I like to think of football as being the closest simulation to war that we have, at least in terms of a sport. So to kill some time this afternoon I decided to pick a commander from history and create his quarterback statistics as if he was in the NFL.
I chose Napoleon, and even though he wasn't a Civil War general (obviously), I posted it here because I plan to do more for Civil War generals or to see what other people have to say.
This is how I came up with his numbers:
- First I took his major campaigns and came up with 12 of them. With this, I gave each one statistics as if it was one game in a season.
- After Napoleon's personal stats, I put the result of the whole game, which takes into account the final outcome and the performance of the rest of the team.
- Remember here, Napoleon is his own playcaller!
- I then took his game stats and just multiplied them into 16 game seasons for his career stats. Obviously, these are skewed by ridiculous amounts. But if Napoleon had been a real quarterback and called all his own plans, it is plausible. Someone with that much talent + ambition (read: never running the ball when he could throw, going for it on fourth downs) could theoretically put up those kinds of numbers.
How I came up with the stats (roughly):
- Attempts: Ambition/length/objective of the campaign
- Completions: How many he achieved/how well he achieved these
- Cmp%: Kind of obvious. This numbers indicates how efficient his campaign was
- Yds: Length of campaign + how much actually accomplished. Dramatic/decisive victories = big plays = big yards
- TD: Big time victories (not a specific number correlated with a number of battles, just my general feeling while keeping within the scope of the campaign)
- INT: Big time failures (same as above)
- Yards per attempt: Measures how much he accomplished versus how much time he did it in basically. I tried to make it so that this number is the best measure of success, just like it is in the NFL (look it up: the best correlation to good quarterbacks and to wins is Y/A).
Keep in mind, I didn't use a formula or anything for this. I was just going off the top of my head. Feel free to add suggestions. Maybe next time I'll actually do one victory = one TD and such to make it more exact.
Who would he compare to? I would say, based on what I came up with, an insane combination of Marino and Favre, with some Jeff George. Lots of TDs, lots of INTs, but still a good ratio. Good yards but not amazing. Headstrong.
Season:
Career:
Any suggestions for who to work on next?
I'm thinking Lee.