TODAY’S SPORTSTAT: Roethlisberger has game to forget
By JERRY TAPP
Ben Roethlisberger had a rough day on Sunday … five interceptions, no TD passes in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 30-9 loss to Jacksonville.
Roethlisberger became the 68th QB in NFL history to have a game (it was the 77th game) with five or more interceptions and no TD passes. The last QB to do this was last season when the Jets’ Ryan Fitzpatrick had six interceptions and no TD passes in a game versus the Kansas City Chiefs.
George Blanda holds the league record with four games with five or more interceptions and no TD passes. He is followed by Joe Ferguson, Ryan Fitzpatrick, John Hadl, Jim Hart, Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas, each who had two such games.
Teams that had a QB throw five interceptions and no TD passes in a game are 3-74; the last win was on November 18, 2012 when Atlanta’s Matt Ryan had five interceptions and no TD passes in the Falcons’ 23-19 win over Arizona.
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.