Top Tier QB's

When you slot the quarterbacks 1-32, it essentially insinuates that the gap between each QB is the same — that if you put them all on a chart, it would go gently down at a 45 degree angle. This isn’t like ranking NBA players by height where the tallest guy is 7-foot-4 and the next tallest guy is 7-foot-2 and the next tallest guy is 7-foot-1. It’s more like ranking the 32 coolest kids at your high school. The top five are going to be pretty cool. After that there’s a lot of average kids and then the rest are dweebs. The ranking makes it seem like average Tommy is only a better haircut and new jeans away from being team captain Tommy when in reality he’d need to gain four inches in height, 20 pounds of muscle and find a magic box of swag.

Here’s what I mean in statistical terms: The top two passing games in the NFL last season (Los Angeles and Kansas City) in Expected Points Added were worth around 235 points per Pro-Football Reference. The fifth best (Green Bay) was worth 168 and the 14th (Indy) was worth 83 points. If you have the 10th best passing game in EPA (the Vikings), that seems pretty good but it’s actually nowhere close to the best.

Here’s why being the best passing game in EPA is important: Every team from 2016-2020 to reach the Super Bowl was in the top five in passing EPA. In 2021, the No. 1 team won the Super Bowl, No. 2 reached the AFC Championship and the losing Super Bowl team ranked ninth (Cincinnati would have been higher if not for Joe Burrow’s penchant for taking sacks).

Even a tier system of ranking QBs makes it seem like Tier 1 is close to Tier 2 but it’s usually not. The best QB in the NFL by talent, Patrick Mahomes’ offense scored on 48.2% of their drives last season and produced a total offensive EPA 45 points higher than the next best offense (Buffalo).

The best quarterback is Mahomes, then there is a big gap, then the next best QB is about four guys that are close, say Herbert, Allen, Brady, Rodgers, Burrow and then there’s a big gap and the next best is Stafford, Prescott, Wilson, Carr etc.

Quarterback clustering seems more right than ranking. Mahomes has his own cluster and then there’s the guys who we’d be shocked not to see among the best passing EPAs in the league and then the QBs who can be great in the right situation and then the mid-pack group that needs everything to go right to surprise everyone in the top five of EPA and then the QBs who have basically no chance outside of an act of God.

That brings us to the next part: What’s the goal here?

Are we trying to say by ranking the quarterbacks which players are the most talented? In that case, expected production should have nothing to do with it and we should only look at athleticism, arm strength, accuracy. But that doesn’t really tell us much about who is going to win.

Take Kyler Murray. Who’s more talented than Murray? He’s blazing fast and can throw a beautiful bomb. He’s like a miniature Daunte Culpepper. His offensive system isn’t good though. PFF posted a study this week showing that Murray has the fewest number of plays where the defense makes mistakes, indicating that the system is not doing him any favors.

We treat quarterbacks with advantages like that’s a knock. Oh, this guy has a good system. He’s got good receivers. Well, if you’re only judging pure skill, that’s fine. If you’re judging who is going to lead the best passing attack, then give credit to supporting casts and coaching when ranking QBs. When Joe Montana won Super Bowls, they called him the greatest ever, they didn’t whine that he had help. So neither should we when it comes to ranking QBs.

What if we rate them by whose passing game we expect to be at the top of Expected Points Added in the passing game? That’s what we’re going to care about at the end of the season anyway, right? Unless you’re doing a list of which QBs you’d want for a decade, the whole point is to project who’s going to do the most in the passing game, isn’t it? Or at least it should be, rather than just heaving names at the wall based on who was better in the past.

If we did the exercise by whose passing game was going to drive the most success in 2022, Aaron Rodgers would drop because he lost his best receiver. We still have to bake in the fact that he can elevate the play of receivers but nobody would be the same without Davante Adams. Maybe we raise Derek Carr’s ranking and lower Dak Prescott. Cincinnati improved its O-line, Burrow needs to be bumped up. Jalen Hurts isn’t as good at playing quarterback as Ryan Tannehill but would anyone be shocked if AJ Brown was the difference and Philly jumped up into the top 10?

Now let’s about the most non-controversially ranked quarterback in football: Kirk Cousins. He is universally placed on all of these lists in the same exact place: The middle.

Based on raw talent and past accomplishments, that’s right where he belongs. But in a league that produced a top five EPA season out of Case Keenum in 2017, Jared Goff in 2018, Jimmy Garoppolo in 2019 and Tannehill in 2020 (and all of those teams won at least 11 games), it’s not only possible but routine to have one average Tommy become a team captain Tommy when it comes to operating a great passing game.

The same PFF chart showed the Rams as the best team at causing defensive errors. Will that carry over to Minnesota and Cousins? Will Irv Smith Jr.’s return and the offensive line improvement make a big difference? Or is it fair to keep him in the middle because you don’t believe that stuff is going to elevate him the same way McVay/Kupp or Diggs/Thielen or Kyle Shanahan or Arthur Smith/Derrick Henry raised those other QBs?

Is there a QB ranking system for optimists and realists?

Anyway, it’s understandable that nobody wants to be the person who ranks Kirk Cousins in the top 10 because the Duluth chamber of commerce would laugh you off the internet. If you make a chart and Cousins isn’t in the middle, did the chart even exist? But if we go just by estimated passing EPA, he’s got a shot. So does Jalen Hurts and Derek Carr and Stafford could lead the league again.

Being a great quarterback and creating the top passing game for the following season aren’t the same thing. One of those is much more important than the other. It’s absolutely vital that Cousins and the Vikings have a top passing offense. It’s not all that important where he’s ranked by traditional QB ranking standards.

@itsjustos how many qbs that were starters for a decent amount of time have as few ten win seasons as cousins and were/are considered good?

That’s a good question. I did a little poking around Pro-Football Reference and I found that there are 60 quarterbacks with more than 85 starts since 1990, which seemed like a good sample size of starts to work with. There are a lot of quarterbacks who had a short period of briefly being considered good like Neil O’Donnell, Jim Everett, Jeff Garcia, Marc Bulger, Aaron Brooks, Jake Delhomme, Trent Green etc. Their peaks were higher in terms of winning but they didn’t sustain it for as long as Cousins has done the 7-10 win dance. That eliminates a lot of potential comparables. I landed on Matt Schaub as being very similar overall with a 46-42 record as a Texan but he had a 12-win season. Andy Dalton’s good Cincinnati years extended for quite a while but he had an 11-win year.

After much investigation, I found Jay Cutler. He went 51-51 as a Chicago Bear with tons of peaks and valleys but never won more than 10 games. He was debated constantly but was never discussed with the elites. Probably hit too hard by critics, probably given too much credit by defenders. Their playing styles aren’t similar but there’s a lot of the same notes otherwise.

At first blush, the argument seems insane. Of course, Dak is better than Kirk. He plays on America’s Team! He slings it all over the field! Prescott threw for 4,449 yards a year after a gruesome ankle injury!

It’s not just Stephen A. and the Mad Dog having this conversation, though. Bill Simmons and Peter Schrager had a difference of opinion on Simmons’ July 8 podcast.

“Dak Prescott and Kirk Cousins…have the exact same stats. They have the exact same career resumé,” said Simmons. “To me, there is no difference to me – other than that one plays for a famous team, and the other plays for a famously tragic team.”

“I’m gonna say more on the balance of Dak, knowing how he’s respected around the league,” Schrager countered. “If you talk to these GMs and coaches, they all put Dak in these conversations. There are very few skeptics on Dak.

“Cousins can go here or there. But within the league, Dak is looked at not only as a more reliable quarterback than Cousins, not only that guy that can win you games but also in the building, that leader, that unquestioned leader.”

Kirk and Dak are more similar than you may think. Below are their career stats. Cousins is entering his 11th season (fifth with Minnesota); Prescott is entering his seventh.



Let’s isolate the last three years.



How about in the playoffs?



There are some caveats here. Cousins’ postseason numbers are weighed down by a 3/10, 31-yard performance he had as a rookie backup in 2012. Take that game out, and Cousins’ playoff completion percentage jumps to 66.7. His quarterback rating increases to 90.6. Cousins also didn’t battle a horrifying ankle injury, which alters Prescott’s stats the last three years.

But Cousins and Prescott are pretty similar quarterbacks. Both are fourth-rounders who some experts feel are overpaid. Cousins played for Mike Zimmer, a defense-first coach who never was entirely sold on him. Prescott plays for Mike McCarthy, who the Green Bay Packers fired because he wasn’t maximizing Aaron Rodgers.

Prescott has arguably played for the better team. In 2019, Cousins beat Dak and the Cowboys on the road in primetime. But Dallas won the last two games in Minneapolis, including last year’s Sunday Night game that Cooper Rush started.

Still, the difference is marginal. The more significant point is that Cousins should have the advantage this year. He’s playing for Kevin O’Connell now, a better coach who believes in him. Because of O’Connell’s illusion of complexity, Cousins should find his receivers open downfield. He should also be operating with a clear mind because everything will be laid out for him.

Are the Vikings in good hands if Cousins can play as well or better than Prescott? They should be. They will be operating in a modern offense, and Cousins will have Justin Jefferson, Adam Thielen, Dalvin Cook, and a healthy Irv Smith Jr. at his disposal. We’ll find out soon enough, though. Camp opens in August, and the Cowboys will be in town for a 3:25 p.m. game on Nov. 20.