On Monday night against the Seattle Seahawks, Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff went 18-for-18 for 292 yards with two touchdowns. He set an NFL record for most attempts in a game without an incompletion, and had a touchdown reception too.
Goff had a 155.8 passer rating for the game on Monday night. A perfect passer rating is 158.3, under a formula that is largely unknown but generally rewards completion percentage and a lack of interceptions.
So if you complete all of your passes in a game, over a noticeable number of attempts (is 18 enough?) and of course then throw no interceptions, what do you have to do get a perfect passer rating? If Goff didn't get it done, who could?
Was it because of the safety Goff took late in the game when he was sacked in the end zone? The three sacks he took in the game? Those things don't have anything to with anything he did as a passer, so they're not going to dent his passer rating. What about the incompletion he threw that was nullified by an offensive penalty? The play didn't count, so that shouldn't impact passer rating, though Goff did wonder if it'd count.
Why Jared Goff did not get a perfect passer rating vs. Seahawks
A perfect passer rating requires the following things:
- A minimum of 10 pass attempts
- A minimum 77.5 percent completion rate
- At least 12.5 yards per attempt
- Zero interceptions
- A touchdown percentage of at least 11.875 percent
Goff checked the first four boxes, with room to spare in each of first three. But two touchdown passes on 18 attempts is a touchdown rate of 11.1 percent, just shy of the 11.875 percent that's required. The same numbers on 16 pass attempts would have gotten him a perfect passer rating.
Ultimately, Goff not getting a perfect passer rating for what he did Monday night is fresh evidence of how flawed and arbitrary the statistic is. Who came up with 11.875 percent as the touchdown percentage threshold?
There has be some accounting for sample size (a minimum number of passes to qualify). But when a quarterback throws zero incompletions with multiple touchdown passes and averages more than 16 yards per attempt over nearly 20 pass attempts over a full game, missing a perfect passer rating via falling short of the randomly determined touchdown rate is flat-out lame.