Warner in the dock

(Warning: In order to prepare for this essay, I actually watched part of the Super Bowl.)

It's not every day you get to watch a football game with a man's Hall of Fame candidacy hanging in the balance. I was going to write a note last week confidently predicting that Warner would play well, and the Cardinals would win, and that he must go into the Hall. It didn't occur to me that he might play one of the best games of his career and still lose...

The NFL has updated their Super Bowl site, and there it is, in black and white - the three greatest Super Bowl passing performances in history (total yards passing):

- Kurt Warner, 1999 (414)
- Kurt Warner, 2008 (377)
- Kurt Warner, 2001 (365)

Three trips to the Super Bowl, and on each of those trips Kurt Warner passed for more yards than any other quarterback in Super Bowl history. So, he's got that going for him.

Peter King wasn't sold on his candidacy before this game, and since Warner's team lost, I assume he's still not sold:

I'm one of 44 voters for the Hall of Fame, and I could well be in the vast minority on this. But Warner, at this point, even with the victory over the Eagles, making him the second quarterback in NFL history (Craig Morton, Denver and Dallas) to quarterback different teams in the Super Bowl, is not yet a Hall of Famer to me.

The reason, mostly, is longevity. Three times he has played full seasons in an 11-year career. In two other years he's had 11 starts. It comes down to this: Do five outstanding years make a Hall-of-Fame career?

I don't really buy the longevity argument. I'm more of a Jamesian (as in Bill James' Historical Abstract). Here are some questions I would ask to help decide whether someone should be in the Hall of Fame:

• Was he one of the best players at his position of his generation?
• Did he play a leading role on (division/league/Super Bowl) championship teams?
• Did he demonstrate superior clutch and postseason performance?
• Did he win MVP awards or other recognition suggesting he was one of the most valuable players in football?
  
• Was his performance (as measured using modern statistical methods) outstanding by comparison with other Hall of Famers?
  

I answer those yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Let's just focus on the last one.

First, I downloaded the passing performances of every Super Bowl quarterback in history. After deleting those with 15 or fewer attempts (garbage time players, or guys who played so bad they got pulled), we are left with 76 performances. Computing IAYPA, Warner's three efforts rank #12 (1999), #18 (2008), and #36 (2001) out of that group. A couple of points right away on that:

1. It's harder to throw for a high IAYPA when you have a lot of attempts. The more times the ball goes in the air (e.g., when you're playing catch-up), the tougher it is to avoid turnovers (ask Jim Kelly). Warner's three games featured a lot of attempts. Other QBs with a similar number of attempts in their Super Bowls had lower IAYPAs (Kelly, Brady).
   
2. All of Warner's efforts are above-average. That's remarkable. Even great players can have bad Super Bowls - Elway 1989, Kelly 1991, and Tarkenton 1974 come to mind. They're playing against great defenses - it's understandable. But Warner hasn't had one of those "understandable" days.
   
3. Remember who he's competing with here...we're not comparing him to average quarterbacks - the average we are comparing him to is the average of people like Aikman, Montana, and Namath.

But I decided to go a little deeper and zoom in on a select club - quarterbacks who have had more than 15 attempts in more than one Super Bowl. They are (+ denotes current Hall of Famer...Craig Morton doesn't make the list, due to getting pulled after 15 attempts in the 1977 game.):

• Montana (4) - 9.4 +
  
• Plunkett (2) - 9.4
• Bradshaw (4) - 8.7 +
  
• Aikman (3) - 8.0 +
  
• Warner (3) - 7.6
• Favre (2) - 6.6
  
• Brady (4) - 6.1
  
• Staubach (4) - 5.4 +
  
• Elway (5) - 4.8 +
  
• Roethlisberger (2) - 4.5
  
• Kelly (3) - 3.6 +
  
• Theisman (2) - 3.2
  
• Tarkenton (3) - 2.1 +
  

Do I need to go on here? This guy's been to three Super Bowls and played better than most Hall of Famers. He's been a good teammate, a man of personal integrity, and credit to football. What else does he need to do?

Favre and Brady can wait. Put Kurt Warner in the Hall of Fame.