In 1974, Terry Bradshaw was not very good. He threw for just 785 yards on 148 pass attempts, while throwing only 7 touchdowns against 8 interceptions. That translates to a 2.92 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt average, which is terrible even for 1974. He ranked 25th in ANY/A among the 32 quarterbacks with at least 120 pass attempts. Given the league average of 3.91, that means Bradshaw finished the year with a Relative ANY/A of -0.99.

That’s the worst of any quarterback who wound up winning the Super Bowl. But that doesn’t mean Bradshaw wasn’t a big part of why Pittsburgh won its first title. He was excellent in the team’s three playoff games, particularly in Pittsburgh’s first win.

Against Buffalo, Bradshaw completed 12 of 19 passes for 203 yards, with 1 TD and no interceptions, and he was not sacked. In the regular season, the Bills pass defense allowed 2.71 ANY/A, making them one of the best in the league. But Bradshaw averaged 11.74 ANY/A over 19 dropbacks, or 171 Adjusted Net Yards over expectation.

The next week, in Oakland, Bradshaw was against above-average. Bradshaw went 8/17 for 95 yards with one touchdown and one interception and no sacks. That may not sound great, but it translates to a 4.12 ANY/A average, which is better than how the average quarterback fared against Oakland that year (2.82). Over 17 attempts, that’s worth 22 ANY over average.

In the Super Bowl against Minnesota, Bradshaw went 9/14 for 96 yards with a touchdown, no interception, and two sacks for 12 yards. That’s a 6.50 ANY/A average against a defense that allowed 3.45 ANY/A during the regular season, so Bradshaw gets credit for producing 49 Adjusted Net Yards over average.

So in the Division Round of the playoffs, Bradshaw was 171 ANY over average; in the conference championship game, he was 22 ANY above average, and then in the Super Bowl, he was 49 ANY over average. So throughout the postseason, he was 242 ANY over average. Among the 49 Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, that ranks as the 27th best performance. That may not be great, but (1) most Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks have excellent postseasons, and (2) he was one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL during the regular season!

I went ahead and calculated the postseason numbers for the quarterback for the Super Bowl champion in each season. Let’s use Joe Montana in 1989 as an example, since he had the best playoff run ever. Playing for the 49ers, his *regular season* Relative ANY/A was +3.07, which means he was 3.07 ANY/A above average (that, combined with his scorched earth playoff run, is why he ranks number one here).

In the postseason, he threw 84 pass attempts. Montana didn’t play in the Wildcard round, but he provided 233 ANY of value over expectation — i.e., based on his opponent’s ANY/A allowed during the regular season — in that game. In the NFCCG, he was at +130, and in the Super Bowl, he was at +280. That totals to 643 ANY of value added in the postseason, the best ever.

Peyton Manning was not very good during the 2006 postseason — at least statistically — and it shows here. In fact, he has perhaps the worst passing stats of any Super Bowl winning quarterback, when you consider the number of pass attempts he had verus Morrall. That said, it’s not like Manning was bad in the playoffs: he still ranked as above-average, in large part because his last three games came against the top three pass defenses in the NFL. After adjusting for average, Manning was bad by Super Bowl winning QB standards, but still above average. Interestingly enough, Tom Brady 2001 is just behind him, and even Brady 2014 isn’t too far behind.

Also pretty interesting: the worst two Super Bowl performances by the winning quarterback, at least by this method, came from Ben Roethlisberger. We all remember how much he struggled in Super Bowl XL, but I suppose years of watching his game-winning drive and touchdown to Santonio Holmes has overshadowed the rest of his performance in Super bowl XLIII. Roethlisberger was great on the last drive (6/8, 83, 1) but he was just 15 of 22 for 173 yards with no touchdowns and an interception against a pass defense that ranked 26th in the NFL.

Anyway, I’m of course more interested in your thoughts. There’s a lot of fun and useful data in here, I hope, so enjoy!

I will also leave one disclaimer: these are based purely on stats, and obviously stats don’t capture everything. One clear example is Jim Plunkett’s 1980 playoffs. A quick look at his line shows a disaster in the division round — a -146 score is in fact the worst in any single game by any quarterback in the table — followed by two great games. Plunkett was no star (hey, he was below-average during the regular season), but he deserves a pass here. His Division round game came in Cleveland in one of the worst weather games ever, and that ended in Red Right 88.