The Most Unbreakable NFL Record (Mathematically!)

Continuing our discussion of records in professional sports, we now turn to studying the most unbreakable NFL record. Most lists of the most unbreakable NFL record read less like impressive records and more like ledgers of “weird events that have happened through history”. For example, a quick google search for the most unbreakable NFL record turns up results of a single game with lots of sacks or a team with lots of blocked punts in a season. Pardon me, but I don’t really care.

To me, these are statistical anomalies and are not in the spirit of records. We want to study more traditional statistical categories like career passing yards and receiving touchdowns. From amongst these stats, we want to identify the record in the NFL which is the most unbreakable.

Our methodology combines rigorous statistics and some gut instinct. The statistics are meant to help measure how far above the rest of the field the current record holder is. The gut instinct is meant to help provide context to the otherwise black and white statistics. Together, these two components help us decide on the most unbreakable NFL record.

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Click here for our related article discussing the most unbreakable NBA record!

The Candidate Stats

As we mentioned above, we are not interested in finding statistical nuggets and highlighting these events as the most unbreakable NFL records. For example, Derrick Thomas recorded 7 sacks in a game in 1990. This is impressive and is certainly unlikely to be beaten any time soon. However, this is not what fans think of when they think of ‘records’.

Instead, we wish to consider the more traditional counting stats that fill an NFL box score. In particular, we consider the following statistics when determining the most unbreakable NFL record:

• Career passing yards and touchdowns (both regular season and playoffs)
• Career rushing yards and touchdowns (both regular season and playoffs)
• Career receiving yards and touchdowns (both regular season and playoffs)
• Career tackles and sacks
• Career extra points and field goals
• Career interceptions and fumbles lost

Before introducing our pick for the most unbreakable NFL record, we’ll offer a quick discussion of our methodology. A more extensive discussion is included later.

Using the mathematics introduced in our article about curve fitting tails of distributions, we estimate how long a record is likely to stand before being broken. This is an inexact science, of course, but is meant to give an idea of how impressive a record is relative to the performance of the other elite athletes.

Now, our pick for the NFL record which is the most unbreakable is…

The Most Unbreakable NFL Record

It’s a tie.

It’s a tie because both of these records are so far above and beyond the rest of the all time top performers list that it is nearly unfathomable that this record will be broken.

It’s a tie because these records are both so impressive that our computer cannot decipher which one is more impressive.

Luckily, the fact that it is a tie doesn’t matter that much because both records are held by the same person.

The winner(s) for the most unbreakable NFL record is Tom Brady’s playoff passing yards and touchdowns records. The numbers are mind numbingly impressive. Here is a look at these two stats.

In the all time debate about the best quarterback of all time, Brady usually gets the nod. However, Manning is usually in the discussion and I’m sure in 5 or 10 years Patrick Mahomes will start to be mentioned too. However, Brady’s playoff performance is wildly unparalleled.

Tom Brady has almost twice as many career playoff passing yards as Peyton Manning. This record is a result of insane longevity, playoff success (which leads to more playoff games played), and quality quarterback play. These three things also lead to Brady having a wildly impressive record when it comes to playoff passing touchdowns. Those numbers are below.

Again, having nearly double the next most on the list is a sign of the unbreakability of this record. I will encourage the reader to watch Mahomes’ spot on these lists, though. He is off to an incredibly hot start to his career. At his current pace, he might catch Brady in his age 38 or so season.

This feels doable, but remember that most quarterbacks decline before this age. Moreover, every time the Chiefs fail to go at least 3 games deep in the playoffs, it will get harder for Mahomes to catch Brady.

To give a final perspective on how ridiculous these records are, I wanted to discuss what our model says. By computing the estimated percentile for a record using curve fitting tails of distributions, we can estimate how long it should take before we would expect a record to be broken.

The model says that Brady’s record should stand for multiple thousands of years. Obviously this is a nonsensical result. However, just the mere fact that Brady’s performance has broken our model is impressive in itself.

Honorable Mentions

Two other NFL records should be mentioned in the pantheon of most unbreakable NFL records. Both of these records belong to the one and only Jerry Rice. His career receiving yards and receiving touchdown records are both extremely impressive. Shown below is the all-time leaders in career receiving yards.

First of all, Rice’s receiving records are impressive because of the separation between himself and the rest of the top 10. But that isn’t what makes this record that impressive to me.

What makes Rice’s record extremely impressive is noticing that there are zero active receivers in the top 10. Larry Fitzgerald just retired and only got about 75% of the way to Rice’s mark. The leader among active receivers is Julio Jones at #16, himself knocking on the door of retirement.

When we look at players who still have a good portion of their career left, the active leader is DeAndre Hopkins who has accrued less than half the career yards of Jerry Rice. I would find it hard to believe Hopkins’ career is less than half over. In 7 years, we can look at Justin Jefferson and see if he is beginning to get close.

But until then, Rice reigns supreme.

Just like in Brady’s case, the impressiveness of Rice’s record is the combination of longevity with peak performance.

The Most Breakable NFL Record

Some stat categories don’t even come close to qualifying for the most unbreakable NFL record. In fact, one particular record is long, long overdue to be broken. At least, that is what the numbers say. Our gut instincts actually say something else.

The most breakable NFL record is Emmitt Smith’s career rushing yards record. According to our model, Smith’s career mark of 18,355 yards should have been broken years ago. When considering the rest of the top 10 and top 50, Smith’s numbers don’t pop off the page the same way the other records do. That is, there isn’t enough separation for us to expect this record to stand for that long.

At least, that is what the model says. There are some interesting wrinkles with this one, though.

All fans will note that the way NFL football is played has changed. The run game is definitively ancillary to the passing game anymore. Moreover, analytics departments have determined that running backs don’t provide very much value so players’ careers are decidedly shorter. These two facts combined make it hard for modern running backs to climb this record list.

But that doesn’t mean the record is hard to break. It just means that the structure of the league is keeping the record from being broken. Things can change in an instant. If the pendulum swings back in favor of running backs, I would expect this record to be broken very quickly.

Defensive Records

It is interesting to note that none of the defensive records we considered took the cake here. None of the defensive records are eye popping enough to secure the spot as the most unbreakable NFL record ever. I don’t think this is due to the lack of elite defensive talent when compared to elite offensive talent over the last 65 years.

Rather, the lack of unbreakable NFL records on the defensive side of the ball is probably due to the way that defensive statistics are accrued. In particular, the best defenders tend to drive offenses away from their location. In turn, the best defenders don’t often accrue very many stats.

For example, a lockdown cornerback won’t be the one with the most interceptions. QBs tend to avoid throwing the ball at the opponents’ best cornerbacks. This gives the defensive players fewer opportunities to accrue stats.

More on the Methodology

To read in depth discussions on our methodology, see this article of ours about curve fitting tails of distributions and this article where we discuss the most unbreakable NBA record.

The core of our methodology is to estimate the percentile associated to the current record holder. If we draw 4 numbers from a distribution, we would expect the largest to exist at roughly the 80th percentile. Drawing 99 numbers, the largest on average would exist at the 99th percentile.

By comparing a record holder’s estimated percentile versus their expected percentile, we can see if a record is more or less impressive than we would expect based on the age of the league. The higher the percentile of a record holder, the more impressive the record is.

In order to estimate the percentile of a record, we use the top 50-100 numbers in a category and fit a cumulative distribution curve to the data. Doing so gives an estimated percentile for each observation in the list. However, doing so also implicitly requires the choice of an underlying probability distribution. This is an opportunity for error and for our model to break.

In our case, we’ve chosen an exponential distribution to fit our data. This choice was not for physical reasons but was because the exponential curve fit the shape of our data well. I would expect that a heavier tailed distribution would perform better and provide more reasonable estimates for the percentiles of a distribution. For example, a one-sided (or half) Cauchy distribution or the Student’s t-distribution might give better results.

A final source of error in our curve fitting procedure is in assuming that the way the game is played is unchanging. Our model necessarily assumes that stats are accrued in similar ways in different eras. We know this to not be true, however. For example, modern quarterbacks play differently from their predecessors. This means that our data is actually a mixture from different distributions leading to undesirable results. Unfortunately, this effect is not very easy to excise and so the approach we’ve taken is the best we can see.

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