ANY/A in Football: Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt

ANY/A stands for adjusted net yards per attempt. It's Pro Football Reference's quarterback efficiency stat, and it starts where yards per attempt does, then adjusts for what yards leave out: a bonus for touchdown passes and a charge for interceptions and sacks.

ANY/A = (passing yards + 20 × TD passes − 45 × interceptions − sack yards) ÷ (pass attempts + sacks)

Every touchdown pass is worth 20 extra yards and every interception costs 45. Yards lost on sacks come off the top, and each sack also counts as a dropback on the bottom, so a sack hurts a quarterback's ANY/A twice.

The formula, worked through one season

Here's Drake Maye's 2025 season, from NFL.com's official stats. He threw for 4,394 yards and 31 touchdowns with 8 interceptions on 492 attempts, and he was sacked 47 times for 201 yards.

(4,394 + 20 × 31 − 45 × 8 − 201) ÷ (492 + 47) = 4,453 ÷ 539 = 8.26

ANY/A is the last of four related rates, and each one fixes a gap in the one before it. Here are all four for Maye's 2025:

AY/A is ANY/A with the sacks left out, so the gap between the two shows what sacks cost. For Maye it was 1.2 yards per dropback, the biggest drag on a great season. His eight interceptions cost him less than that.

Maye and Stafford finished a hundredth apart

Run all 32 quarterbacks who threw 250 or more passes in 2025 through the formula, using NFL.com's totals, and only two finish above 8: Maye at 8.26 and Matthew Stafford at 8.25. They got there in different ways. Stafford threw 46 touchdown passes, the most in the league, which added 920 yards of bonus, and he was sacked only 23 times. Maye averaged 8.93 yards per attempt, the best of the group, and sacks cost him 1.2 yards per dropback.

For scale, the middle of the group sat around 6.4, and only eight quarterbacks cleared 7.1. Pro Football Reference keeps year-by-year ANY/A leaders if you want to see where a season like Maye's sits in history.

At the other end, Geno Smith's 17 interceptions and 55 sacks left him at 4.44, the lowest of anyone with 400 or more attempts. Stafford's raw yards per attempt was 7.88 and Smith's was 6.75, about a yard apart, while their ANY/A numbers were almost four yards apart.

One game of ANY/A swings hard, though. In a 30-dropback game, a single interception knocks 1.5 yards off the number by itself, and one extra touchdown adds about 0.7. Lean on a season or a long stretch of games before you let it change your mind about a quarterback.

Passer rating never sees a sack

Passer rating, the number you see on broadcasts, doesn't use sacks at all, and that's where ANY/A earns its keep. In 2025, Josh Allen's passer rating of 102.2 beat Sam Darnold's 99.1, per NFL.com. By ANY/A, Darnold was well ahead, 7.40 to 6.84. Sacks explain most of that gap: Allen took 40 of them for 298 yards, and Darnold took 27 for 186.

Take the sacks out and the two nearly tie. Allen's AY/A was 8.08 and Darnold's was 8.21, so once you count only what happened on their throws, they're about a tenth of a yard apart.

Pressure is where sacks start

Pressure rate is the share of dropbacks on which the pass rush got to the quarterback or hurried the throw. In Pro Football Reference's version, a pressure is any hurry or knockdown, plus every sack. Other charting sites draw the line in their own places, so compare quarterbacks inside one source.

Sacks are the part of pressure that shows up in ANY/A, and 2025 showed how unevenly pressure turns into them. Justin Herbert was pressured on 29.8% of his dropbacks, the highest rate among quarterbacks with 400 or more attempts, per PFR's advanced passing numbers. Baker Mayfield had the lowest rate in that group, 14.8%. Herbert was sacked 54 times for 301 yards, and his ANY/A of 5.94 sat 1.21 below his AY/A of 7.15.

Caleb Williams was pressured on 25.1% of his dropbacks and was sacked only 24 times, so sacks cost him 0.58 yards per dropback. That's about what they cost Stafford, who was pressured on 18.5%. Pressure raises the chance of a sack, and the quarterback decides a lot of what happens next. FTN's DVOA explainer puts it plainly: "a quarterback has a lot of control over his own sack rate."

So when you look at a quarterback's ANY/A, put the sack total next to the pressure rate before you blame the line or give it credit. Line injuries and role changes during the week are their own read, covered in how to read an NFL player's week.

What ANY/A leaves out

ANY/A has no idea when a play happened. A 12-yard completion on third-and-15 counts the same as a 12-yarder on first-and-10, and a checkdown that turns into a 20-yard run after the catch counts as 20 passing yards. It skips the quarterback's running, and it doesn't adjust for the defenses on the other side.

EPA per play covers the first gap by grading each dropback in the situation it came in. CPOE and yards after the catch split a quarterback's throws from what the receivers do once the ball arrives.

How ANY/A changes a passing-yards pick

Say your GAGE card has a quarterback at 250+ passing yards, and YES shows a 45% chance. NO, at 55%, is worth +4.5 if they stay under 250 or costs 5.5 if they get there.

Sack yards don't come off a quarterback's own passing yards; NFL.com lists them in a separate column. Sacks still hurt a yardage pick, because each one is a dropback that never became a throw. At 7 yards an attempt, four sacks where there would have been throws is roughly 28 passing yards gone, before you count the drives they end. If this quarterback is facing a pass rush that gets home a lot and their line is banged up, NO at 55% starts to look like the better side.

The full table is on how GAGE scores a pick, and GAGE is on the App Store when you want your reads scored.