While reviewing my historical NFL player ratings, I found a flaw in the qualification rules for running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends. Correcting it required me to recalculate every Scrimmage Performance Rating from the 1981 season through 2025.
I also discovered a separate issue with missing 1987 game scores while reviewing the archive. After correcting the score-processing step, I rebuilt that season’s team reports as well. The updated reports are available in the NFL ratings archive.
The qualification problem
The old Scrimmage Performance Rating system used fixed minimums for every season:
- 100 touches for running backs
- 50 touches for wide receivers
- 30 touches for tight ends
Those thresholds looked reasonable for a typical full NFL season, but they did not account for seasons with different numbers of scheduled games. The league has used schedules of different lengths during the 1981–2025 period, and the 1982 and 1987 seasons were shortened by strikes. Applying the same fixed total to every season made it disproportionately difficult for players to qualify in shorter seasons.
The corrected standard is based on touches per scheduled game:
- Six touches per scheduled game for running backs
- Three touches per scheduled game for wide receivers
- Two touches per scheduled game for tight ends
That produces nearly the same thresholds during standard 16- and 17-game seasons while scaling appropriately when the schedule is shorter.
Updating the formula
I also replaced the rate-heavy SPR formula with a production-first model. The previous approach converted every component to a rank percentile, which compressed large production gaps and allowed lower-volume rate leaders to outrank players with substantially more yards, touchdowns, and first downs.
The complete formula is now:
- Yards from scrimmage: 35%
- Total touchdowns: 15%
- Total first downs: 10%
- Yards from scrimmage per game: 15%
- Touchdowns per game: 5%
- First downs per game: 5%
- Yards per touch: 10%
- Fumble avoidance: 5%
Total and per-game production are scaled relative to the qualified leader at each position, preserving the size of the difference between players. The per-game categories also ensure that two players with identical totals are separated in favor of the player who produced them in fewer games. Only yards per touch and fumble avoidance remain percentile-based. This formula change required another complete recalculation.
Why every season had to be recalculated
Scrimmage Performance Rating is based on season-relative percentiles. Running backs are compared with the other qualified running backs from that season, wide receivers with wide receivers, and tight ends with tight ends.
Changing the qualification standard can change the pool of players included in those comparisons. Once that pool changes, the percentile scores can also change for players who qualified under both the old and new rules. Updating only the newly qualified players would therefore leave the rest of the ratings inconsistent.
For that reason, I rebuilt all 45 seasons from 1981 through 2025. The recalculation updated the individual season reports as well as the cumulative running back, wide receiver, and tight end rankings for 2001–2025.
The missing 1987 scores
During the same review, I found that replacement-player game scores were missing from the data used to build the 1987 team reports. The underlying scores file contained those games, but the score-processing step had not included them in the generated team-rating inputs.
After correcting that process, I regenerated the 1987 NFL Power Ratings, Elo Ratings, Adjusted Scoring Ratings, and related reports. That team-data correction is separate from the qualification and formula changes applied to the skill-player ratings.
Correcting the historical record
Historical ratings are only useful when the same rules and formula are applied consistently. A qualification threshold that works for one schedule length should not distort another, and methodology changes should be applied across the entire archive rather than only to recent seasons.
The revised qualification rules are explained in How the NFL Player Ratings Work. Visit the NFL ratings hub to browse the corrected reports for every season from 1981 through 2025.