In 2006, playing for the Detroit Lions, quarterback Jon Kitna was responsible for every pass attempt by the team. He wound up throwing for 4,208 yards, and ran for another 156 yards. The Lions, being a terrible 3-13 team, finished 32nd in rushing attempts (because they were always losing) and 2nd in pass attempts (because they were always losing).

So you won’t be surprised to see that the Lions threw for a lot of yards (7th most in the NFL) and ran for not many yards (last). And since Kitna took every passing attempt, well, Kitna was responsible for most of the Lions total yards. In fact, the 4,364 yards he totaled wound up representing 81.7% of the Lions 5,337 team yards from scrimmage. That is the most in a single season by any player in NFL history… until, maybe, now.

Russell Wilson has accounted for (thrown or rushed for) 82.1 percent of the @Seahawks scrimmage yards this season. That's the highest such percentage by a player in any season in the Super Bowl era. pic.twitter.com/OjweQ1NEOK — NFL Research (@NFLResearch) November 16, 2017

Here’s a good tip: if you see a stat that says Superstar X has the most Y in history, and it doesn’t tell you who currently has the most Y in history, there’s a good chance it’s a player who isn’t very good. (Also, and this is a more rare rule: if a stat says since X date, it usually means another player had a better season before X date. That’s not the case here; the “in the Super Bowl era” modifier was not necessary.)

Wilson has all 2,543 passing yards thrown by the Seahawks this year, and he also leads the team in rushing. Wilson has 290 rushing yards, so he’s accounted for 2,833 yards for Seattle this year, or 82.1% of the team’s 3,443 yards through ten weeks.

Below are the current list of single-season leaders in percentage of team yards:

With Kitna on top of that list (and Bortles in 3rd place), it isn’t so impressive sounding. I’d argue that what we are really trying to isolate is that Wilson has 100% of Seattle’s passing yards and 32.0% of Seattle’s rushing yards. The fact that Seattle passes a lot, while important, isn’t quite as important as the fact that Wilson has all of the passing yards and a huge chunk of the rushing yards. If you take a simple average of those two percentages, you could say that Wilson has 66% of the team’s yards this year. And while that’s impressive, it’s not quite the most ever:

Bobby Douglass is your leader by this metric, with a more recent Cam Newton season coming in second place.

If you compare Wilson’s 2017 to Newton’s 2012, you can see that “percentage of total team yards” tells a different story than this metric. Newton’s 2012 ranks 28th in the first table, but that’s because Carolina didn’t pass *that much* in 2012. Carolina finished 26th in pass attempts and 16th in passing yards, while ranking 11th in rushing attempts and 9th in rushing yards. So Newton played on a less rush-friendly team, but he was a bigger part of his team’s running game than Wilson has been this year.

What do you think?