Brock Purdy will have the highest career passer rating in NFL history, just as soon as he has enough pass attempts to qualify for the record.
Purdy’s career passer rating of 105.4 is higher than the official record, which is Lamar Jackson’s 102.7. But to qualify for the record, a quarterback needs 1,500 career passing attempts, and Purdy is currently just short, with 1,495 career pass attempts.
So as soon as Purdy throws his fifth pass on Monday night against the Commanders, he’ll have the record. Purdy’s lead over Jackson is such that even if Purdy were to throw five straight interceptions to start Monday night’s game, he’d still have the record: If Jackson throws five picks on his next five passes, his passer rating will fall to 103.7, which is better than Jackson’s record.
Passer rating is a fairly goofy statistic which the NFL adopted as its official method for ranking passers in 1973. Its weaknesses as a measurement for a quarterback’s quality include overvaluing completion percentage, arbitrarily capping the maximum amount of credit a quarterback can get for a certain statistic, and ignoring important variables like first downs and sacks, not to mention the things beyond passing that a quarterback can do, good or bad, like running the ball or fumbling.
Still, it’s a statistic that roughly measures how good a passer a quarterback is, and in the history of the league, it measures Purdy as the best ever.