Lamar Jackson has now joined Patrick Mahomes as the only players in history with a career average Approximate Value of 19

So this is for any stat nerds who like needlessly boiling down careers into a single stat. There is a stat called Approximate Value that basically attempts to approximate how much someone contributes to the success of their team, and to me is honestly the only one that actually does a pretty good job at comparing players of different positions. You can see the explication of the stat in the link I attached, as well as a leaderboard for career totals. The only way to see someone’s 17 game average is by looking at their page individually, but so far this is what I have found:

Average Approximate Value:

19 - Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson

18 - Lawrence Taylor, Jim Brown

17 - Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Barry Sanders, Ray Lewis, Aaron Rodgers, Anthony Munoz, and Steve Young, Reggie White, and Aaron Donald, Josh Allen

16 - Drew Brees, LaDainian Tomlinson, Fran Tarkenton, Marshal Faulk, Russell Wilson, Rodger Staubach (there are probably a few more that I am missing)

Those are all the players I could find. There is no leaderboard for Average Approximate Value, only total career leaderboards so I had to go to each of their pages individually to see their average. Good chance I am missing some people that are either active or just didn’t play very long so they wouldn’t make the total career leaderboards, so let me know if I did

I do want to add though it’s kinda not very useful in comparing active players with retired vets who played a long time, because it’s much more difficult to keep a high average AV the longer a career goes on. For example Mahomes average AV has been decreasing every season of his career, just because of how great his first MVP season was. However I still think this stat is pretty neat