The Mannings And The Palmers

A story that received little national publicity and one I was only aware of because I actually saw it happened involved a little re-writing of the NCAA record books. Against the University of Alabama-Birmingham, UTEP quarterback Jordan Palmer amassed enough passing yards for he and his brother, Carson, to become the most prolific passing brothers to ever play college football, surpassing Peyton and Eli Manning. With cumulative passing yards not really giving an indication of how good quarterbacks actually are (see: Testaverde, Vinny), I decided to compare the respective brother duo's college career to see who has really been the better passing brother duo. Sadly, I could not find box scores for the 1994 season so the comparison is really 2 Palmer brothers to 1.75 Manning brothers.

Not to spoil the suspense I built with that intro, but the two brother duos are pretty comparable with no clear winner in the battle, except for one category. For the games I looked at, the Mannings are a little better in terms of completion percentage than the Palmers (61.6% to 60.0%), not exactly a huge advantage. Also, the Mannings average more passing yards a game, but that is only because they threw more passes per game as well. In talking about yards per pass attempt, both the Mannings and the Palmers average 7.7 yards per pass attempt. The one statistic the Mannings clearly won was in the amount of touchdowns they scored per game, averaging 14.7 points per game on a combination of passing and rushing touchdowns to the Palmers' 12.2 points per game.

Maybe with Peyton's freshman season added into the mix, the outcome of this heavyweight bout would have been different. If I ever get my hand on the box scores, then we will find out.