Past and Present: QB rankings

[Tyrod's friend]

There is plenty of noise by posters about this being the "Best Year Ever" for QBs. I just wanted to look back at NFL Tracker to find those QBs that were ranked as an Eventual Starter (5.4 ranking, roughly) since 2012.

This year there are 8 QBs ranked to be reasonable starters by NFL Tracker. Of them, 4 are considered "Early Starters" - so 1st year guys. Only 1 is considered to be Pro Bowl material. We can go back to 2012 and we have a good number of QBs, so a statistical analysis (and this isn't one) is reasonable. But we have numbers at least.
 

• This year has one of the greatest discrepancies between the best and the second best QBs. Darnold's distance from the other top three is pretty huge.
• Eight is a lot; but there were 9 as recently as 2016. There were 8 in 2017. There is a lot of players below 5.4 but 8 Eventual Starters isn't a lot.
• Four Early Starters aren't an anomaly either.
• It doesn't have the best talent at the top; Darnold isn't near Luck and there have been several years where there were two truly great choices.
• Several years there were barely three QBs that could have been rated even Eventual Starter. Since we took EJM one of those years, it's reasonable for us to have some cognitive dissonance here. More importantly to the idea of cognitive dissonance, most of the barren years were recently. 
• 2012 is the most similar year, 7 rated "Starter" and the eighth was Russell Wilson at just a hair under. All 8 became NFL starters and arguably the 8th was the best (Luck or Wilson? I like Wilson's wife so he wins). However there was veritably no difference between 1 & 2. From where I sit, 2012 was easily the year of the decade although I guess we'll see.
• The distance between the top QB and the top overall rated athlete this year is close to the best player overall. But the distance between every other QB ranked in this draft, and the best players available, is the largest over the 8 year period. There are 15 players considered more likely to be Pro Bowl player than the 2nd ranked QB. 

 

Is it worth anything? Maybe not. It helps me to recognize this isn't the best year ever for QBs and it isn't even the best year this decade. It's actually closer to a normal year. It puts my mind at ease for simply staying at 12, and even more so if I think that Mayfield, Rosen and Allen will be gone by then - thus pushing better players toward 12 and ultimately 22. It honestly wouldn't surprise me to see our GM push taking a QB into the 2nd round - especially with the (misguided?) faith in Peterman.

Just thought I'd put it out there. You can feel free to pick it apart; writing it out helped me clear my mind a bit.

Cheers. 

 

Edited March 15, 2018 by Tyrod's friend