Best individual season by a Bengals QB - Analysis

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(05-27-2022, 12:42 PM)KillerGoose Wrote: As fans, one of the things we love to discuss is which players have been the best throughout our franchise's history. You can find numerous discussions in this boards history debating the accolades and stats of players like Chad Johnson, Cris Collinsworth, Ken Anderson, and numerous others. The conversation usually ends with something like "well, football was so different back then, so we just can't compare". This is true - the game has evolved substantially since the Bengals 1969 inception within the AFL. However, I believe there are a few things we can do here. When we talk about how good or bad a player is, it is relative to their peers. Being good or bad is always relative. What was good in 1969 would likely be awful today, but it wasn't then. So, I set out and started gathering data on every Bengals QB to start in an effort to identify the single best season by a QB in Bengals franchise history. One important note is I set a threshold of only using players who started at least 75% of available games for that season. Due to this, you won't see infamous names such as Akili Smith in here. For those who care about the rest of the methodology, I am going to post how I did this at the bottom of the post. For those who don't care, enjoy and happy discussions!



The 1981 Ken Anderson and 1988 Boomer Esiason season stand out as the two best individual seasons by a QB in Bengals history. Their passer rating relative to their peers was exceptional that season and they both helped lead their teams to great overall success, including a Super Bowl berth. Really, there is an interesting pantheon of QBs in that top right quadrant. We have 1981 Anderson, 1988 Boomer, 1975 and 1982 Anderson....and 2015 Andy Dalton. To have a laugh, we can see the duality of Dalton as he also boasts the single WORST season in Bengals QB history by way of his 2019 campaign. I also found it fascinating how good Cook's 1969 season was. We always hear about how good he was before he tore his rotator cuff and this backs it up. He was phenomenal individually, though the team didn't have much success that year. By Z-Score alone, he posted the 4th best individual performance in Bengals history, below '81 Anderson and '85-'88 Boomer. Speaking of Z-Score, I am now going to go into methodology for those interested...

Like I mentioned earlier, how good or bad someone plays is always relative. In order to answer the question "who is the best?" I have to find a way to define everyone. I settled on Z-Score and win percentage of games started. For those interested in a more exact definition, here is a link that explains z-score but the short of it is that it is a value that describes how far a value is from the mean of an overall population. For this, I grabbed the individual QB's passer rating for that season and then gathered the average passer rating for that season. From there, I then calculated the standard deviation in passer rating for that season and performed my final calculation to obtain the z-score which was (Passer Rating - Mean) / Standard Deviation. Really, this is telling us how that QB's passer rating compared to his peers during that season. The higher the number, the better he was relatively and the lower the number, the worse he was relatively. The win percentage data is straight forward - take the wins divided by the total games started to get their winning percentage for that season. With this data combined, I believe this graph gives us the following four quadrants...

Bottom Left - Played poorly and the team wasn't successful (Bad all around)
Top Left - Played well but team still performed poorly (Good QB on a bad team)
Bottom Right - Played poorly but team was still successful  (Bad QB on a good team)
Top Right - Played well and team was successful (Good QB on a good team) 

That should cover the basics here, but if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. 

Great stuff! These are my favorite types of charts because they're all relative and make the comparison over eras possible.