Those of you who are familiar with the Pro Football Reference Site know that I use it a lot, but I'm not sure everyone here knows much about the Approximate Value Metrics (AV) that the founder Doug Drinen put together to try and establish a way to approximate a players value to his team, among other things.
He's tweaked it a bit over the years, and it isn't infallible by any means, but it does give an approximation we can work with, and allows for some "what if" types of fun and games. I just wanted to use it here to take a quick look back at our guys from 1960 on, to see who all scored the top scores for our beloved Broncos each year.
In the table below I have the guys line up top to bottom, with the guys at the top having been the top guy in the rankings for the most years. You may not be surprised that John Elway took the honors for 6 years, the most of all players during the 53 year period. The only other guy with more than three years was Randy Gradishar.
The way that this works is that the possible score that our players can get is affected by how well the team did as a whole, so there were years when the Broncos were very bad that our top guy didn't even score a 10.
I'll meet you at the bottom of the list. Clicking the players name takes you to the PFR career stats page for the player.
POS |
PLAYER NAME |
YEARS PLAYER LEAD THE BRONCOS IN AV (AV #) |
---|---|---|
QB |
6-1987 (14), 1988 (12), 1990 (13), 1993 (17), 1994 (12), 1995 (15) |
|
LB |
4 - 1975 (10), 1978 (16), *1982 (09), 1983 (14) |
|
SE |
3 - 1960 (12), 1963 (10), 1965 (11) |
|
DE |
3 - 1968 (10), 1969 (11), 1970 (14) |
|
CB |
3 - 2004 (16), 2005 (16), 2006 (16) |
|
DT |
2 - 1961 (15), 1962 (13) |
|
RB |
2 - 1972 (12), 1973 (16) |
|
RB |
2 - 1974 (21), 1976 (15) |
|
DB |
2 - 1980 (08), 1984 (11) |
|
DE |
2 - 1985 (14), 1986 (15) |
|
FS |
2 - 1991 (15), 1992 (12) |
|
RB |
2 - 1997 (19), 1998 (22) |
|
WR |
2 - 2000 (17), 2001 (15) |
|
RB |
2 - 2002 (15), 2003 (16) |
|
QB |
2 - 2007 (12), 2008 (15) |
|
LB |
2 - 2011 (12), 2012 (17) |
|
CB |
1964 (11) |
|
LB |
1966 (10) |
|
TE |
1967 (09) |
|
LB |
1971 (11) |
|
SS |
1977 (18) |
|
CB |
1979 (17) |
|
LB |
1981 (16) |
|
LB |
1989 (20) |
|
DE |
1996 (17) |
|
DT |
1999 (15) |
|
DE |
2009 (15) |
|
WR |
2010 (12) |
You can easily see that they guy with the best score in any year was non other than TD during the 1998 SB winning year. Then you see Brandon Loyd at the bottom of the list above, who's listed as our "best player" during the terrible 2010 year with an AV12.
That's not the worst score ever by a Bronco though. Steve Foley scored an 8 in 1980, and in *1982, the strike shortened year, we only won 2 games, so that had a negative affect on Gradishar's score that year.
To put things into perspective, the highest score ever scored by any player (going back to 1950) based upon this system is a 27. That player was DT Alan Page of the 1969 "Purple People Eaters" Viking defense that dominated for a bit. Page actually gave those guys 12 of the 16 years he played, and he started 215 of the 218 games he played in.
The different sets of comparisons that the PFR site has put together are quite interesting and so I'll give the following links:
NFL Single-Season Approximate Value Leaders Alan Page leads this list.
NFL Career Approximate Value Leaders Favre leads this list but not by much.
NFL Active Approximate Value Leaders Peyton leads this list. And the last is...
NFL Year-By-Year Approximate Value Leaders
For the past two years Von Miller was our top guy in this system despite the great year Peyton had. One of the things that I found interesting was some of the guy that it introduced me to. Guys like CHIP MYRTLE, and JOHN BRAMLETT.
Well, I hope this gives us a little bit of a conversation piece during this slow stretch, and I hope that it may entertain a few of you.
It's going to be a fantastic year, I can just feel it!