Anyone my age knows who Henry Rowengartner is.
After breaking his arm in the movie Rookie of the Year, Rowengartner, a 12-year-old, is able to throw a heater. Like, a serious heater -- one so good that he's able to play in the big leagues as a little leaguer.
By the end of the movie -- spoiler alert! -- Rowengartner's pitched the Cubs (because why wouldn't it be the Cubs?) to the division championship. In that final game, he slips on a baseball in the ninth inning, lands on his throwing arm and, because this is how the human body works in '90s movies, can no longer throw his insane fastball.
Fortunately, Rowengartner was a fictional character in a kids movie. Despite his lack of arm strength, he was able to throw a floater at the end of the movie to strike out his arch nemesis at the plate.
The Cubs won.
Though he was only 12, Rowengartner's story is similar to the rise and decay of plenty professional athletes. After elite play, some athletes hit a wall.
Some athletes do what Peyton Manning did in 2015.
Manning's career should never be overshadowed by his poor play this season. He's one of the best quarterbacks we'll ever see, and that can't really be debated. But this year -- this year he was like Henry Rowengartner post-slipping on the ball.
This year, Peyton Manning was throwing floaters.
This year, Peyton Manning was bad.
And it has me wondering -- it has me asking a question I never thought I'd ever ask: Is this year's Peyton Manning the worst quarterback we've seen in the modern Super Bowl era?
Not the Peyton of Old
If you're new to numberFire, you probably haven't seen our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric before. In essence, NEP helps us measure the number of points a player adds or loses for his team versus what's expected. I'm not talking about fantasy points -- I'm talking real points.
You see, each down-and-distance situation on a football field has an expected point total for a particular team on a particular drive. If a player helps that expected point total from one play to the next, he'll be credited with a positive expected points score on that play. If he doesn't, then he's taking a negative score. All of those individual plays, then, form a player's Net Expected Points total.
For more detail surrounding NEP, you can check out our Tom Brady and his historic 2007 campaign, with Manning's record-breaking 2013 coming in second. Neither of those quarterbacks won the Super Bowl that year, but it was very clear those two guys were the best at slinging the ball around during those seasons.
You'll notice Newton's passing numbers are about average among Super Bowl quarterbacks -- remember, he doesn't just do his damage through the air -- while 2015's Peyton Manning ranks fourth to last. That's not a great endorsement for Manning, but as the title of the article suggests, that doesn't appear to make him the worst quarterback we've seen in the Super Bowl since Y2K.
But as football fans know, passing has become a much more efficient way of moving the football down the field than rushing. And, if you've watched football for a few years, you know the league has turned into a much more offensive-driven one.
Our Net Expected Points metric reflects that.
In 2000, the average Passing NEP per drop back among quarterbacks was zero. In other words, the average quarterback wasn't adding or subtracting points with each drop back he made.
In 2015, that average was 0.11.
Now, let's take a look at the same chart, but this time adjusting for era.
| Year | Full Name | Passing NEP per Drop Back | League Average | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | Tom Brady | 0.43 | 0.02 | 0.415 |
| 2013 | Peyton Manning | 0.41 | 0.07 | 0.342 |
| 2006 | Peyton Manning | 0.34 | 0.01 | 0.327 |
| 2011 | Tom Brady | 0.33 | 0.01 | 0.320 |
| 2009 | Peyton Manning | 0.32 | 0.02 | 0.303 |
| 2009 | Drew Brees | 0.32 | 0.02 | 0.296 |
| 2001 | Kurt Warner | 0.25 | -0.02 | 0.264 |
| 2005 | Ben Roethlisberger | 0.24 | 0.01 | 0.235 |
| 2004 | Donovan McNabb | 0.22 | 0.03 | 0.190 |
| 2002 | Rich Gannon | 0.20 | 0.02 | 0.189 |
| 2005 | Matt Hasselbeck | 0.19 | 0.01 | 0.177 |
| 2010 | Aaron Rodgers | 0.22 | 0.05 | 0.176 |
| 2004 | Tom Brady | 0.20 | 0.03 | 0.175 |
| 2010 | Ben Roethlisberger | 0.21 | 0.05 | 0.163 |
| 2008 | Kurt Warner | 0.19 | 0.04 | 0.143 |
| 2011 | Eli Manning | 0.16 | 0.01 | 0.143 |
| 2012 | Colin Kaepernick | 0.17 | 0.06 | 0.114 |
| 2002 | Brad Johnson | 0.13 | 0.02 | 0.112 |
| 2014 | Tom Brady | 0.20 | 0.10 | 0.108 |
| 2013 | Russell Wilson | 0.17 | 0.07 | 0.102 |
| 2015 | Cam Newton | 0.20 | 0.11 | 0.092 |
| 2000 | Kerry Collins | 0.08 | 0.00 | 0.081 |
| 2003 | Tom Brady | 0.05 | -0.01 | 0.065 |
| 2001 | Tom Brady | 0.04 | -0.02 | 0.058 |
| 2003 | Jake Delhomme | 0.02 | -0.01 | 0.037 |
| 2008 | Ben Roethlisberger | 0.05 | 0.04 | 0.002 |
| 2014 | Russell Wilson | 0.10 | 0.10 | -0.001 |
| 2012 | Joe Flacco | 0.05 | 0.06 | -0.013 |
| 2006 | Rex Grossman | -0.06 | 0.01 | -0.073 |
| 2007 | Eli Manning | -0.08 | 0.02 | -0.101 |
| 2000 | Trent Dilfer | -0.10 | 0.00 | -0.101 |
| 2015 | Peyton Manning | -0.02 | 0.11 | -0.130 |
While Manning has the fourth worst Passing NEP per drop back average among all passers in the Super Bowl over the last 16 years, he actually has the absolute worst when we compare him to how he performed versus his peers during his Super Bowl season. To give you all some context, the -0.13 number associated with Manning in the "difference" column above references the fact that an average passer in 2015 would have added 0.13 more points than Manning did with each drop back. That's more than a field goal per game.
This may not be surprising to pundits who've watched him all season long, because his play was certainly lacking. But it's still astounding to see "Peyton Manning" next to "Trent Dilfer" as a Super Bowl quarterback.
We'll have to wait and see if Manning has just as happy of an ending as Rookie of the Year.