How to compare offenses? Hmm...

The geniuses over at Snap Judgment take a stab at the latest question du jour: do the Colts have the greatest offense of all time? Here are some snippets of their comments:

Jeff Merron: The 2000 Rams and 1998 Vikings (both dome teams, like the Colts), were better. Maybe, maybe the Colts will finish the season as one of the best five offenses ever. But check out Indy's schedule...

Patrick Hruby: Greatest ever? Please. Manning is having a memorable season, without question. But would I take the Colts over the Triplet Cowboys? Air Coryell? A San Francisco club featuring Montana, Rice, Craig, Rathman, Jones and a Hall of Fame o-line that turned cut-blocking into performance art? No, no, and heck no. Indy plays on turf, has the rules stacked in its favor and boasts, at most, three Canton-worthy players...

Skip Bayless: ... Manning's offense isn't in the same all-time-scary league as, in ascending order, Dan Fouts' Chargers, the Montana-Rice 49ers and the 1999 St. Louis Rams. This league has never seen anything quite as indefensible as Kurt Warner's '99 attack.

Aaron Schatz: I'm still partial to the early '90s San Francisco 49ers and the Otto Graham Browns of the '50s.

You can see the quandary these guys are in. After all, it's not like they're debating the all-time prettiest quarterback here (which clearly comes down to Brady vs. Montana). If only there were some objective way of measuring what the best offense of all-time really was; some statistic, perhaps, that could somehow guide us in determining the answer to this elusive question. Too bad there's no way of measuring that.

"Unless...."

You know, the purpose of an offense is to score points, is it not? So if we could somehow dig up the extremely obscure statistic of "points per game" scored by an offense, we may be able to compare offenses across the years. It's so crazy, it just might work!

Sarcasm aside, while it's true that points scored by an offense does get us most of the way there, let's remember some mitigating factors. There will still be differences across eras, so one should take into account the rank of an offense compared with the rest of the league. Perhaps the best single number for measuring an offense is the ratio of its average points per game for a year over the average for every team in the league for that year. I don't have those numbers easily available to me, so I'll leave that particular analysis to Rob Neyer for when he finally gets bored of crunching baseball numbers, at which point he'll no doubt run the numbers and proclaim the 1903 Akron Knickerstockings the greatest O of all-time.

What I can do, however, is mock some of the choices that our panel of geniuses chose. First off, not one of them mentioned the 1983 Redskins, who set a record for most points scored in a season, and only one of them managed just a passing reference to the '98 Vikings, who finally broke that record. Come on, guys, that was only 6 years ago! At least they haven't already forgotten about the '99-'01 Rams.

Not surprisingly, several of them bow down at the altar of Holy Joe Montana. This is not a bad choice, of course, but Joe's Niners clearly fall short statistically to Steve Young's Niners of the Nineties, who barely get mentioned! (I'm not exactly sure what Schatz means by "early 90s Niners.") The Montana/Craig/Rice Niners led the league in points scored and yards gained twice, in 1987 and 1989, while the Young/Watters/Rice Niners did it four straight years from 1992-95. The most points in one season that Montana and co. ever scored was 475 in 1984, while in 1994 Young and co. scored 505.

Now for a word on SRAM's go-to guy on the panel, Patrick Hruby. The "Triplet Cowboys," Pat? Are you serious? These guys never even led the league in scoring. Not once! They were, to be sure, 2nd in the league three years in a row from '92-'95 (hmm, those years sound vaguely familiar), but the most points they ever scored was 414, which wouldn't have led the league in most any other year, either. Their rank in yards per game those years, by the way, was 4, 4, and 13. Looks to me like they got some help from their famous defenses of those years, too.

And finally, that was a nice old-school reference that Schatz made to Otto Graham's "Browns of the 50s," but they only led the league in scoring once, in 1955. Air Coryell did it 3 times. You don't have to be that old-school.

The common thread among all the notable omissions and stupid inclusions is, of course, the absence or presence of a Super Bowl victory in there. The '83 Redskins didn't win it, so no mention. Neither did the Chargers in the '80s or the '98 Vikings, so little mention of them. Montana won it 4 times to Young's once, so of course he gets a much more prominent mention. Let's try and remember guys: there are two sides to the ball.

Now, having said all that, I find out that all the hard work has been done for me, and by espn.com's Page 2, no less. A while back they published a list of the 10 greatest offenses of all-time, based on solid numbers, rather than the knee-jerk reactions of a panel of geniuses. I have no problem with their list, and I note that Montana's Niners, Aikman's Cowboys, and even Graham's Browns aren't mentioned . Maybe the Snap Judgment wizards should read their own rag next time.