Player
Matthew Stafford
QB · LA Rams
Old-quarterback seasons usually survive on efficiency while the volume and the touchdowns migrate elsewhere. Stafford inverted that: he carried the league's top-scoring offense with the most touchdown throws of his life, at an age when most of his draft class had been retired for half a decade. The 46-8 touchdown-to-interception line is the part that has no precedent in his own career, since his previous best ratio in a full season was roughly half as clean.
The 46-touchdown season
46 touchdown passes at age 37. In 25-plus seasons of data, only one man ever threw more at that age: Peyton Manning.
RareMost passing TDs in a season at age 37 or older, 1999-2025
| Season | QB | Age | TD |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Peyton Manning | 37 | 55 |
| 2025 | Matthew Stafford | 37 | 46 |
| 2021 | Tom Brady | 44 | 43 |
| 2020 | Tom Brady | 43 | 40 |
| 2014 | Peyton Manning | 38 | 39 |
Stafford's 2025: 4,707 yards, 46 touchdowns, 8 interceptions across all 17 games. Only Peyton Manning's record 55 in 2013 beats it among quarterbacks aged 37 or older in our data. Brady never threw 46 in a season this old. Brees never did. Rodgers never did. And Stafford did it in his 17th NFL season, the year the Los Angeles Rams scored more points than anyone in football.
Why it matters. Old-quarterback seasons usually survive on efficiency while the volume and the touchdowns migrate elsewhere. Stafford inverted that: he carried the league's top-scoring offense with the most touchdown throws of his life, at an age when most of his draft class had been retired for half a decade. The 46-8 touchdown-to-interception line is the part that has no precedent in his own career, since his previous best ratio in a full season was roughly half as clean.
He won the touchdown title by 12. Nobody else was within a dozen of him, and only two QBs beat him on a per-play basis.
Comparison2025 passing TD leaders (regular season)
| QB | TD | INT | Yards |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew Stafford | 46 | 8 | 4,707 |
| Jared Goff | 34 | 8 | 4,564 |
| Drake Maye | 31 | 8 | 4,394 |
| Dak Prescott | 30 | 10 | 4,552 |
The gap from Stafford (46) to second place (Jared Goff, 34) was 12 touchdowns, the same as the gap from Goff down to 12th. And it was not volume masquerading as brilliance: among passers with 350-plus dropbacks, Stafford ranked 3rd in EPA per pass play (+0.229), behind only Drake Maye and Jordan Love. Most touchdown kings buy the crown with attempts. Stafford ranked outside the top 10 in attempts (597) and won it on conversion.
Why it matters. A 12-touchdown margin over the field is the kind of edge that usually only appears in outlier offenses, and pairing it with a top-3 efficiency rank means the touchdowns were a product of quality, not just red-zone volume. For 2026 the two numbers point different directions: efficiency this high tends to hold better than a touchdown count this high, which is exactly the tension his draft price has to resolve.
Two peaks, fourteen years apart: 5,100 yards at 23 in Detroit, 46 touchdowns at 37 in Los Angeles.
TrendThe shape of a 17-season career (regular season)
| Season | Team era | Yards | TD | INT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Detroit, age 23 | 5,100 | 41 | 16 |
| 2016 | Detroit, mid-career | 4,327 | 24 | 10 |
| 2021 | LA, Super Bowl year | 4,886 | 41 | 17 |
| 2024 | LA, down year | 3,762 | 20 | 8 |
| 2025 | LA, age 37 | 4,707 | 46 | 8 |
The first overall pick of the 2009 draft threw for 5,100 yards and 41 touchdowns at age 23, then spent a decade as the best quarterback on mediocre Detroit teams. The second peak came at the other end of the arc: 41 touchdowns in the 2021 Super Bowl season, a 20-touchdown crater in 2024, and then a career-best 46 at age 37. Almost no quarterback's best touchdown season arrives in year 17.
Why it matters. Career shapes like this are vanishingly rare because the skills that produce a 5,000-yard season at 23 (arm talent, volume tolerance) are not the ones that produce a 46-touchdown season at 37 (processing, placement, an elite play caller). The 2024 crater in the middle is the warning: his year-to-year range is wide even inside the same offense, and drafting him means deciding which of the last two seasons was the signal.
Still the deepest arm
His offense scored 518 points, most in the NFL, and hit 20 in 15 of 17 games. The season ended one drive short of the Super Bowl.
Split2025 scoring, top of the league (regular season)
| Team | Points | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| LA Rams | 518 | 1 |
| New England | 490 | 2 |
| Seattle | 483 | 3 |
| Buffalo | 481 | 4 |
The Rams went 12-5, led the NFL with 518 points (30.5 a game), and scored 20 or more in 15 of 17 regular-season games. Then they won twice on the road in January before losing the NFC Championship 31-27 at Seattle, the team that finished third on this list. Stafford's 46 touchdowns were the motor of the league's best scoring machine, and the machine is scheduled to return around him in 2026.
Why it matters. For a quarterback's forward outlook, the offense around him matters nearly as much as the arm. Scoring 20-plus in 15 of 17 games is a consistency profile, not a boom-bust one, and history treats good offenses as more durable year to year than good defenses. A 38-year-old QB is a risk; a 38-year-old QB commanding the league's most reliable scoring offense is a much better one.
Age 38 and what history says
Myth test: a 37-year-old quarterback is a statue managing games. Stafford took the fewest hits of his career while throwing the deepest.
Lowest sack rate, 2025 (min 400 attempts)
| QB | Sacks | Sack rate | aDOT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bo Nix | 22 | 3.5% | 7.3 |
| Matthew Stafford | 23 | 3.7% | 9.3 |
| Caleb Williams | 24 | 4.1% | 8.7 |
| Joe Flacco | 18 | 4.2% | 7.4 |
The game-manager caricature fails on every count. Stafford's 3.7% sack rate was the second-lowest in football and the best of his 17 seasons, and he did it with the highest average target depth (9.3 air yards) of any 400-attempt passer. The only QB sacked less often, Bo Nix, threw two full yards shorter on average. Holding the ball for the deepest routes in the league while almost never taking the sack is the opposite of managing a game. It is dictating one.
Why it matters. Sack avoidance at high target depth is the rarest combination in quarterbacking, because depth costs time and time costs hits. Doing both at once means the anticipation and pocket clock are carrying what the legs no longer can, and those are precisely the traits that age most gracefully. Of all his 2025 numbers, this pairing is the strongest evidence the 2026 version can stay upright.
The back that was supposed to end his career has let him play 48 of the last 51 games, including two full 17-game seasons.
TrendGames played by season, the second act
| Season | Games | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 8 | back injury, season over in November |
| 2022 | 9 | concussion and spine, shut down |
| 2023 | 15 | |
| 2024 | 16 | |
| 2025 | 17 | career-high 46 TD |
Twice in four years, in 2019 and 2022, back and spine problems ended Stafford's season at the halfway mark and the retirement talk started both times. Since then: 15, 16, and 17 games, with 2025 his first fully complete season since the 2021 title run. He has now finished 17 NFL seasons, something fewer than 2 in 100 players who make a roster ever do.
Why it matters. Availability is the whole question with a 38-year-old, and the recent record cuts against the injury-prone label his 2019-2022 stretch earned. Three straight seasons of near-full availability, in the same offense, with a declining sack count each year, is the durability profile you want. The back is still the tail risk that no cohort can price, but it has not cost him a start in three seasons.
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