Before Sunday, no player had ever thrown more than 10 passes in an NFL game and finished with a completion percentage over 95. In Week 12, it happened twice.
How long until an NFL quarterback has a 100 percent completion day?
Philip Rivers and Marcus Mariota were each just one drive away from an incompletion-free performance. It’s only a matter of time until we get a perfect day.
Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports
First, Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers completed 28 of his 29 passes for 259 yards and three touchdowns in a 45-10 dismantling of the Cardinals. Then on Monday, Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota completed 22 of 23 attempts for 303 yards and two touchdowns in a 34-17 loss to the Texans.
And just like that, there are two new players at the top of the most accurate games ever leaderboard. It’s only a matter of time before a perfect game sits in the No. 1 spot.
There were big differences between the two performances. Both Rivers and Mariota attempted eight passes behind the line of scrimmage, but Rivers threw more than 10 yards downfield seven times, while Mariota did just four times.
Rivers connected on touchdowns from 9, 2, and 4 yards. Mariota had explosive touchdowns for 61 and 48 yards.
Rivers threw his sole incompletion in the third quarter on his final drive of the day. Geno Smith took over for the entire fourth quarter of the blowout. Mariota’s only incompletion came with just over a minute left in the game, while Tennessee was making a futile effort to score one more time with the game already out of hand.
The different routes to remarkable stats proves this is probably not a wild coincidence. Earlier this season, Derek Carr completed 29 of 32 passes in a 20-19 loss to the Broncos in September. Just last week, Eli Manning finished 17 of 18 in Week 11 to beat the Buccaneers, 38-35.
It’s really damn hard to play defense in the year 2018 and a 100 percent passing performance is probably right around the corner.
Completion percentage is at an all-time high, league wide
Through 12 weeks, NFL passers are completing 65.3 percent of their passes. That number has been rising gradually for decades, but it’s a significant spike compared to typically slow growth.
The average passer completed 62.1 percent of passes in 2017, 60.9 percent five years before that in 2012, and 59.6 percent another 10 years before that in 2002.
Three teams — the Buccaneers, Colts, and Falcons — are allowing opposing quarterbacks to complete over 70 percent of their passes. The 2016 Lions, 2015 Buccaneers, 2011 Colts, and 2007 Lions are the only four teams to ever finish a year with numbers that bad against the pass.
So yeah, incompletions are becoming less common.
Hell, Drew Brees is completing 76.4 percent of his passes — well ahead of the NFL single-season record of 72 percent set last year by none other than Brees himself.
That perfect day is coming from someone soon, no doubt.
So who will win the race to a 100 percent day?
The obvious and likeliest candidate is Drew Brees, the NFL’s efficiency king. He’s already topped 80 percent in a game four times this season — tied for the most ever by a quarterback in a season.
One of those four games was a Week 1 game against the Buccaneers. The rematch against Tampa Bay is coming in Week 14, and there’s little reason to believe it won’t be another prolific day for Brees.
But as Rivers, Manning, Carr, and Mariota — the four passers with a 90 percent day this season — have shown, it’s hard to predict who will have an extraordinarily efficient day and when. Not only does it take a great day by the quarterback, it takes a fair amount of luck too. All it takes is one drop, one throw away, or one tipped pass to ruin it.
The best bet is that one of the NFL’s struggling secondaries — like the Buccaneers — will have a really, really bad day. But we probably won’t have to wait too much longer before we see the NFL’s first incompletion-free day.
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