels Favre to a draw.
But the most important statistic for the watchability of the 2010 Browns is Delhomme’s career win percentage as a QB. 58.7% would equate to roughly a 9-7 record. I don’t expect the Browns to hit that mark in 2010, but I am encouraged that barring another catastrophic outlier of a season, Delhomme is in position to improve the Browns’ offense dramatically this year. He may not be Brett Favre, but then again, the Browns also come way out ahead of the Vikings in this statistical category:
Jake Delhomme 2010 Salary: $7MM
Brett Favre 2010 salary: $17MM
So from a financial efficiency standpoint, the Browns may actually be doing fairly well for themselves at the QB position. Starting Sunday, though, we’ll find out what seven stacks really gets you in the 2010 NFL.
-T
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