The 6 Best NFL Passing Seasons Since 2000
We''ve seen a trend toward younger quarterbacks during the 2016 NFL season. Quarterbacks of today who are taking some of the attention away from this era's greats.
These passers include Kirk Cousins, Derek Carr, Marcus Mariota, Jameis Winston and Dak Prescott. All five aren't older than 28 and only Cousins is older than 25 years of age.
Even with the likes of Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers still hanging around, there seems to be a changing of the guard. Everyone wants to talk about the young guns, but before we get too far into what's next, let's appreciate what we've witnessed over the past 10-plus seasons.
Which quarterbacks have had the best single-season passing years in the last 16 years?
With the help of numberFire's passing Net Expected Points (NEP) -- our in-house metric which you can read more about in our glossary -- we can decipher which quarterbacks have been the best and most efficient. In short, a 5-yard pass completion on 3rd-and-7 shouldn't count the same as a five-yard completion on 3rd-and-2. One likely results in a punt while the other keeps a drive alive. NEP accounts for this and, therefore, is a great measure of pure efficiency.
As such, here are the best single-season performances, by passing NEP, listed from honorable mention all the way up to number one.
