2024 NFL Quarterback Tier List

My try at ranking the NFL's QBs in the 2024 season.

Oh boy. Here we go.

Welcome to my Sports Passion Project everybody, where I always used to call this the ‘obligatory opening post of the offseason.’ With the way my publication has progressed over the last 12 months, I suppose I’ve grown out of this post being the necessary offseason opener, with the yearly results-based tier list being superseded as the opening salvo of the offseason by the historical CPOE and xEPA/Play quests I went on, both efforts to quantify skill at the QB position, rather than results.

For those of you who do not know, I’ve done a yearly QB ranking list for every season since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970. Every one of them is on the internet somewhere. The easiest place to find them is as the default sort in the seasonal charts contained within the two articles linked above, but detailed write ups exist on this Substack publication for the 2023 and 2022 editions, as well as this one.

In order to understand my ranking list, you must understand two things. First is in the name. This is a retrospective list, ranking the best QBs in 2024. Do not take it as a best QBs in the league list. It is not that. Do not take it as the ordered list of QBs I would pick for 2025. It is not that. This list is ordered by looking back at 2024, and deciding the order in which I would pick the QBs retrospectively, taking their results as given. Nothing else comes into consideration.

The second thing that must be understood is that this is a player value list. This means that injuries hurt players in their placement on this list, and volume helps. For instance, if two players were to post exactly the same results on a rate basis, but one player had 100 more total touches, the one with more touches would be treated on this list as being strictly better, because that’s 100 fewer touches I have to fill with a backup QB.

With those two things understood, I can get into the list. Players qualify for consideration by having at least 180 total touches in the 2024 season, a season which featured a 25 year high for qualifying QBs, with an astounding 44 players making it to at least 180 total touches. That’s the most qualifying finishers since I had to rank 46 in 1999. This does mean a lot of touches were taken up by backup players, which means I have to do a lot of talking about backup players.

Each of the 44 entries will contain the relevant numbers, and a little write up about what I think the player did well, what they need to improve on, and a mild prediction for their future prospects. Gear up. With 44 of these to go through, we’ve got a long road ahead, beginning with poor old Spencer Rattler.

Tier 7: Not Starting Calibre

44. Spencer Rattler: New Orleans Saints

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.219 EPA/Play (43rd); -9.1 CPOE (43rd); 87 sk%+ (33rd); 4.14 ANY/A (42nd) in 285 plays

Despite the fact that rookies tend to be really bad, it’s been a long time since a rookie has taken last place on the list. Last place in 2023 was taken by Trevor Siemian, 2022 by Baker Mayfield, 2021 by Mike Glennon, and 2020 by Dwayne Haskins. It’s been since 2019, where the last position was again occupied by Dwayne Haskins, this time as a rookie, since a first year player has been the first player mentioned on my list.

I feel bad for Spencer Rattler, as he was left for dead to play six and a half games in a Saints offence that was dead, most of them without Chris Olave, without Rashid Shaheed, with a washed up Alvin Kamara, and without any other offensive player that anybody has ever heard of.

Can anybody be surprised then when this rookie with absolutely no help puts up one performance better than the NFL average (0.04 EPA/Play) in those six and a half games?

To Spencer’s credit, that one positive EPA performance was the week 15 game where he outplayed Jayden Daniels, and came within one measly point of defeating a Washington team that made the final four last year, but he did not play anywhere near that well against anybody else. This is the only game Spencer played that the Saints even managed to stay within one possession.

It was that bad, which is why I say I’m sorry young man, but you’re 44th.

43. Drew Lock: New York Giants

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.141 EPA/Play (40th); -6.1 CPOE (41st); 105 sk%+ (19th); 4.55 ANY/A (40th) in 217 plays

Did you know that this Drew Lock season contains an all-time great game?

In week 17 against Indianapolis, Drew Lock generated an absurd 1.18 EPA/Play, and 30.6 total EPA. It’s an all-time great game in terms of both rate and volume. Without exaggeration, it’s one of the best QB games anybody has ever played in the play tracking era (1999-present). Drew Lock still lands 43rd, despite his 26 touches against Indianapolis contributing 30.6 total EPA, so imagine how bad the other 189 of them must have been.

His best game other than Indy is -0.1 EPA/Play against the aforementioned horrendous New Orleans Saints, and it only gets worse from there. Sometimes, even a 217 play sample is enough to weed out the boys from the men, even when one of those boys plays one of the best QB games ever.

Drew Lock has now qualified in three different NFL seasons, but he’s 28 years old now, and especially with his -6.1 CPOE, I have my doubts that he’ll qualify in another.

42. Cooper Rush: Dallas Cowboys

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.082 EPA/Play (37th); -8.1 CPOE (42nd); 121 sk%+ (T-5th); 5.5 ANY/A (27th) in 365 plays

Cooper Rush can avoid a sack. That he absolutely can do. As for everything else? Perhaps you should look elsewhere.

Cooper had been an organisational backup in Dallas for as long as I can remember, before moving to Baltimore this offseason, and the last time he qualified in a season, in 2022, it went exactly the same way, with his EPA/Play results greatly outpacing his ability to throw the ball, which was in the 40s back then also, because his feet are nothing short of elite.

When Cooper completes passes, he wins games, with his only two positive CPOE games on the season resulting in wins against good opponents, at home against Tampa Bay and on the road in Washington, but with a -8.1 CPOE on the year, he just does not complete passes often enough to make him viable at the NFL level.

As the new backup in Baltimore, if he can help Lamar Jackson get his sack avoidance up to Cooper’s level, the league might be in all kinds of trouble, which I think makes him perfect as a signing for them, but as far as Cooper himself qualifying in a season again? It’s possible. Lamar Jackson has had injury issues in the past, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

41. Anthony Richardson: Indianapolis Colts

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.051 EPA/Play (35th); -10.9 CPOE (44th); 114 sk%+ (T-10th); 4.74 ANY/A (36th) in 374 plays

Speaking of guys with elite feet but can’t throw.

Anthony Richardson is like Cooper Rush scaled up, with feet that are just as fantastic as Cooper’s, if not more so, but even less ability to complete passes at the NFL level. To ARich’s credit, his average pass in 2024 travelled 12.3 yards in the air. That is the second longest average pass the NFL has seen since the stat began being tracked in 2006, behind only Tim Tebow’s 13 yards flat in 2011.

This choice to throw immensely long passes causes Anthony Richardson to be in a tier of his own in terms pass difficulty. Anthony’s expected completion percentage in 2024 was just 61.5. For reference, the second most difficult average pass in 2024 was thrown by Trevor Lawrence, and his expected completion percentage is all the way up at 64.2, in a different world than Anthony.

However, even with an extraordinarily low expected completion percentage, an actual completion percentage of 47.7 does not cut it, and never will cut it in the modern NFL. Anthony got to play a lot of weak opponents, with four of his ten real starts (seven total touches against Pittsburgh notwithstanding) coming against teams with five wins or less, plus one against the Dolphins with no Tua Tagovailoa, who were the league’s worst team at the time Anthony played them. These five games account for his five wins. Against real competition, Anthony lost every time.

A weak schedule comes with the territory, playing in the AFC South, but it’s hard to beat real teams when you cannot throw the football. This is why Anthony is 41st.

40. Jacoby Brissett: New England Patriots

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.157 EPA/Play (41st); -2.9 CPOE (39th); 77 sk%+ (T-40th); 3.92 ANY/A (43rd) in 202 plays

I’ll take the L on this one.

In the preseason, I was having an argument with my good friend

Smayan Srikanth

. He said Gardner Minshew was going to surprise some people. I said that’s possible, but QBs you should really be looking at to surprise people were Jacoby Brissett and Sam Darnold. One of those picks was correct. This one was very wrong.

My faith in Jacoby was enough to save me from elimination in my survivor pool like half the country got eliminated when the Patriots defeated the Bengals in week one, but that win aged like milk as the season went along, as we soon figured out that generating 0.05 EPA/Play against the 2024 Cincinnati Bengals was actually not very impressive at all, and this is the best it would get.

Jacoby is not hindered by a complete inability to throw a football like the guys we’ve seen on this list to this point, which is why he goes above them, but a -2.9 CPOE is the worst you can get without being in that tier, and when complementing it with a 77 sk%+, it makes a recipe for a QB that was never going to finish the season. He was always going to be benched sooner or later.

Jacoby will nearly be 33 by the time next season starts, but he’s like a cockroach. He just finds a way to keep qualifying. This is now the fifth ranking list he’s been a part of. Will he qualify again? For a normal player, I’d say probably not, but Jacoby Brissett is the new Ryan Fitzpatrick. He just keeps finding his way onto the football field, so we’ll probably see him again.

39. Deshaun Watson: Cleveland Browns

2023 Ranking: 34th

2024 Stats: -0.233 EPA/Play (44th); -2.2 CPOE (37th); 54 sk%+ (44th); 3.7 ANY/A (44th) in 298 plays

It probably felt like a hot take not to have this guy 44th.

Deshaun Watson is not the worst qualifying QB in the NFL, but over the last three years, he has now ranked 35th, 34th, 39th. Needless to say, this was not the best investment for the Cleveland Browns.

As far as his play in 2024, Deshaun’s sk%+ was 54. I’m not sure much more needs to be said than that. A complete lack of ability to avoid a sack has been the problem with Deshaun’s game. It remains the problem with Deshaun’s game, and three fumbles taken on these sacks certainly did not help things either.

Once the ball gets in the air, Deshaun is better than 39th, but the problem is that on 276 pass drop backs in 2024, the ball got in the air just 216 times. That is not enough. Pure and simple.

As for Deshaun’s future, I cannot see how tearing an Achilles would be helpful to a player whose footwork in the pocket was already the main issue. It’s almost certain that Deshaun will not play for the Cleveland Browns again, but will he play anywhere else? I have a feeling that the negative publicity around Deshaun will prevent that from happening, but we’ll see.

38. Andy Dalton: Carolina Panthers

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.084 EPA/Play (38th); -1.1 CPOE (34th); 120 sk%+ (7th); 4.92 ANY/A (35th) in 183 plays

He’s still here.

In a last ditch effort to save the career of Bryce Young, the Carolina Panthers put him on the bench, replacing him with Andy Dalton, and leaving Andy in there just long enough for him to qualify for this ranking list in 2024, his 13th time. Unfortunately, this 13th appearance sees him in his worst position ever in 38th, with his worst ever EPA/Play, and second worst ANY/A.

I was encouraged when Andy turned back the clock a little bit, finding himself back in the top 20 as the starting QB for the 2022 Saints. I thought that perhaps once he got out of the dumpster fire that the Cincinnati Bengals had become in the late 2010s, there may still be something give here, but it seems like that comeback season on the 2022 Saints was little more than a one off.

Andy Dalton doesn’t even play like Andy Dalton anymore, with his 6.7 aDoT (seventh shortest) and 69.1 expected completion percentage (8th easiest) both being entirely out of character for him. Andy prior to 2024 had never been in the top ten easiest average throws in the NFL, and fundamentally changing throw depths and difficulties is often a sign that it’s over.

Even with these easier throws, the -1.1 CPOE proves that Andy cannot complete these passes enough to justify the change in playing style, and even his exceptional 120 sk%+ was not enough to make up the difference. I feel badly ranking a tenured NFL veteran with as much success as Andy Dalton has had in a lowly 38th place, but his performance on the field cannot justify him being placed any higher.

37. Tyler Huntley: Miami Dolphins

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.071 EPA/Play (36th); 3.1 CPOE (12th); 77 sk%+ (T-40th); 4.47 ANY/A (41st) in 183 plays

12th in CPOE huh? I never would’ve picked Tyler Huntley to be ranked that highly in any statistic.

Tyler can complete passes. Nobody’s doubting that, but his problem is that he managed just a 77 sk%+, in spite of a Miami offensive line that ranked eighth in pass protection, according to Ben Baldwin’s pass block composite rankings.

Metrics tend to wildly disagree on the quality of the Miami offensive line, because they’re the quickest time to throw offence in the NFL, so they never have to keep it blocked up for very long. I have seen metrics that rank the Dolphins’ offensive line in 2024 as high as third. I’ve seen others that have it ranked as low as 28th. We’re going to go with Ben’s list throughout the whole of this ranking, so the Dolphins will be treated like a top ten offensive line here, but keep note throughout this list that sacks are such a QB stat that offensive lines can be tough to grade in pass protection, even in the modern age of statistical enlightenment.

Take as evidence for this Tyler Huntley’s 2024, where he remained stubbornly in line with his career sk%+ of 78, by posting a 77 even behind Miami’s solid offensive line.

Tyler was the QB for most of the plays the Dolphins spent without Tua, during which period they were the worst offence in football, and the worst team in football in general, complete with a loss to the Tennessee Titans, who would go on to achieve the number one overall draft pick, but I place most of the fault for the offensive struggles on the fact that Miami had one of the league’s worst run blocking offensive lines, and one of its worst running backs in DeVon Achane.

There’s something going on here though, as Tyler attempted the longest and most difficult passes of his career in 2024, and saw his accuracy dramatically improve on them, albeit in just a 183 play sample. This small sample keeps him low on the 2024 list, but I would like to see this guy play a little bit more, to see if this 3.1 CPOE on the 12th most difficult average pass in the NFL is real, or just a small sample blip.

36. Will Levis: Tennessee Titans

2023 Ranking: 28th

2024 Stats: -0.173 EPA/Play (42nd); -0.4 CPOE (29th); 63 sk%+ (43rd); 4.61 ANY/A (39th) in 403 plays

I still don’t know what to make of Will Levis.

The arm talent is clearly there for this guy to be a real NFL player someday, as last season he posted a -0.4 CPOE on the most difficult average pass in the NFL, and this year he posted a -0.4 CPOE on the seventh most difficult. It would only take a slight step up from here to get that into the positives, which means as far as I’m concerned, the arm is good enough.

There are two things holding Will back from being an NFL starter moving forward. One of them will revert to the mean, but I’m afraid the other is terribly sticky.

Beginning with the trend that I do not think will continue, Will’s INT%+ in 2024 was an appalling 67, despite a CPOE of just -0.4. That is not sustainable. QBs so close to league average in terms of passing accuracy do not turn the ball over on four percent of all pass attempts, like Will did in 2024. His career INT%+ is 90, and I think that’s much more reasonable with this accuracy level. Expect him to revert to that moving forward.

However, Will Levis has never seen a sack that he did not love to take. The Tennessee Titans’ offensive line was the 30th best in pass protection in 2024, so they take a bit of the heat for this, but Mason Rudolph qualified for this list behind the same line, and posted a sk%+ well over 100, so they can’t take all of it. Will’s sack rate in 2024 is 11.99%, a sk%+ of 63, well worse than his rookie season last year.

Will in 2024 regressed in the one and only area he needed to improve in order to stick in the NFL as a starter. The turnovers will fix themselves. The sacks will not, and these sacks are so plentiful that they have relegated an NFL starter in terms of arm talent to 36th on this list, and to backup duty behind Cam Ward for the foreseeable future.

35. Gardner Minshew II: Las Vegas Raiders

2023 Ranking: 19th

2024 Stats: -0.113 EPA/Play (39th); 0.5 CPOE (26th); 88 sk%+ (32nd); 4.71 ANY/A (T-37th) in 370 plays

Another victim of turnover luck.

Gardner Minshew is an enigma, still holding onto starting positions in the NFL based upon the allure of one season with the Jacksonville Jaguars several years ago in 2020, where to his credit he did post 0.087 EPA/Play on a 4.3 CPOE on a team desperate to replace him with Trevor Lawrence.

Since that 2020 season, Gardner has done very little to impress, but I thought last year there was a ray of light. He did not play especially well, but he did start every game, which is valuable. It’s why he was 19th last year, and I thought this year, with a Raiders offence that’d been carrying poor QB play to acceptable results for years, Gardner could do some good things.

He did not.

Gardner tried a different approach in 2024. He’s always been a short and easy throws guy (except, ironically, for his best season ever in 2020, where he was league average in terms of pass depth and difficulty), but never one to throw the very easiest average pass in the league like he did this year. Finally getting his CPOE back positive for the first time in four years likely indicates this was a good adjustment, but we never truly got the chance to see for ourselves, because an INT%+ of 80 despite a positive CPOE ruined any chance of solid results.

There were flashes this year, with 0.17 EPA/Play against Kansas City in week eight being the biggest one, but on the whole, Gardner Minshew did not play very well in 2024, and he did not put up the volume to force me to rank him highly like he did last year either.

34. Aidan O’Connell: Las Vegas Raiders

2023 Ranking: 33rd

2024 Stats: -0.01 EPA/Play (31st); -3.6 CPOE (40th); 122 sk%+ (4th); 5.97 ANY/A (21st) in 284 plays

The king of non-negative.

If you have to play a game not to lose, Aidan O’Connell is your guy, as in terms of avoiding mistakes, there are very few better. In terms of my favourite way to measure mistake proneness, TEP/Play, the top five in the NFL in 2024 goes as follows: Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Derek Carr, Bo Nix, Aidan O’Connell.

If QB play was all about avoiding mistakes (turnovers, sacks, etc.), Aidan would be a bona fide top five guy in the league. Regretfully for Aidan, non-negative does not necessarily mean positive. There is a lot of value in never having big negative plays out of your offence, but not enough to get you any higher than 34th place. The same went for last year, when he finished in 33rd place playing the exact same way.

When you break it all the way down, Aidan is basically a less bad version of Cooper Rush, Anthony Richardson, and Andy Dalton. The ability to avoid negative is there, better than almost anybody, but the ability to complete passes at an NFL level is not there.

I think there is a role in the NFL for a player like this. I’m just not sure that role is a starter. In my opinion, Aidan would be perfect as a backup for an elite team. If the starter were ever to go down, and that elite team just had to play not to lose for a few weeks, there are very few NFL QBs better at playing not to lose than Aidan O’Connell. If you believe that you’re a team that can win with a 0 EPA QB, there is nobody better at consistently generating roughly zero EPA/Play, with very few mistakes but also very few positives, than this guy.

Unfortunately, this is the NFL. You have to be able to have a big positive play out of your offence here and there, and Aidan just does not do that enough to find himself any higher than 34th.

Tier 6: The Injured, The Replaced, and The Replacements

33. Mac Jones: Jacksonville Jaguars

2023 Ranking: 35th

2024 Stats: 0.002 EPA/Play (28th); -0.5 CPOE (30th); 114 sk%+ (T-10th); 4.97 ANY/A (34th) in 315 plays

At last we find somebody who finished 2024 with positive EPA/Play, and we find our first example of a player who got better from 2023 to 2024, but I still don’t think this went as well as Mac wanted it to.

Taking over for an injured Trevor Lawrence in the second half of a season that was already over for the Jaguars as a team, Mac had a chance to prove that he could still be an NFL starter. He had a full eight weeks to do this. Eight games of football entirely unencumbered, with Trevor Lawrence out of the way, and one of the best receivers in the NFL in Brian Thomas, Jr. at his disposal. This was his chance to prove that 2021 was not a fluke, and he could still be a starter once removed from the dumpster fire that the Patriots became in his years there.

He didn’t do that.

Mac didn’t completely blow it in his eight games of action. He did finish with a positive EPA/Play at least, but amongst QBs who got at least 315 plays of action, there are only four of them below Mac on this list. It was not nearly as bad as his 2023, but this season was a return to 2022 form. Not 2021 form.

Ever since the broken ankle in the opening weeks of 2022, Mac has just never been the same guy. Normally broken ankles don’t cause this much trouble at this position, but for Mac it absolutely has, and while he has qualified in each of his four NFL seasons, and we’ll surely see him again on a tier list sometime down the line, he’s a backup now, and this 33rd place ranking does nothing to dispute that.

32. Jameis Winston: Cleveland Browns

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.016 EPA/Play (32nd); -1.8 CPOE (36th); 96 sk%+ (T-27th); 5.35 ANY/A (29th) in 354 plays

This is the slowest decline I’ve ever seen a QB have.

Ever since Jameis’s best ranking of 12th all the way back in 2017, his numbers have slowly, and I do emphasize slowly, but uniformly, gone down every season since. From a 4.9 CPOE in 2017, to 2.2 in 2018, 0.7 in 2019, -3.1 in a small sample in 2021, and -1.8 in a bigger sample in 2024. EPA/Play has followed the same path, as have his placements on my QB tier lists. No steep drop offs, but a slow descent from the 'Good QBs’ tier all the way down to 32nd place in 2024.

Jameis has not fallen off any cliffs. It’s more like he’s been walking down a gentle slope for almost a decade now, and he’s finally made it far enough down the hill that it’s tough to justify him as an NFL starter. He is still in the top 32 qualified finishers. In technical terms, that’s starting level production, even now, which is indicative of the talent that this man used to have, before the sexual assault allegations and the broken throwing hand fingers and the torn ACL and the broken back, but if we project his slow but steady decline to continue, he’s likely not a starting calibre NFL player anymore moving forward.

This is frustrating, because the talent is still in there somewhere. 0.27 EPA/Play in a win over the Baltimore Ravens, and being one of only four QBs to score more than 30 points against the league leading defence of the Denver Broncos (along with Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, and Justin Herbert) proves that, but he just cannot bring it out as consistently as he used to.

He was the only one to make the Cleveland Browns offence look good at all last season, but he still did not make it look good often enough to bring himself out of 32nd place.

31. Mason Rudolph: Tennessee Titans

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: 0.049 EPA/Play (T-23rd); 0.2 CPOE (27th); 117 sk%+ (T-8th); 5.16 ANY/A (30th) in 279 plays

With all the talking I’ve done about Mason Rudolph, you’d think his 2024 would land much higher than 31st, but this is the results-based tier list, and look at those results up there, and the volume on which he posted them.

It’s not Mason’s fault that he had to be the backup behind a much worse QB option in Will Levis, who we’ve already talked about, but if we’re picking 2024 seasons, 279 plays means I have to fill more than half the season with a backup, and to go through all that for man tied for 23rd in EPA/Play? You can understand why I would pick him 31st.

Credit has to be given to Mason though for the results he managed to drag out of the putrid Tennessee Titans. This is the same offensive supporting cast that ruined the NFL career of Will Levis. I talked about that earlier. Mason underperformed his xEPA/Play by quite a bit also, but he at least managed to get above league average results out of perhaps the worst offence in the league.

He posted a 117 sk%+ despite playing behind an offensive line that ranked 30th in pass protection, so if you’re the type that thinks the quality of the offensive line is a big element of sack avoidance (I’m not, but some are), he looks even better. He also posted a 0.2 CPOE throwing to receivers that were often covered very tightly. This is why NFL NGS (which uses a CPOE formulation that rewards QBs for completing passes into coverage, which makes no sense to me, so I don’t use their CPOE, but it is a good indicator of which QBs are throwing to more tightly covered receivers) credits Mason with a more impressive looking 1.4 CPOE, and etcetera.

The point is that even Mason’s underlying peripherals are likely undercut by playing with the lackluster Tennessee Titans, and the underlying peripherals already think he should’ve been a 0.118 EPA/Play guy.

This list looks backwards, which is why Mason is 31st, but if it were looking forwards, picking QBs for the 2025 season, he would be a lot higher. I don’t see any reason he can’t at least maintain his 2024 level of play, which (considering he’s better than 32nd in every important statistic) was already starting calibre, and if I had to put money on one outcome, I would say that his next qualifying season is going to be better than this one. I truthfully think regression to the mean for Mason Rudolph is going to go upwards, not downwards.

He may be 31st now, but watch out for him, and don’t say you weren’t warned when he plays well in his next chance to qualify. Hopefully the Steelers come to their senses and he qualifies next year, but we’ll see about that.

30. Dak Prescott: Dallas Cowboys

2023 Ranking: 2nd

2024 Stats: 0.018 EPA/Play (26th); -0.9 CPOE (32nd); 101 sk%+ (T-23rd); 5.62 ANY/A (26th) in 341 plays

The biggest decline of the year. Again.

All those saying that 2025 is a make or break year for Dak Prescott is Dallas are probably correct, but they also overlook the fact that he has made a career out of doing this.

Dak’s performance has fluctuated wildly up and down throughout his entire NFL tenure, with his placements on these tier lists being (in order) 6th, 18th, 13th, 3rd, 24th, 8th, 15th, 2nd, and now 30th. He’s had so many down seasons, and so many make or break years coming off those down seasons, that these circumstances probably just feel normal to him, and yes. I do predict him to bounce back.

There is no reason he should bounce back, given his poor surface numbers and only marginally better underlying numbers, but we’ve all read this book too many times, only for Dak to come out and put up another top ten results season on us. How many times can you be fooled by Dak’s sine wave career trajectory before you begin to simply predict it?

As for his play in 2024, Dak only finds himself as far up as 30th because of a three week stretch in which the Cowboys played against Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and the New York Giants. The Cowboys only won one of these games, but Dak played very well in all three, generating 0.227 EPA/Play combined. Exempting these three games, Dak was awful, generating negative EPA against opponents as inauspicious as the Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints, and Atlanta Falcons, none of whom in 2024 could exactly be considered a defensive powerhouse.

None of these are teams that should’ve been able to hold the league’s second best QB in 2023 to negative EPA/Play, but they did. The Ravens and Steelers are the teams that should’ve been able to shut Dak down, but he played very well against each of them. This doesn’t make any sense, just like Dak’s whole sine wave career doesn’t make any sense.

Which is why he will be top ten again next year.

29. Joe Flacco: Indianapolis Colts

2023 Ranking: 30th

2024 Stats: 0.049 EPA/Play (T-23rd); 1.1 CPOE (20th); 101 sk%+ (T-23rd); 5.88 ANY/A (23rd) in 291 plays

This is the best Joe Flacco we’ve seen in a long time.

Prior to 2024, Joe hadn’t generated positive EPA/Play in a season since 2018. He hadn’t had a positive CPOE since 2012. I mean no disrespect, but Joe was bad for the 2023 Browns. He was bad for the 2022 Jets. He was bad for the 2019 Broncos. I haven’t had Joe Flacco higher than 30th on the tier list since 2018. That doesn’t sound so long ago, but it’s six years folks. In NFL years, that was ages ago.

It’s hard to know what to make of this, because Joe came out in 2024 playing like it was 2009 again. Joe has spent his entire post-prime career being a Cooper Rush-Andy Dalton type, having sk%+ seasons in the high 110s or low 120s, but unable to complete passes accurately anymore. In 2024, this completely flipped, as his sack avoidance precipitously declined, all the way down to 101, but his CPOE shot all the way back to above average, at 1.1. This is the type of player Joe used to be, back in his early years, but he had not played this way in a long time.

Joe, at least in this 291 play sample, went from the fossilised old man he’d been for years back to the form he showed as a second and third year player. This is possibly because in 2024, Joe had access to the best group of receivers he’d been around in years. Possibly ever. There is no true number one in Indianapolis, but they have three bona fide top 40 receivers, which always helps.

It’s just a shame the Colts wasted so many touches on Anthony Richardson, who proved uniquely unqualified to exploit such an unexpectedly great WR room. I would’ve liked to see what Joe Flacco could’ve done in a full 600 play sample with this offence. Perhaps then, the Colts might’ve actually made the playoffs, instead of coming up barely short.

I don’t see anything about Joe’s 2024 performance that looks unsustainable, other than the obvious, that he’d played like a washed up old man for six years prior to this return to form. This makes it very difficult to predict how he’s going to play moving forward. Has he found the fountain of youth, and this 2009 version of himself is just who he is again? Or is he going to go back to playing like Cooper Rush? It’s tough to say, but in 2024, Joe was absolutely a starting level option, after not having been one for a long time.

28. Daniel Jones: New York Giants

2023 Ranking: 40th

2024 Stats: -0.02 EPA/Play (33rd); 1.5 CPOE (19th); 94 sk%+ (29th); 4.71 ANY/A (T-37th) in 450 plays

You may not expect to hear this, given the position, but in a year where more guys fell off than came back, Daniel Jones moving from 40th to 28th is one of the bigger year over year rises featured on this 2024 tier list. It’s nowhere near his career high of 12th place in 2022, but this season, Daniel showed himself to be a starting level option in the NFL again, which is something he needed to do, coming off a vomit inducing 2023 season.

The top level results, ranking 33rd in EPA/Play and 37th in ANY/A, look quite bad, but they’re a mirage, based entirely on one bad start in week one against Minnesota. I will grant you that week one was a putrid start, spectacularly awful, but that Minnesota defence turned out to be one that made a lot of people look bad in 2024, and if we just ignore this one game, Daniel’s EPA/Play jumps all the way up to 0.035, which is not perfect, but would rank him 25th in the NFL instead of 33rd.

By this point, we’ve got this QB figured out. Daniel Jones is going to play like Daniel Jones. He’s going to have a moderately positive CPOE, in all likelihood between zero and two. He’s going to augment this with mildly below average sack avoidance, with a sk%+ between 85 and 100, but he’s going to provide a good amount of rushing value.

All of this is going to combine to put him in the mid 20s in the xEPA/Play rankings, and with the Giant offence holding him back for his entire career, he’s going to rank slightly worse than that in the real rankings. Look at the rankings you’re reading right now. In 2024, Daniel was 21st in xEPA/Play, but 28th on this list. This is the pattern. It’s happened every year of Daniel’s career, with the notable exception of 2022.

Next year however, this pattern is going to change. Instead of the Giant offence holding Daniel back, he’s going to play with the three bona fide top 40 receivers in Indianapolis that I discussed under the Joe Flacco entry. Downs, Pierce, and Pittman found the fountain of youth for Joe Flacco, but there is no need to do that for Daniel Jones. He can already rank 21st in xEPA/Play on his own. With a little push, he can easily be a top half results-based QB in the NFL again, and it’s entirely possible that the Colts offence is exactly the push he needs.

We’ll see if he gets his chance, with all the talk going around about Anthony Richardson’s injuries, but if he does get the chance, don’t be surprised if he performs. I know I won’t be.

27. Trevor Lawrence: Jacksonville Jaguars

2023 Ranking: 12th

2024 Stats: 0.054 EPA/Play (22nd); -1 CPOE (33rd); 107 sk%+ (18th); 5.99 ANY/A (20th) in 334 plays

Trevor Lawrence is hard to judge.

His statistical profile reads oddly, as a man who keeps getting less and less accurate, while continuing to insist on making his throws more and more difficult. Trevor Lawrence in his four seasons in the NFL has never had his average pass get shorter or easier. Every year of his career his throws have gotten harder, but this seems tough to justify, considering his CPOE has been going down every year as well.

However, this is counteracted by the fact that Trevor Lawrence gets more and more accurate relative to league average the more difficult the passes get. On passes of seven air yards or shorter, Trevor’s CPOE is -2.4. On intermediate throws, it’s -1.5, and on deep shots, it’s positive 4.3.

Viewing things through this lens, I can understand why he keeps gravitating towards tougher and tougher throws, to the point where in 2024, he threw the NFL’s second most difficult average pass, easier than only Anthony Richardson, with an expected completion percentage of 64.2.

It’s the shoulder surgery that keeps Trevor this low on the list, but in terms of the rate results, he’s not in the top 20 either. I’d love to predict a bounce back out of him, but his career path has been a lot like Jameis Winston’s. Since his high of eighth place in 2022, it’s been a slow, but uniform, decline.

I would hope to at least be able to predict a full 650 plays or more from him next year, which alone would get Trevor back inside the top 20, so he will bounce back from this lowly 27th position, but as far as getting back into the top ten? It could be dicey. In terms of EPA/Play results, he was 0.071 EPA/Play last year, and 0.054 EPA/Play this year. It’s a lot harder to come back from two down years than it is to come back from one.

26. Justin Fields: Pittsburgh Steelers

2023 Ranking: 22nd

2024 Stats: 0.107 EPA/Play (17th); 2.4 CPOE (15th); 85 sk%+ (37th); 5.86 ANY/A (25th) in 251 plays

The rankings drop from last year to this year reads like this was a down year for Justin, but think about it this way. Last year, he had 550 touches. This year, he had only 251 touches, and I would still select him in approximately the same position. That means the plays he did play were much better than Justin has ever played before.

Justin Fields finished 15th in CPOE in 2024.

He can throw everybody, and he can throw accurately. This is not the Justin Fields of old anymore, and the key thing is that his CPOE increased without significantly changing his throw depths or difficulties. He threw the same average pass in 2024 as he did in 2023, just completed it more often. This is often the key barometer that the change in accuracy is real.

If I told you three years ago that Justin Fields would one day have not just starting level accuracy, but top half starting level accuracy, what would you have told me about his future?

I would’ve predicted it to be extraordinarily bright, and I suspect most of you would have as well, but we would’ve all been wrong. Instead, Justin Fields learned to throw, only to be benched in the second half of the year, demoted to backup status even on a negative EPA/Play Pittsburgh offence.

The decision to bench Justin was a mistake, as in the six games he started, which included two games against top five defences (wins over both the Broncos and Chargers), Pittsburgh was at least a positive 0.005 EPA/Play offence. In the 11 games Justin did not start, which included only one matchup against even a top ten defence (an ugly loss to Philadelphia), Pittsburgh was a -0.044 EPA/Play offence.

Did Justin get absurd turnover luck? Yes he did, as even on a positive 2.5 CPOE, an INT%+ of 131 cannot be sustained. Does he still have a problem with taking sacks? Yes he does, although if he can keep his sack rate in the nine percent range, like he did in 2024, that’s starting to verge on bad, as opposed to untenable, which is what Justin’s pocket presence has been for his whole career prior to 2024.

There’s a lot of ifs with Justin Fields, but with the move from Pittsburgh to the Jets, he’s also moving to an offence that carried Aaron Rodgers well beyond his xEPA/Play in 2024 (more on that later), with a significant trade up in terms of offensive line quality over Pittsburgh’s 26th ranked unit, which may help Justin get the sack rate even lower.

It’s up to you whether you expect Justin to maintain his 2024 improvements, but he is moving to a better offence than he had last year, which cannot hurt. I think that if he can stay healthy for the whole season, the Jets have got themselves a good catch here.

25. Bryce Young: Carolina Panthers

2023 Ranking: 29th

2024 Stats: 0.008 EPA/Play (27th); 0.7 CPOE (23rd); 100 sk%+ (26th); 5.11 ANY/A (31st) in 475 plays

Another massive improvement.

It’s only 25th place, but Bryce Young last year played well over 600 total touches, and I selected him behind multiple players that had less than half as many touches as he did, such was the poor quality of those touches. This year, there are still no players with as many touches as Bryce Young that rank behind him, making him the worst QB in the NFL with at least 475 touches for the second year in a row, but this year, there is only one player whose touch count is in the 300s that’s ahead of Bryce. Compared to where he was last year, that’s a mighty improvement.

It would be an even bigger improvement if his stats weren’t skewed by starting the season with two weeks (72 plays) of -0.514 EPA/Play, and -11 CPOE football. In the first two games, it seemed as if he’d gotten even worse, and his rookie year was already bad enough. It got so bad that the Panthers were forced to bench the former number one overall draft pick, and perhaps this tactic ought to be tried more often, because this benching might have saved Bryce Young’s NFL career.

He came back from that benching a different player.

In his final ten starts of the year, Bryce Young played 0.110 EPA/Play, 2.8 CPOE football. That’s better than Jayden Daniels in the same span. A span that’s longer than half the season, might I add. His sack rate fell all the way to 6.55% over these last ten starts, and he even won four of them, while still lugging around a Panthers defence that ranked dead last in the NFL last year.

If I remove the first 72 plays of volume, and only take the final 403, Bryce Young would actually move up on this list. That’s almost impossible to do on a player value list when removing 15% of a player’s volume, but such is the extent that the first two games weigh down his stats on the year. He did some good things this year once everybody stopped paying attention, carrying a Panthers roster that is still woeful to a 4-6 record in his final ten games of the year, with two of those losses being one possession games against both Super Bowl participants, teams that the Carolina Panthers should not be able to play a one possession game against.

I’m not saying he’s going to win MVP or anything, but if next year Bryce Young gets into the top half of NFL QBs, or even the late top ten, it would not surprise me.

24. Drake Maye: New England Patriots

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.007 EPA/Play (T-29th); 2.8 CPOE (13th); 86 sk%+ (T-34th); 5.1 ANY/A (32nd) in 459 plays

The forgotten man in the 2024 rookie class.

When you’re not the number one overall draft pick, and you’re also not either of the two rookie QBs that lead their teams to the playoffs, it’s easy to fly under the radar, so while people in New England are excited about him, I’m not sure anybody else is. The reason for this is very simple. While all of his rookie contemporaries came into the league much more reserved, Drake Maye was one of the most mistake-prone players in the entire NFL, with an INT%+ of 86 and a sk%+ of 86.

Like I said about Will Levis, the turnover luck will revert to the mean, especially with Drake’s 2.8 CPOE in his rookie season, which is mightily impressive, but the sack rate is going to need some work on Drake’s part. The Patriots did have the very worst pass protecting offensive line in football in 2024, which did not help, but as we’ve seen multiple times on this list already, you can be a great sack avoider even with atrocious offensive line play, but Drake was not, and this is the biggest thing he needs to work on going into year two.

I feel bad that I have nothing more to say about Drake Maye, and feel like I’m part of the problem of the world overlooking him, but the fact of the matter is he won one start, and generated -0.09 EPA/Play in that start, so it was not a very notable rookie season.

He did manage to post 0.095 xEPA/Play as a rookie, which is nothing to scoff at, and once the turnover luck turns around, I have no issue conceptualising him as a top half QB as soon as next year. If he can get both the turnovers and the sack rate under control, like Bryce Young did in year two, I see a scenario where Drake can be a top ten guy next year.

It’s a long shot with the Patriot offence he’s in, which means he will almost certainly underperform his xEPA/Play again next year, but it’s possible.

Tier 5: Bad Starters, and Tank Victims

23. Russell Wilson: Pittsburgh Steelers

2023 Ranking: 16th

2024 Stats: 0.019 EPA/Play (25th); 4.5 CPOE (6th); 86 sk%+ (T-34th); 6.39 ANY/A (15th) in 416 plays

As we get into the next tier, we’re finally beginning to see some bona fide starters, and we begin with Russell Wilson.

I spoke earlier about how the Pittsburgh offence was worse with him than it was without him, and I stand by that, but it was meant as more a compliment to Justin Fields than an insult to Russell Wilson. Both men ranked 16th and 18th in xEPA/Play, with Mason Rudolph sandwiched in the middle, but while Justin translated his 16th place ranking in xEPA/Play into a 17th place ranking in actual EPA/Play, Russ did not get so lucky.

The stubborn truth is that Russell Wilson remains one of the most accurate throwing arms the league has to offer, and it seems that it will remain that way until his career ends, but the rest of his game is changing, even as the throwing accuracy seems to be holding.

His 224 rushing yards per 600 touches is the lowest of his career, exempting a 2021 season where he was angling to get out of Seattle and not taking any risk to his body. His 86 sk%+ is in that same grey area between really bad and untenable that Justin Fields sits in, and his aDoT in 2024 was only 7.8 yards, more than a full yard shorter than his career average.

Russ still has the moon ball, with his shocking 21.8 CPOE on throws of 20 air yards or longer putting him on another planet to any other QB in the league, but he’s a lot like Trevor Lawrence, in that his CPOE on throws of seven yards or shorter is negative. He cannot complete the short balls anymore, even as he can still complete the deep ones.

As he moves forward to play with the New York Giants, I struggle to see his results getting any worse than this, barring the falloff finally coming for Russ’s magical throwing arm. He is making a trade down in terms of offensive line play, but it would be tough for his sacks to hurt a team any more than they already do, and having Malik Nabers on the end of those deep balls that still lap the field even at age 36 does create the potential for magic. It depends on how long the team plans on allowing him to play with Jaxson Dart sitting on the bench.

If Russ plays next year, I have no trouble envisioning him in the mid teens again, just like he’s been for most of the last half decade, but it’s also entirely possible he won’t qualify at all. I hope he does, but knowing the Giants, and their penchant for knowingly benching better QBs in favour of worse ones, like they did in 2024, and 2023, don’t hold your breath.

22. CJ Stroud: Houston Texans

2023 Ranking: 11th

2024 Stats: -0.007 EPA/Play (T-29th); -1.7 CPOE (35th); 84 sk%+ (38th); 5.44 ANY/A (28th) in 656 plays

Oh my gosh, a full time starter!

It’s indicative of the modern NFL, and how often changes are made these days, that we’ve had to comb through 22 QBs on this list before being able to find anybody that started more than 12 games last year, but here we are. The very worst full time starter in the NFL in 2024, and who else could it have been?

I warned you about this in the 2023 tier list. This is an excerpt from my write up on him last year:

‘I don't want to dampen the hype at all, because just to post a positive CPOE at all as a rookie is hard to do, but we all understand that CJ got carried really hard by that Texan offence right? … This was a Texan offence that was ready to go, with a top half offensive line and two top ten receivers … In all honesty, if this season happened with an incumbent QB at the controls, it would be viewed as a slight disappointment.’

Another:

‘I honestly think CJ has been overrated just a little bit, likely because of how long it's been since a rookie has played so well … Tying for 21st in CPOE and translating that into a 13th place rank in EPA/Play is rare and likely won't happen again, so CJ needs to take the year two accuracy leap that's customary in top draft pick QBs. If he fails at that, CJ Stroud could be one of the most overrated QBs in the NFL for a while.’

Did I call that one or what?

The Texans offence fell off dramatically in 2024. The top half offensive line became 19th. The two top ten receivers persisted, but Stefon Diggs played only eight games, Nico Collins played only 12, and Tank Dell played only ten, falling off big time in the snaps he did play.

This dip in the quality of offensive support could not have happened at a worse time, as CJ also regressed in the turnover luck department, going from an unreasonable 130 INT%+ last year to a much more realistic 100 this year, as well as his sack avoidance getting even worse, going from a not notable 99 sk%+ last year to a very harmful 84 this year.

All of this adds up to CJ Stroud tracking his xEPA/Play with his real results closer than any other player in 2024, putting up -0.007 EPA/Play on -0.006 xEPA/Play, meaning I don’t see this bad year as an out of character down season. I see the worst full time starting QB in the NFL as who CJ Stroud is right now.

It’s only year two. Nobody is saying he can’t turn it around, but for young players, things happen fast. Every snap is crucial. Right now, the first two seasons of CJ Stroud’s career have matched the first two seasons of Mac Jones almost exactly. If in year three CJ gets even worse, he’s likely done in Houston, just like Mac Jones was done in New England.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but I do not think I’m exaggerating. Teams do not wait long at the QB position. CJ has already gotten more leash than most men in his position would have, given the quality of the team he plays for. Auto bids from the extremely weak AFC South can only save you for so long. In my opinion, the Texans had a window with a championship calibre roster. Patrick Mahomes won championships with rosters worse than CJ has had the pleasure of playing for, and that window may already be gone, wasted while we waited to see if CJ Stroud is an NFL level QB or not.

2025 will be extremely telling. If he can get his CPOE back in the positives, and his sack percentage out of the eight percent bracket, he will be extended. If his numbers stay where they are now, I can see the Texans selecting a QB in the 2026 draft, and CJ might not qualify at all in 2027. He’ll be thrown into the cold, just like this next man was.

21. Kirk Cousins: Atlanta Falcons

2023 Ranking: 18th

2024 Stats: 0.065 EPA/Play (20th); 1 CPOE (21st); 108 sk%+ (T-16th); 6.13 ANY/A (17th) in 524 plays

Kirk got screwed in this whole process with the Falcons. We all know this. I wrote an entire article about it. so what do I say here, to make this list entry individually interesting?

Let’s compare Kirk Cousins in 2024, where he lost four games in a row and got benched for it, to the Kirk Cousins in 2022, where he won 13 games and got into a one possession barn burner in the playoffs:

2022 CPOE: 1.3

2024 CPOE: 1

2022 sk%+: 98

2024 sk%+: 108

2022 INT%+: 103

2024 INT%+: 75

Yeesh. I think I’ve found the root of the problem here.

2023 was a turn back the clock year for Kirk, putting up numbers he had not posted since his 20s, not even getting to 400 plays and still finding himself in the top 20, before tearing his Achilles and cutting his season short. I don’t think anybody thought Kirk was going to repeat that, which is why my comparison is to 2022, where it’s tough to tell 2022 Kirk and 2024 Kirk apart.

The CPOE difference between these two seasons is basically nothing. Kirk was actually slightly better at avoiding sacks this time around. All of this adds up to Kirk Cousins being a slightly better xEPA/Play player than when he won 13 games in 2022. We’ve talked about the 2022 Vikings around here before, but the overarching point to all this is that if the Falcons did not think this level of QB play was good enough, why did they sign Kirk Cousins?

The Atlanta Falcons are either incompetent enough to allow themselves to be tricked by a bad stretch of turnover luck into believing that Kirk Cousins was fundamentally different (worse) as a player, which he wasn’t, as xEPA/Play or any of its individual components can tell you, or, the Atlanta Falcons are incompetent enough to believe there was any chance of Kirk Cousins repeating his best season in years, coming off an Achilles injury. Neither is a good look for the team.

The way I see it, the Falcons signed Kirk Cousins, got exactly what they wanted out of him, and then benched him for it. Of the players on this list with 524 plays or less, only three of them are ahead of Kirk Cousins. If you leave his numbers exactly the same, and allow him to get to the full 650 plays, Kirk moves up to 18th on this list, and if you didn’t want the 12th-18th best QB in the NFL, why did you sign Kirk Cousins?

Kirk is left in this weird limbo of everybody more or less universally acknowledging that he’s still the 12th-18th best QB in the NFL, yet everybody more or less acknowledging that he’s not going to qualify next year, should everything go according to plan.

If there’s anything that screams ‘playing QB in the NFL is not a meritocracy,’ it’s this Kirk Cousins situation. I’ll move on before I say anything even more inflammatory.

20. Caleb Williams: Chicago Bears

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: -0.026 EPA/Play (34th); -0.1 CPOE (28th); 72 sk%+ (42nd); 5.09 ANY/A (33rd) in 750 plays

750 plays, and only 20th place.

Many people coming into this list likely thought Caleb Williams was going to be in CJ Stroud’s place, as the very worst full time starter in the NFL in 2024, but I like his season for a couple of reasons. First is the volume. If Caleb had the comfort to be able to take almost 100 plays off his sample, like CJ Stroud did, his rate numbers would look a lot better. The second is that Caleb played for the Chicago Bears.

Advanced metrics tend to quite like the Bears’ offensive line last year. Ben Baldwin’s list puts them 13th in pass protection, but they were mostly irrelevant, as Caleb’s utter lack of pocket presence ensured a 10.79% sack rate (72 sk%+). With his biggest weakness negating his team’s biggest strength, Caleb was left to lean on the rush game, which was one of the worst in the league, and the receiver group, which was one of the worst in the league.

Keenan Allen and DJ Moore still have a moderate amount of name value, but I can’t say with honesty that either of them (or anybody on the Bears) played well enough to be considered a top 40 receiver anymore.

With his ineptitude in the pocket negating the talents of a solid offensive line, Caleb was left with a horrendous rush attack, and a skill position group with no top 40 receivers in it. Is it any wonder that he struggled?

Needless to say, Caleb will never be anything in the NFL if his sk%+ stays down at 72. To predict Caleb not to be a bust at the NFL level is to predict this to get better, because he should’ve struggled even worse than he did, getting very lucky to throw only six INTs on this accuracy level, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

His sack avoidance cannot possibly be this bad in year two. The arm is there already. -0.1 CPOE as a rookie is a solid jumping off point from which Caleb can become a very accurate thrower in the future, but if his sk%+ stays in the 70s, or gets even worse like Will Levis’s did, his career as a starter will be over.

Once again, you may think I’m being exaggeratory, but look at Bryce Young. If he’d come out in his final ten starts and put up a sk%+ in the 70s again, that would’ve been his chance. His NFL career as a starter would’ve been over. Caleb is no different. There’s no reason he can’t improve his sack avoidance from the 70s all the way up to 100 or above in year two. We just saw Bryce Young do that, but Caleb better do it too, or his NFL prospects will begin fading fast, no matter what kind of arm he has.

Just ask Will Levis.

Tier 4: Average Starters and Injury Issues

19. Derek Carr: New Orleans Saints

2023 Ranking: 14th

2024 Stats: 0.149 EPA/Play (14th); 3.3 CPOE (11th); 130 sk%+ (T-1st); 7.57 ANY/A (4th) in 318 plays

What a shame.

If this was the last time we ever saw Derek Carr on a football field, at least nobody can ever say he went out with a whimper.

For those of you who followed as I updated these rankings live through the season on Substack Notes, you will know that Derek started the season white hot, generating 0.4 EPA/Play in week one, and 0.78 in week two, putting him number one on the week two rendition of this list. It was only downhill from there though, as the Saints offence that was Derek’s weapon crumbled to pieces all around him.

Derek got Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed for only five games apiece, and the Saints’ offence once both of their top two receivers went down for the year was truly putrid. Factoring in their 31st ranked offensive line, it’s no stretch to call this the very worst supporting cast in the NFL in my opinion.

Yes, Derek Carr put up a 130 sk%+ with the league’s second worst pass protecting offensive line. Sacks are a QB stat.

Saddled with this absolutely horrendous offensive roster, and a defence that was not good either (19th), Derek Carr still managed to win three of the five starts he was able to make after all the injuries happened, and ground his way to somehow finishing 14th in EPA/Play on the season, before finally succumbing to his own injuries, and as we know now, succumbing for good.

Derek Carr in 2024 finished no worse than second place in xEPA/Play, carrying this God awful Saints team along. This second placed xEPA/Play ranking only translated to 14th in real EPA/Play, but we saw what every other QB was able to do with it, as their other qualified representative (Spencer Rattler) landed smack dab in 44th place, right at the very bottom of the league. That’s what these 2024 Saints did to people. It was that bad.

I told you earlier under the Spencer Rattler entry that this New Orleans team was only able to play a single one possession game without Derek. The other six games he did not start were all multiple possession losses, and yet, Derek managed to drag this anchor to a 5-5 record in the games he started. That is seriously impressive, and without an unfriendly 2-4 record in one possession games, Derek’s individual record could’ve been even better.

If football were a fair game, 2024 would’ve been Derek Carr’s His Year article. Instead, it was the season that ended the career of a man who still had a lot left in the tank. 318 plays is not even a half season, so it’s tough to move him higher than 19th place, but 2024 was the best season of Derek’s career, individually, and it’s not even close. Derek Carr’s 2024 is the 76th best xEPA/Play season in NFL history. That’s what it took to get even a .500 record out of the 2024 New Orleans Saints.

It’s just a shame we’re not going to be able to see it again.

18. Aaron Rodgers: New York Jets

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: 0.057 EPA/Play (21st); -2.6 CPOE (38th); 104 sk%+ (T-20th); 5.87 ANY/A (24th) in 679 plays

The Aaron Rodgers era in New York will be remembered as a disappointment, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s the best QB the Jets have had for years.

It’s more a testament to New York’s long history QB ineptitude than anything else that 2024 Aaron Rodgers is the best they’ve had in a long time, as the Jets are working on a streak of not having a top ten QB since 2006 Chad Pennington. This streak is the second longest currently ongoing in the NFL, behind only the new Browns, who have not ever had a top ten QB.

Aaron Rodgers did not break this drought, but he did finish with positive EPA/Play as a Jets QB, which nobody has done since Josh McCown did so in 2017. It’s been that bad in the Jets’ QB room, to the point where a man merely generating positive EPA/Play feels like a blessing.

There were some turn back the clock performances for Aaron in 2024, with both games against the Patriots being the clear standouts, but there were not many. You do not become a playoff team by playing well against the Patriots, so the Jets slunk to a 5-12 record, and Aaron Rodgers slunk to a lowly (by his lofty standards) 0.057 EPA/Play.

This is 0.057 EPA/Play on a negative xEPA/Play by the way. It’s been a long time since the Jets’ offensive supporting cast carried any QB, but they definitely did it this time in terms of results, although the one thing you cannot take away from Aaron is that he does not miss time, even at the age of 41. He’s out there playing all the snaps. If you truly believe the best ability is availability, a tenant this list does stick to quite strictly, you can see why he’s all the way up in 18th. Playing 679 plays means you have to fill no space with a backup, but it’s only 18th, because those 679 plays were less than fantastic.

As such, would I expect Aaron in the top 20 again next year? I have a hard time construing the 2025 Pittsburgh Steelers as an upgrade offensively from the 2024 New York Jets at this point in time, but can Aaron give 679 plays of league average football again? I don’t see why not, especially if the -2.6 CPOE is an aberration, which I think it is.

If a -2.6 CPOE is typical for post-Achilles Aaron Rodgers though, don’t expect to be seeing him in the top half of the list again.

17. Tua Tagovailoa: Miami Dolphins

2023 Ranking: 4th

2024 Stats: 0.2 EPA/Play (7th); 3.8 CPOE (8th); 114 sk%+ (T-10th); 6.61 ANY/A (12th) in 451 plays

The best ability is availability, but sometimes you just need to score some points.

Looking at Tua’s ranks, they’re all better than 17th, which obviously means the injuries and associated lack of volume play a key role in this ranking. If you leave Tua’s numbers the same, but pump him up to a full 650 play sample, he jumps all the way up to seventh on this list. A slight step back from last year, but not a big one. However, having Tua Tagovailoa as your QB seems to always mean you’re going to have to fill a lot of plays with backups, which has hurt him on the lists in the past, and hurts him on this one.

Tua in 2022 ranked second in EPA/Play, but seventh on the tier list, because of injury concerns. Tua in 2024 ranks seventh in EPA/Play, but 17th on the tier list, because of injury concerns. In 2023, there were no injuries, so I gave him his well deserved fourth place, but if this is going to keep happening, it’s going to keep hurting his standing year after year, which will eventually hurt the perception of his entire career, even more than it has already.

Aside from the injuries, Tua was also a completely different player on the football field in the 2024 season. Prior to this season, Tua had never even been in the top 15 in terms of easiest average pass. He has the reputation for throwing easy throws all the time, but this reputation is not correct. Not until 2024.

In 2024, Tua’s expected completion percentage was 71.2, the second easiest in the NFL, behind only Gardner Minshew. To his credit, Tua was able to put up a true completion percentage (which excludes spikes and throwaways) of 75, to post a healthily positive 3.8 CPOE, but this is still scary to me.

Generally, elite QBs just don’t feel the need to be this short and easy. They have so much arm talent that they can complete more difficult throws just as easily as lesser players can complete easier ones. Prior to 2024, Tua had never posted an expected completion percentage higher than 67.4, which is roughly middle of the pack, so the question becomes what changed this year, and can it go back to normal, or is Tua going to actually become the checkdown merchant that everybody’s thought he’s been all along?

It’s tough to tell what changed, as everything else about Tua’s underlying metrics remained the same. Same top flight CPOE. Same sk%+ of roughly 110 (with a slight tick up to 114 in 2024). Same extremely quick time to throw (quickest in the league again this year), just with a fundamentally different distribution of throws now.

If anybody can do it, Tua Tagovailoa is the guy, but I personally have a hard time seeing anybody with an expected completion percentage of 71.2 having success at the NFL level. There needs to be a little bit more risk than that. In my opinion, this is a lot of the reason why he regressed from being a top five EPA/Play finisher in each of the last two seasons to only seventh this season, and in order to get back into the top five, Tua needs to lengthen his throws back out a little bit. 5.8 air yards just won’t cut it. I’d like to see at least seven, like he was doing every season of his career prior to this one.

If he can do that, and if he can have another injury free season like he did in 2023, I see no reason he can’t leap right back into the top five again. However, there’s always the risk of injury holding a top ten QB on a rate basis all the way down in 17th place, as we’ve now seen two of the last three years with Tua.

16. Matthew Stafford: Los Angeles Rams

2023 Ranking: 13th

2024 Stats: 0.118 EPA/Play (16th); -0.7 CPOE (31st); 113 sk%+ (13th); 6.59 ANY/A (13th) in 594 plays

A rather typical Matthew Stafford season.

The mid teens in terms of results, but the late 20s in terms of peripherals, is where Matthew Stafford has lived a lot of his career, but considering he’s in the McVay offence, and this is the results-based tier list, I have no choice but to begrudgingly put him in 16th place this year, just like I begrudgingly put him in 13th place last year.

He is undoubtedly the second best of the Shanahan/McVay quarterbacks, in terms of both results and peripherals, which is why you have not seen Brock Purdy’s name yet, but even 16th place feels like I’m being forced to overrate this guy, based on the nature of the list I’m doing, for the 15th year in a row.

To give the same credit to Matthew Stafford that I gave to Aaron Rodgers, availability is an important ability, and is a big part of the reason why, despite his failings, he keeps ending up so high on the list. He’s only missed one game over the last two years, because he’s been neither benched nor injured, which is something precious few behind him on this list can say, but even so, his volume suffers from the Rams offence being significantly deleveraged from him, as he accrued only 594 touches in 16 starts this season. That’s only 37 touches per start, which for a QB in the modern game, especially one who played in 11 one possession games, is very low.

The reason the Rams choose to divert so much of their offence from their starting QB is unique to Matthew Stafford, as this is not an issue the Rams used to have when Jared Goff was their starting QB, when they commonly rode him into the ground. You may notice that you have not seen Jared Goff’s name yet either.

We all know the McVay offence by now, and we know how it weirdly understates the value of its non-QB players. As such, the advanced metrics believe that the Rams had the league’s 27th ranked offensive line and just one top 40 receiver in 2024, but somehow still had their QB significantly outperform his xEPA/Play. The two parts of that sentence are difficult to reconcile, but it’s been the McVay offence for years.

Either this offence somehow routinely fools advanced metrics into believing its players are really bad, Matthew Stafford included, or these players are actually really bad, Matthew Stafford included, and Sean gets great offence out of them anyway. It depends on what you believe.

It’s a formula that’s difficult to untangle, and notably a malady that the Shanahan offence does not have, but Matthew Stafford finds himself caught right in the middle of it, just like he’s been caught in the middle of it for the last four years. Once again, I’m going to have to split the difference, hence the 16th place ranking.

15. Jordan Love: Green Bay Packers

2023 Ranking: 8th

2024 Stats: 0.192 EPA/Play (9th); 0.6 CPOE (T-24th); 128 sk%+ (3rd); 7.51 ANY/A (5th) in 485 plays

A step forward or a step back?

It depends on your perspective. In the final eight games of the 2023 season, Jordan Love was the second best QB in the NFL, generating 0.266 EPA/Play on a 6.2 CPOE, both second behind only Brock Purdy in that span. If you thought this was the Jordan Love that was going to continue moving forward, it must be said that 2024 was a disappointment.

However, if you take his 2023 as a whole, where he was already an extreme player, allowing his 114 sk%+ to do the heavy lifting while his 1.1 CPOE tagged along for the ride, Jordan Love got even more extreme this season, improving his already great pocket presence to a 128 sk%+, but posting an even more meagre (albeit not negative) 0.6 CPOE.

Whatever your opinion of Jordan Love was, it’s almost certain that the 2024 season did not change it, as all that changed from 2023 to 2024 is that Jordan Love played even more like Jordan Love, who was an extreme player to begin with. He’s blazing a new trail in the post-2004 era, as there is no QB who has truly tried to make a living playing like this. His career so far (historically great sack avoidance, league average accuracy, top ten results) is a basically identical to that of Jim Hart, but I’m going all the way back to the 1970s to make that comparison.

This is how extreme Jordan Love is. There is nobody in his era that plays football the way he does, but it seems to be working for him, as in his two qualifying seasons he’s finished fifth in EPA/Play in 2023 and ninth in 2024, although his standing on this list is hurt by very low volume, a result of the Packers giving him even fewer touches per start than Matthew Stafford got. 482 touches in 15 starts is only 32 touches per start, which in the modern game is extremely low. Even the fact that nine of his 15 starts were one possession games did not save him from this cripplingly low volume.

However, he was still top ten on a rate basis, and the success of Jordan Love might be creating a new path for QBs in the NFL. Perhaps a living can be made in the 2020s playing QB like Jim Hart, because in 2024, we’ve seen yet another young QB come into the NFL playing the exact same way.

14. Bo Nix: Denver Broncos

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: 0.09 EPA/Play (18th); 0.6 CPOE (T-24th); 121 sk%+ (T-5th); 6.12 ANY/A (18th) in 702 plays

The other half of the tie for 24th in CPOE, and another player trying to walk the Jim Hart trail.

To say that Bo and Jordan Love are similar in terms of underlying metrics would be an understatement, as both posted a CPOE of 0.6, but both made up for it with absurd sack avoidance, both posting a sk%+ in the 120s. It cannot be expressed just how much it helps an offence to have only 23 of its QB’s 702 total touches end in a sack.

There does come one caveat with this though, which serves as the reason that Bo Nix sits at the top of the ‘Average Starters’ tier in 2024, and not the bottom of ‘Good Starters.’ This caveat is that there is rarely such a strong consensus in the advanced metrics community as to which team possessed the best pass blocking offensive line. In 2024, the best pass protecting offensive line by far was the Broncos. I’ve very rarely even heard an argument in favour of any other team.

Sacks are a QB stat, but having the undisputed best pass blocking offensive line in the NFL cannot hurt when a player’s main positive attribute is his 121 sk%+.

Similar to last year’s CJ Stroud, if Bo Nix weren’t a rookie, leading a team with the best defence in football and the best offensive line in football to a 10-7 record and a one and done playoff appearance would likely be seen as a disappointment. There is a reason he is only 14th place on this list, and the curve grading will not continue for very long. However, Bo Nix is not CJ Stroud, and here’s why.

Bo’s xEPA/Play in 2024 was an astonishing (for a rookie) 0.164. That translating into only 0.09 EPA/Play for real indicates to me a really bad offensive environment. The quality of the Denver receiver room depends a lot upon what you think about Courtland Sutton. If you’re high on him, you’ll likely think this WR room is at least workable. If you’re not, this is one of the worst receiver rooms in the league, and I must say that I’m one of the doubters. I don’t think this Denver receiver group is very good at all, and they caused the uber rare rookie underperformance of a fantastic xEPA/Play total.

Opinions differ on whether regression to the mean is going to go up or down for Bo Nix. In my opinion, it depends on three things. First, can he keep his sk%+ at least above 115 when the quality of the offensive line starts to fade a bit? Second, can he raise his CPOE above 0.6? Third, can Denver put some better receivers around him?

If all three of these answers are yes, Bo Nix will be in the top ten next year. That is a guarantee. I have my doubts about that though. I have confidence that his sack rate will stay low, but as for the other two propositions? We’ll wait and see.

Tier 3: Good, But Limited QBs

13. Geno Smith: Seattle Seahawks

2023 Ranking: 15th

2024 Stats: 0.075 EPA/Play (19th); 5.6 CPOE (4th); 93 sk%+ (30th); 5.93 ANY/A (22nd) in 713 plays

It just won’t come together for Geno Smith.

Consistency is this guy’s middle name, as you can see when comparing his 2022 stats (5.7 CPOE, 93 sk%+, 0.086 EPA/Play in 713 plays) to his 2024 ones (5.6 CPOE, 93 sk%+, 0.075 EPA/Play in 713 plays). The problem with this is that the 2022 season landed him sixth on the 2022 list, meanwhile this 2024 season lands him 13th, because they were done in two fundamentally different offensive environments.

Geno’s 2022 happened in a league where leaguewide QB play was 28 percent worse than the position’s greatest height in 2019, but his 2024 happened in a league where leaguewide play was only about six percent worse. In this case, consistency was not a positive, when many QBs leaguewide were rising with the tide.

His Seattle tenure may be over with, but it’s hard to ask Geno to do any more than he did. On a team that only once in three years gave him a defence that ranked better than 25th in EPA/Play Allowed, never gave him a good offensive line, and only gave him one top 40 receiver per year (DK Metcalf in 2022 and 2023, JSN in 2024), he never failed to have a winning record, never failed to have absurd volume, and never failed to post an EPA/Play as good or better than this 0.075.

Geno Smith in 2024 was the Seahawks, just like he’s been the Seahawks for years. Considering the team got a third round pick for the privilege of bringing in a QB to replace Geno that you have not yet seen on this list, I cannot fault the decision to make a change, but it does not mean that Geno Smith is not a playoff calibre QB. He is, and if we were ranking guys based on pure arm talent, Geno would be very close to number one, as there are very few that can compete with his ability to complete passes.

As Geno moves to the Las Vegas Raiders, I get the nasty feeling that his results continuously underperforming his talent level is not going to stop. The bad defence problem may get better, as Vegas has at least been a top half unit in each of the last two years, but the bad offensive line problem will not be getting better, and the only one good receiver problem may not be getting better either. It depends on if Jakobi Meyers can remain the 1000 yard guy he became in 2024, because we all know that a team with Geno Smith at QB will never allow a TE to be the most targeted receiver, so Brock Bowers cannot be the number one option.

He’s also moving to the toughest defensive division in football in 2024 in the AFC West, and I see no reason why it will not continue to be the toughest division in football to play QB. This means it’s a tough road ahead for Geno Smith, but can he be on the fringes of the top ten again next year? Sure he can.

That’s what Geno does these days.

12. Jalen Hurts: Philadelphia Eagles

2023 Ranking: 6th

2024 Stats: 0.161 EPA/Play (12th); 7.5 CPOE (1st); 81 sk%+ (39th); 6.93 ANY/A (11th) in 552 plays

This ranking will perhaps be controversial, but the championship ring disguises a very clear step backwards for Jalen Hurts in 2024.

Jalen’s EPA/Play was 0.139 last year, and 0.161 this year, but because of the massive boost to the leaguewide offensive environment between 2023 and 2024, that’s a relative step back, and not a small one. This is despite the fact that in 2023, Jalen was hindered by an unsustainable INT%+ of 89. This year, that became a much more reasonable (for the most accurate QB in the league) 117, but he still took a noticeable step backwards.

It’s extremely rare for a QB to recover from a stretch of bad turnover luck, and still get noticeably worse, but Jalen managed to do it, due to his sack rate of 9.52 percent, rendering the league’s fourth best pass blocking offensive line completely useless. This translates to a sk%+ of just 81, which is by far the worst of Jalen’s career, and deep into the untenable zone, if this were anything less than the very most accurate in the NFL, and even at that, it dropped a QB who had not ranked worse than sixth in several years clear out of the top ten.

This season reminded me a lot of Russell Wilson in his prime. For most players, this would be big praise, but considering where Jalen Hurts was in 2022 and 2023, and the fact that Russ only made the top five three times in his career (assuming he does not make another one from here), that is not a compliment in this case. It’s lucky for Jalen that he did have the very most accurate throwing arm in the NFL in 2024, or he could’ve fallen clear out of the top 16.

Jalen is not good in the pocket, but his career sk%+ is only 95, nowhere near as bad as he was this year, and he has a track record of being good at avoiding mistakes that are not sacks, so I don’t expect his negative plays to be as significant of a hinderance to his team as they were in 2024 moving forward. With that said, if his CPOE can remain anywhere near 7.5, it’s an easy prediction to see Jalen back in the top five next year, but if his sk%+ is in the 80 bracket again, we could be looking at a systemic change in how he plays. Not a good one.

I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here, but if Jalen plays in 2025 exactly like he played in 2024, don’t expect the results to be so good the second time around.

11. Kyler Murray: Arizona Cardinals

2023 Ranking: 26th

2024 Stats: 0.15 EPA/Play (13th); 2.1 CPOE (T-16th); 112 sk%+ (14th); 6.23 ANY/A (16th) in 682 plays

Welcome back to the ranks of the relevant Kyler. We’ve missed you at the adults’ table.

After two years wasted ranking 27th in 2022 and 26th in 2023 (both seasons shortened by the same knee injury), Kyler Murray is back to being a fringe top ten QB, the way God intended. It’s always a shame to be the first guy out of the top ten, and Kyler has now occupied this 11th position twice, as he also landed here in 2021, with these two 11th places going alongside only one actual top ten finish in 2020.

Speaking of 2020, Kyler basically replicated his best season in 2024, with his 2.1 CPOE, 112 sk%+, and 13th place finish in EPA/Play closely tracing his 2.2, 113, and 19th that got him his only top ten finish four years ago. It’s a shame that it only got him to 11th against 2024’s crop of competition, but if you’re going to be a fringe top ten QB, this is the life you live.

If only he could’ve had this season on the 2023 Arizona offence, which had three top 40 receivers on it. Under the radar, the Cardinal offence regressed quite a bit this season, despite its results getting better due to its QB finally being back to 100 percent. James Conner is not what he used to be. Trey McBride stayed pretty much the same as he was in 2023, but 116 targets had to be wasted this year on Marvin Harrison Jr., who accrued only 800 yards on these targets, which amounts to a really bad WR season.

I’m not saying Marvin will be really bad forever, but this is a list looking back at 2024, and in 2024, his ineptitude, combined with the fact that his draft status forced the Cardinals to use him, hurt Kyler Murray’s production a lot, causing him to come in below (although not an extreme amount below) his xEPA/Play for yet another time in a Cardinals’ uniform, after the preciously rare experience of basically matching it in 2023.

Kyler is not the league’s young boy anymore. He’s 27 years old now, and there’s only so long this can persist until the fringe top ten guy he’s always been becomes the fringe top ten guy that he’s always going to be. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for a man who once upon a time put up a 4.2 CPOE in an NFL season, and was in the rare club to put up a college CPOE better than ten, to spend a whole career doing this would likely be a slight disappointment.

It’s not too late. He can always find that 4.2 CPOE again, and if he can do that, particularly once Marvin Harrison Jr. becomes a help instead of a hinderance, we will see Kyler in the top ten again, but for now, we’re left with Kyler’s remarkable consistency. He hasn’t finished in any position other than 10th or 11th in a full season since he was a rookie. Why would I predict him to be anywhere else next year?

Tier 2: Great Starters

10. Brock Purdy: San Francisco 49ers

2023 Ranking: 1st

2024 Stats: 0.198 EPA/Play (7th); 2.1 CPOE (T-16th); 104 sk%+ (T-20th); 7.34 ANY/A (6th) in 570 plays

One of the bigger declines on the list.

Even I, one of Brock Purdy’s biggest boosters, can admit that 2024 was a large come down from the electric heights of his number one position in 2023, but we should put some stock into the fact that I’m describing a season where a QB finished 7th in EPA/Play and sixth in ANY/A as a significant fall from grace. How good must he have been beforehand for this to be considered a down season?

Brock’s placement on the list suffers for two reasons. First is his volume. Last year, he was so far above the pack in an extremely weak offensive league that I was willing to take 523 plays of Brock Purdy over 719 plays of second placed Dak Prescott, 742 plays of third placed Josh Allen, and etcetera. This year, Brock is not so lucky.

In 2024, Brock had 47 extra touches over his 2023 season, despite starting one fewer game, a difference almost entirely covered by the 36 extra fourth quarter touches Brock had this year, because the 49ers were not blowing teams out anymore. Nevertheless, the offence was still significantly deleveraged from Brock, as he tallied only 38 touches per start, and the 49ers threw just the 22nd most passes in the NFL last season, despite not being ahead late in very many games. The methodology of this list questions why the 49ers threw so few passes, which is why Brock is here, in just tenth place, despite ranking 7th in EPA/Play.

As far as Brock individually goes, he’s been walking the same path as Trevor Lawrence. Every season in the NFL, his average pass has gotten both longer and more difficult, and just like Trevor Lawrence, the longer a pass gets, the more accurate Brock Purdy is, relative to NFL average, so I can understand why he keeps gravitating towards these longer throws.

It’s gotten to the point where Brock Purdy (who some people will insist is a game manager, no matter what) in 2024 threw the league’s 11th most difficult average pass. Does that sound like a game manager to you? This is not even like it was last year, where Brock’s NFLFastR CPOE was above five, but his NFL NGS (which remember, rewards QBs for throwing into coverage) was roughly two, indicating that a Brock Purdy target was wide open a large percentage of the time. This season, Brock’s NFLFastR CPOE and NFL NGS CPOE are exactly in line, meaning his targets in 2024 were not as wide open as they used to be.

They were open at about a league average rate, and Brock was still able to complete two percent more of his passes than a league average QB would’ve in his place. That’s not far and away number one anymore, but it is an entirely valid tenth position in my opinion.

9. Patrick Mahomes: Kansas City Chiefs

2023 Ranking: 7th

2024 Stats: 0.165 EPA/Play (10th); 2.6 CPOE (14th); 108 sk%+ (T-16th); 6.02 ANY/A (19th) in 695 plays

We are nowhere near the ‘Super Bowl QBs’ tier, but we have now seen both Super Bowl participant QBs. What’s up with that?

The ‘Super Bowl QBs’ tier is for people who have the capability to carry a team to a Super Bowl championship all by themselves. Nobody did that this year, but there were guys that could have, and Patrick Mahomes is not one of them.

Don’t look now, but Patrick has just missed the top five for the second season in a row. This may not seem important to you, but Peyton Manning never missed the top five twice in a row. Roger Staubach never missed the top five twice in a row. Joe Montana never missed the top five twice in a row.

What I’m saying is that Patrick was once on a trajectory to be able to be called the best QB of all time (which is different to calling somebody the GOAT, because it takes more than just team accomplishments into account), but his case is deteriorating before our eyes, and he’s running out of time to save it. The incumbent best QB of all time (Peyton Manning, in my opinion) finished with three seasons outside the top five in an entire career, which is why I speak with such urgency about Patrick’s case. He truly is running out of time to salvage an argument for himself.

He can still be in GOAT discussions because of his teams’ championships, but with the loose way that term is used now, GOAT is a lesser title than best in my opinion, and if Patrick wants to stay in the fight for the real title, he needs to get things turned around, yesterday.

I’m not saying Patrick Mahomes is a bad QB. Far from that. Look at his placement on this list. I still have him ninth, and he’s still playing like Patrick Mahomes, as his average throw distance, average throw difficulty, and CPOE are all regular fare for a season in the Game Manager Mahomes era (2022-present).

Some people may take offence to the term Game Manager Mahomes, but amongst the top ten QBs of 2024 (which you can backward induce from the names you have not seen yet), who threw the shortest average pass? Who has the lowest NFL NGS CPOE, indicating he’s only willing to throw to wide open targets?

Patrick Mahomes.

How people think Brock Purdy and Tua Tagovailoa play is how Patrick Mahomes actually does play. Every pass is short, easy, and never into a tight window. Patrick in 2024 finished in the bottom three amongst qualified QBs in rate of throws into tight windows for the seventh season running. In a seven season career.

It’s not a crime to only throw to wide open targets. It’s actually a good thing. Patrick is always able to spot the open man, and avoid throwing the ball into coverage. This is a positive trait. It’s not a negative trait, but when the quality of your offence begins to dip, and you find your receivers are having a hard time getting separation, the ability to throw into a tight window would be a great skill to have. Patrick does not have this skill. He did not have it even in his best years, and we can see before our eyes the havoc it is playing on his career.

In addition to this, Patrick just posted his first ever season with a sack rate in the five percent bracket, after basically a whole career spent in the threes, and in a bad year the low fours. This translates to a sk%+ of just 108, which is alarming out of a player who used to make 118-121 look routine, especially when it came without any associated drop in quality of the Chiefs’ offensive line.

I will reiterate for one final time that Patrick Mahomes is a lot like Brock Purdy. He is not a bad player. This is still the top ten. A season like this is only relatively disappointing because of the player Patrick used to be, and the fact that this is the second down season in a row raises questions as to whether he will ever be that player again.

If his sk%+ stays all the way down at 108, he will not be that player ever again. That much is obvious. You don’t need me to tell you that. Patrick has never had the arm to be able to overcome merely being good at avoiding sacks. The Patrick Mahomes package is a good but not great arm added onto some of the best feet in the NFL, and the best feet in the NFL were gone in 2024.

For Pat to be able to bounce back from this, it is non-negotiable that his sack rate must get back into the four percent bracket at least. If he ever wants to win MVP again, it has to get back into the three percents, but it really is this easy. It only takes one change. If he can get that done, he’ll be right back into the top five. Perhaps number one again, but if he cannot, I have serious doubts that we’ll ever see Patrick Mahomes in the top five again.

That seems extreme, but in 2024, we’ve seen what Patrick Mahomes is without his elite sack avoidance, in what was a fairly typical season in terms of throw depth, throw difficulty, and accuracy. It’s not nearly a top five player. A single top 40 receiver would’ve helped, but I don’t think that would’ve been enough to cover the difference.

If Patrick wants to recover his case to be considered amongst the candidates for the very best QB of all time, he cannot afford very many more ninth place finishes, but for now, this is where I have to leave him.

8. Justin Herbert: Los Angeles Chargers

2023 Ranking: 26th

2024 Stats: 0.164 EPA/Play (11th); 1.9 CPOE (18th); 96 sk%+ (T-27th); 7.25 ANY/A (8th) in 627 plays

How much luck can you get before it ceases to be luck?

After starting his career rather sensibly in the turnover luck department, Justin has posted a 119 INT%+ on a 1.4 CPOE in the 2022 season, 118 INT%+ on a -0.3 CPOE in the 2023 season, and 132 INT%+ on a 1.9 CPOE in the 2024 season. None of these three seasons look sustainable, taken individually, but when you put them all back to back, out of the same player, it does give some cause to pause.

132 will not be repeated, but it seems like Justin is forming a baseline around the high 110s, despite accuracy figures that cannot support turnover rates that low. However, when we look back up to the ninth placed entry, Patrick Mahomes began his career with three seasons in a row of unsustainable turnover luck, before falling into a pattern much more consistent with his accuracy level, so we’ll see with Justin.

From an xEPA/Play perspective, this has caused Justin to be extremely overrated by his real results in 2024 for the fourth time in a five season career. He is also the worst playoff QB in NFL history (min. 2 starts), if you’re the type that thinks that kind of thing to be important. In addition, Justin’s success rate in 2024 was just 47.4 percent. That’s the fourth lowest success rate to produce an EPA/Play of 0.164 or better since the 2004 rule changes, and the very lowest out of a player who did not throw an extremely difficult average pass.

Justin went from the poor rate results on high volume guy that he’d been for the entirety of his career to a high rate results on low volume guy in 2024. He averaged just 37 touches per start in 2024, which is less than Brock Purdy, the same as Matthew Stafford, but to Justin’s credit, his team only played eight one possession games, which will naturally lead to fewer touches for the QB, a distinction that neither Purdy nor Stafford have.

All of this explains why Justin was able to matriculate all the way up to eighth on this results based tier list, but if I had to pick anybody to fall out of the top ten next year, this would be the pick. The 132 INT%+ is unsustainable. The 47.4 percent success rate (which is much less than Mason Rudolph’s, all the way down in 31st place, for scale) on such a high EPA/Play is unsustainable. Justin does have a top flight NFL receiver for years moving forward in Ladd McConkey, meaning I will hear no further talk of his receivers being bad. Such a great WR on the roster will boost his results for the foreseeable future, but one top 15 guy is not enough to carry such an unsustainable player to this level of success again.

It’s possible that Justin will take a great leap forward individually in 2025 and beyond, and grow into his great results a little bit, but going into year six, it’s getting a little bit late for that, so I suspect we’ll be seeing Justin in this general range again in 2024. Perhaps a bit lower.

7. Sam Darnold: Minnesota Vikings

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: 0.127 EPA/Play (15th); 3.9 CPOE (7th); 92 sk%+ (31st); 6.99 ANY/A (10th) in 687 plays

I told you so.

I published this article on April 1, 2023, telling you so.

Watch Out for Sam Darnold

Considering I’ve been beating the drum in favour of Sam Darnold on my Sports Passion Project for better than two years now, I’m running out of unique things to say about him, other than to offer my unique perspective of the club that I belong to, which I believe I am entirely alone in, that believes 2024 was actually a mild disappointment from Sam. I thought he could do better.

In his stint for the Carolina Panthers in 2022, Sam posted a 4.8 CPOE, a 98 sk%+, and ranked 7th in the NFL in EPA/Play, playing for an offence that was the worst in the league before he got there, that is still holding Bryce Young back as we speak. In 2024, Sam moved to a better offence, but got uniformly worse individually, dropping to a 3.9 CPOE, 92 sk%+, and a 15th place EPA/Play ranking, on a shorter and easier average pass.

As such, I feel as if I’m the only person in the world that thinks less of Sam Darnold now than I thought of him before the season started, but that just means I thought a lot of Sam Darnold before 2024, because seventh place is a great spot to land.

For all the talk of the Minnesota offence, and how much it may or may not help QBs, Sam Darnold matched his xEPA/Play closer than anybody except CJ Stroud in 2024, just like Kirk Cousins very closely mirrored his in 2023, 2022, and 2021. No QB has significantly outperformed their xEPA/Play in any Minnesota offence since 2020, long before Kevin O’Connell got to town. You can take that to mean whatever you want, but the fact is in the Kevin O’Connell offence, QBs tend to land within reaching distance (up or down) of their xEPA/Play in the real results.

This is not the hinderance that guys like Bo Nix and Kyler Murray dealt with in 2024, but it’s also not the great deal of help that guys like Matthew Stafford, Brock Purdy, and Justin Herbert got. Justin Jefferson is still elite, but relative to his ridiculous standard, 1533 receiving yards in 2024 is actually one of his worst seasons, and he’s the only top 40 receiver Minnesota had. I don’t see Jordan Addison taking 99 targets to not even get to 900 receiving yards as especially impressive, and I dare you to name me another skill position player that plays for the Minnesota Vikings.

On top of this, Minnesota’s offensive line was league average in pass protection (17th), and their rushing attack was flat out bad, finishing 22nd in the NFL in EPA/Rush. This is the worst rushing offence any QB in (or even near) the top ten had to deal with in 2024, and when you add this to some bad turnover luck (104 INT%+ on a 3.9 CPOE means reversion to the mean should go upwards), this seems to balance out the fact that he had Justin Jefferson, and land Sam right on top of his 0.123 xEPA/Play figure.

Moving forward as the QB for the Seattle Seahawks, his offensive line is getting worse, his receiver room (unless JSN takes a ridiculous leap) is getting worse. Rushing attacks year on year are difficult to predict. You would hope it would be better, but good rushing offence (in the Geno Smith era) has not been Seattle’s cup of tea either.

Even if Sam keeps his xEPA components exactly the same, it’s a good bet that his real results will be worse next year. As such, to stay in the top ten, I think Sam needs to make some improvements, notably in his sack rate. His sk%+ just has to be better than 100 next year. If not, I believe he’ll fall right back into the Geno Smith position of approximately 0.08 EPA/Play, because the Seattle offence cannot overcome big negative plays like some other offences can.

0.08 EPA/Play on good volume will likely put Sam 12th-15th next year, like it keeps placing Geno Smith year after year, but that would be quite the fall from this lofty position. However, if Sam somehow manages to get the sack rate down, we could have a bona fide top five guy on our hands, and the same goes for the next man on the list.

6. Jayden Daniels: Washington Commanders

2023 Ranking: N/A

2024 Stats: 0.202 EPA/Play (6th); 3.5 CPOE (10th); 86 sk%+ (T-34th); 6.5 ANY/A (14th) in 699 plays

So close yet so far away from having the first ever rookie QB in the top five.

After RG3 petered out in sixth in 2012, and Dak Prescott finished sixth in 2016, Jayden Daniels was supposed to be the one to smash the glass ceiling. For much of the season, he was number one as I was live updating this list week by week. When even landing in the top five is unprecedented for a rookie, you could see how this was blowing everybody’s minds.

Then, he started making rookie mistakes. A lot of rookie mistakes.

For the time that Jayden was tracking so high, the main reason for that was his ability to not make any mistakes, which he was also the best in the league at (in terms of TEP/Play) for a big chunk of the year. This felt unsustainable out of a rookie, and in the end it was unsustainable for Jayden Daniels, as seven turnovers and 27 sacks in the final seven games combined to torpedo his season long metrics.

He fell from first in TEP/Play at the ten game mark all the way down to 11th at season’s end. He fell from second in EPA/Play all the way down to sixth place, and he fell all the way from the fight for number one on this tier list to not even breaking the rookie glass ceiling, as I regretfully had to place him in sixth place again, just like the rookie phenoms before him.

Nevertheless, what a great season from Jayden Daniels.

It’d been a long time since Washington had a top ten QB, ever since they refused to pay Kirk Cousins almost a decade ago. Since that time, the Commanders have hung out in the ‘Not Starting Calibre’ tier a lot, but I get the feeling that they won’t be hanging out there again in the next ten years.

Was Jayden Daniels’ elite start a slight mirage, a product of stacking every game against a top ten defence into the final eight games of the year? I believe it was, but even in these final eight games against generally better competition, where he was making mistakes left and right, Jayden still managed to generate 0.096 EPA/Play around his own errors. That is not even in the top 16 in this span, but out of a rookie you will absolutely take it, especially with a very good playoff run on the end of it.

Perhaps ending the season so cold is a product of the fact that the Commanders used the heck out of this guy. Taking into account the five total touches against the Carolina Panthers, and the final week of the season where he played one half against Dallas, that is basically 15 and a half starts, during which he accumulated 699 total touches. That is extreme volume. It’s 45 touches per start, so it’s tough to blame a man who had never played more than about 500 total touches in a college season for running out of gas near the finish line.

Nevertheless, the league’s best passing offence did fall to not even being league average over an eight game period of time. That’s almost half the season. That has to hurt him on this list. Those eight games are why he’s not in the top five. There’s only so much production you can stack into one half of the year.

Moving forward for Jayden, the obvious is that his sk%+ of 86 is not going to work. Washington’s pretty good (12th) pass protecting offensive line was completely wasted by this, and will continue to be completely wasted unless he can get a handle on it. There is a positive spin to this though, and it’s that Jayden is much like Patrick Mahomes. Sack avoidance is the only issue. Everything else is there already.

If he can get his issues with taking sacks fixed, Jayden will be in the top five many many times in the years ahead, but he’s not quite there yet, with his late season slump costing him a top five position, due in part to a late season surge from this man.

5. Baker Mayfield: Tampa Bay Buccaneers

2023 Ranking: 10th

2024 Stats: 0.209 EPA/Play (5th); 3.6 CPOE (9th); 103 sk%+ (22nd); 7.13 ANY/A (9th) in 697 plays

This is another L for me, but this one I’ll gladly take. Another excerpt from last year’s tier list:

‘Do I think Baker can be top ten again? I really wouldn't bet on it … his results are due for some regression, and there are some murderers on the fringes of the top ten looking for their spots back. Do we really think Baker can hold off Cousins, Lawrence, Stroud, Geno, and whatever sensation may pop up next year all at once to hold on to this last spot in the top ten? If he does, I will tip my cap and he will become one of my favourite players. If he doesn't, don't say I didn't warn you.’

Here I am, tipping my cap. Baker Mayfield has become one of my favourite NFL players.

What a comeback. From occupying the very final spot (40th place) on the 2022 tier list to the top five within two years. By the way, I’d just like to mention again that it’s an absolute joke that a QB won the comeback player of the year award in 2023, and that QB wasn’t Baker Mayfield. One more testament to the fact that awards voters have no idea what’s going on, but they can keep their award. CPOY is a novelty anyway. I would much rather have an elite QB, and that’s exactly what Baker is right now.

What game do you want me to talk about? You want me to talk about that time when Baker was one of only two losses for the 2024 Detroit Lions? The time when he humiliated a 12 win Washington team by a 37-20 score, the time when he was one of only three losses for the eventual Super Bowl champions, generating 0.32 EPA/Play against the vaunted Philadelphia defence and winning in blowout fashion, by a 33-17 score?

All these games happened in the opening six weeks of the season, after which the Bucs went into a bit of a slump, but Baker roared back to life in the final seven weeks, generating 0.279 EPA/Play as five of the Bucs’ final seven games were multiple possession wins. There was one OT game against the newly reinvigorated Bryce Young, but other than that, it was domination, as the Bucs went into the playoffs on a monster hot streak.

He did lose a one possession playoff game where his defence allowed the Commanders to win the TOP battle 71 plays to just 47, but to even be in a one possession game when the other team gets to run 24 more plays than you do speaks volumes to how well Baker played, and I haven’t even told you the best part yet.

These were Baker’s results with absolutely horrendous turnover luck.

Baker threw the most INTs in the NFL last year, with 16. On a rate basis, his INT%+ was only 89, despite his CPOE of positive 3.6. This is not going to happen again. I would say I consider his 2023 rate of 112 to be a solid baseline, and if he could’ve met that this year, the ironclad top four in the ‘Super Bowl QBs’ tier would’ve been an ironclad top five.

Baker still slightly overperformed his xEPA/Play in 2024, because that’s what having Mike Evans, one of the league’s best offensive lines, and one of the league’s best running backs will do for a QB, but he should’ve overperformed it by more, and without the horrendous turnover luck, he will overperform it by more next season.

Will he be back in the top five again? It’s tough to say, considering this 3.6 CPOE is a new high for Baker. He has no track record of being able to play at this level, except for 2024. If this is the new Baker Mayfield, he will absolutely be in the top five again. If this is a career year, and he declines slightly in 2025, at least he’ll always be able to say he was a top five QB in the NFL.

Tier 1: Super Bowl QBs

4. Jared Goff: Detroit Lions

2023 Ranking: 9th

2024 Stats: 0.292 EPA/Play (3rd); 5.7 CPOE (3rd); 111 sk%+ (15th); 8.06 ANY/A (2nd) in 603 plays

Everybody knew before they even clicked on this list who the top four QBs in 2024 were. It’s only a matter of which order I put them in, and in my opinion, Jared Goff has to be the opener for the Super Bowl QBs tier.

After a one year break to finish ninth last year, Jared finds himself back in the top five again, and he does it with rate stats that he’s never been able to touch before. Third place in EPA/Play, third place in CPOE, and second place in ANY/A are all ranks that Jared has never been able to touch before, making this definitively the best season of his career, so why is he in fourth place?

Jared is currently serving as Patrick Mahomes’ stand-in for the role of ‘game manager but still elite QB.’ Ever since he got to Detroit, he has been playing this way. Jared Goff is very rarely outside the bottom ten in terms of longest or most difficult average pass, and there is no exception in 2024.

Amongst all QBs in the top ten, Jared’s average pass in 2024 was the second shortest (longer than only Patrick Mahomes), and very easiest, although it must be said that NGS’s CPOE does not hate him like it hates Patrick, indicating that Jared is much more able to put the ball into a tight spot and complete it than Patrick is, but it’s important to take note that most of the elite QBs just don’t feel the need to be this short and easy. Jared Goff and Patrick Mahomes are the only players that do, and this season, Goff and the Lions doubled down on this philosophy, throwing an average pass with an expected completion percentage of 70.8.

It cannot be denied that Jared Goff is good at being Jared Goff, as despite this extreme expected completion percentage, Jared was able to put up an even more extreme true completion percentage of 76.5, to finish the year with an extremely healthy 5.7 CPOE.

What hurts Jared in this list is the volume. There is not very much of it, despite a Detroit Lions team that played in more one possession games (nine) than you’d think a 15-2 team would. This is a common problem with three of these top four guys, as this top four features three of the league’s top five rushing attacks for backup. Jared’s is the worst of the best, as his Lions finished fifth in EPA/Rush this year, but they still felt plenty comfortable taking the offence out of the QB’s hands more than any of the others in this ‘Super Bowl QBs’ group did, leaving Jared with only 35 touches per start.

That is ten fewer touches per game than Jayden Daniels, and you can’t tell me that taking the extra load off didn’t help Jared in the rate stat department, which is why his rate stats are so high. He didn’t even overperform his xEPA/Play really, as his fourth place ranking in that stat translates only to a third place ranking in EPA/Play, and much like Baker Mayfield, if you were to simulate this season 100 times, he’d likely overperform it by more than that on average, as you could expect an INT%+ better than 101 most of the time on a 5.7 CPOE, especially when the player has a career INT%+ better than 101, like Jared Goff does.

The one thing that Jared can work on is his sack avoidance. It slipped a little bit this season, with his sack rate creeping up into the five percent bracket for only the third time in his career (rookie season excluded). I’d like to see that get back down into the fours, and if that can happen, we’ll see if Jared can ever be a 5.7 CPOE guy again.

His best CPOE in a season prior to 2024 had been 1.5 on the 2018 Rams, so this season has His Year written all over it, but if somehow Jared can maintain this level of passing accuracy, he can make a run for the number one spot next year, with just a little bit of regression back to his mean in the sack avoidance department, and in the turnover luck department. I wouldn’t bet on it, but you can if you’d like.

3. Josh Allen: Buffalo Bills

2023 Ranking: 3rd

2024 Stats: 0.321 EPA/Play (1st); 0.8 CPOE (22nd); 130 sk%+ (T-1st); 7.95 ANY/A (3rd) in 638 plays

One more year. One more failure to finish in first place, but with his consistency at the top of the list, Josh is putting himself into very elite company.

With his finishes on my lists of 2nd in 2020, fifth in 2021, 2nd in 2022, and third in each of the last two years, Josh Allen finds himself in rarified air, one of very few people since the beginning of this tier list series in the 1970 season to make the top five for five seasons in a row. Fran Tarkenton was the first, from 1972 to 1976, and he never made a number one position either. Roger Staubach did it four seasons in a row from 1976-1979, but retired before he could go for his fifth, so he gets an honourary mention here.

Dan Fouts did it at the height of the Air Coryell offence from 1978-1982, before losing his streak due to an injury shortened 1983. Joe Montana got a five season long top five streak at the beginning of his run of dominance from 1981 to 1985, but did not have a second. Dan Marino from 1984-1988 becomes the first and only man to ever finish number one five seasons in a row, a feat that will never be duplicated, but he’s never able to have a second streak either. Boomer Esiason’s run of finishing 5th in 1985, 2nd in 1986, 3rd in 1988 and 2nd in 1989 is ruined by a lousy sixth place finish in 1987, and then nobody does it again until Brett Favre from 1994-1998.

Peyton Manning blows the lid off by finishing in the top five in every season from 2002-2011 if we count not touching the field in 2011 as a miss, and 2002-2014 if we don’t. In the midst of Peyton’s streak, Tom Brady is able to do it every year from 2004-2012, if we don’t count his missing the entire 2008 season as a miss, but if we do count not qualifying at all as a miss, even the great Tom Brady was never able to put five consecutive top five seasons together. Nor was Aaron Rodgers, bedeviled by a sixth place finish in 2008.

The true gap bridger is Drew Brees, who found himself in the top five on my tier list in every season from 2006-2018, with no injury concerns in the middle like Peyton has, making this the longest streak of consecutive top five finishes in post-merger NFL history. He bridges the gap to Patrick Mahomes, who pulls this off from 2018-2022, and now Josh Allen, whose streak began in 2020, and has not ended yet.

Consistency is not everything, but it is an important element of a QB’s value, and in terms of consistency at the top of the league, Josh is now in the company of only Fran Tarkenton, Dan Fouts, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Patrick Mahomes, and maybe Roger Staubach and Tom Brady, depending on how you feel about missed seasons due to injury.

It is really easy not to finish in the top five. As Jayden Daniels showed us this year, you can be the very best QB in the NFL for better than half a season, and still not finish in the top five. All you need is an extremely slight slip in performance (i.e. Patrick Mahomes right now), and you’re out. The consistency it takes to maintain this performance level for five years in a row is a marvel, one that very few players are ever able to pull off, either for injury reasons (Steve Young), their best seasons being poorly sequenced (Ken Anderson), their prime not being five years long to begin with (Troy Aikman), or just one rogue sixth place finish in the middle of a long streak of top fives (Boomer Esiason, Aaron Rodgers).

You may not like this assertion, but Josh Allen is now on my best (not greatest, but best) ten QBs of all time list, and that position will crystallise once he finishes his eighth qualifying season next year, at which point he will become an automatic first ballot hall of famer, no matter what else he does.

In terms of his 2024 performance, Josh Allen decided he wanted to do a Jordan Love impression, stealing Jordan’s thunder completely with a sk%+ of 130, to go with his meagre CPOE of 0.8. I never thought I would say this about this particular player, but in 2024, Josh Allen got much more of his value from being non-negative than from being positive, leading the league in TEP/Play (my preferred measure of mistake avoidance), and taking the positives only when they came, instead of trying to force things, the way he’s done in previous years.

Nevertheless, this is still Josh Allen. He is not in the top five longest or most difficult average pass in the league like he used to be, but he still threw the tenth most difficult passes in the NFL on average, so it’s not as if the change has been fundamental. Just a slightly more conservative version of the same Josh Allen we’ve grown to know and love, which also continues his yo-yo act, in terms of throwing accuracy.

Josh’s CPOE figures over this five year stretch of dominance have been 6.6, 2.1, 0.9, 5 flat, and now 0.8 again. He’s like Dak Prescott, if Dak’s fluctuations were confined to only one area of his game. Judging by the pattern, Josh is likely to be a much more accurate passer again in the 2025 season, meaning perhaps he may be in position to go get that coveted number one position that he’s never yet been able to secure, and win an MVP that he actually deserves next time around. This is especially true if he can remain the best sack avoider in the NFL, which he has been in each of the last two seasons.

I see no reason why he can’t, which means Josh Allen is as good a pick as any to find himself number one when I make the 2025 list in one year’s time.

2. Joe Burrow: Cincinnati Bengals

2023 Ranking: 23rd

2024 Stats: 0.212 EPA/Play (4th); 6.8 CPOE (2nd); 101 sk%+ (T-23rd); 7.28 ANY/A (7th) in 776 plays

Oh my gosh the volume. Look at how many times Joe Burrow had to touch the football.

Hindered more by his inept rushing offence than any QB in the top ten except for Sam Darnold, and without the top five defence Minnesota had to compensate, Joe’s Bengals were often left in positions of having to score, and having only one way to do it. Their only choice was to put the ball in Joe’s hands, and pray that he could get it done. This left Joe in a ton of must pass situations, with the defence knowing he was going to pass, because the Bengals ran the football the third fewest times in the NFL.

Joe’s ranking will differ on your list depending upon just how difficult you think these circumstances make a QB’s life, but on my list, they boost him all the way up to second place. Joe’s 46 touches per start is more even than Jayden Daniels, and represents a rebellion against the general trend in the NFL of having the QB touch the ball less than in years past, with only four QBs reaching 700 total touches in 2024, compared to five in 2023, and seven apiece in each of the 2022 and 2021 seasons.

Joe’s 776 total touches would not have led the NFL in either 2021 or 2022, and would’ve won him the volume championship only by a nose in 2023, but in 2024, his 776 touches put him 77 touches clear of the next closest top ten QB (Jayden Daniels). Assuming roughly 40 touches per start, this means Joe Burrow had to play almost two more full games than any other top level QB did, but in all this extra playing time, without any real threat of the run to back him up, Joe did not tire, still posting the league’s fourth best EPA/Play tally, and still being the second most accurate passer in the game, despite leading the league in pass attempts.

It’s all arm for Joe, as his 6.8 CPOE is doing almost all the heavy lifting here. His feet either inside the pocket (101 sk%+) or outside the pocket (155 rushing yards per 600 touches) are nothing special, which is why Joe basically matched his xEPA/Play this season, despite having not one but two fantastic receivers in Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins.

This is all great, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the other key narrative to Joe’s 2024 season. Aside from his suddenly immense volumes, the thing to note about Joe’s 2024 is that his team missed the playoffs, despite his electric performance. To me, this ought not to be taken as a slight or something to criticize Joe Burrow for, but as yet another sign of the league pivoting away from the heightened amount of importance that the QB position has had for the last 20 years.

It’s not been that long since a top five QB missed the playoffs. Jared Goff did it in 2022, but that was hindered by a 2022 Detroit defence worse even than the one Joe Burrow had to deal with this year, and before him, it’d been a long time since Drew Brees had to deal with similar issues on the mid 2010s Saints, and Philip Rivers missed the playoffs while finishing number one on the tier list for the 2010 Chargers.

Yet another stroke of bad luck for that team.

In the years before the 2004 rule changes tilted the league in favour of offence, top five QBs used to miss the playoffs at a rate of roughly once per season. Just in the play tracking era, it happened to 1999 Steve Beuerlein, 2000 Jeff Garcia, 2001 Steve McNair, 2002 Trent Green, and 2003 Daunte Culpepper.

Once the 2004 rule changes happened, a top five QB missed the playoffs in the form of 2004 Trent Green, and 2005 Trent Green (sigh), but more or less entirely stopped after that, happening to Philip Rivers in 2010, Drew Brees a few times in the mid 2010s, and that’s basically it, until we reach the modern era of QB de-escalation, where it has now happened twice, to two different people, in the last three years.

I think next year will be telling on this. If a top five QB misses the playoffs for the third time in four years, I think we can officially declare the QB position not as important as it used to be. Maybe not as unimportant as it was before 2004, but less important than it’s been any time since.

All of this is to say, don’t pile onto Joe Burrow too much. I know he missed the playoffs, but that’s very far from his fault. With a better roster, he will be back into the postseason very quickly, and we can all look back and acknowledge that 2024 may just be the best season Joe will ever play.

Tier 0: Lamar Jackson

1. Lamar Jackson: Baltimore Ravens

2023 Ranking: 5th

2024 Stats: 0.296 EPA/Play (2nd); 4.6 CPOE (5th); 117 sk%+ (T-8th); 9.38 ANY/A (1st) in 653 plays

For those of you who are not veterans of these tier lists, tier zero means that the choice of number one was easy. There was no true competition, and this is the problem with sympathy MVPs, as a player in a tier zero season somehow failed to win the award, because the voters felt the need to slip an award to Josh Allen.

Did the 2024 Baltimore Ravens win as many games as the 2023 Baltimore Ravens? No they didn’t, but strictly on offence, the difference was so stark that it became difficult to tell that it was even the same team. Lamar took a mammoth step forward from a 2023 season that was inexplicably gifted a totally undeserved MVP award, to the point that I will say it’s absolutely ridiculous that Lamar did not win the 2024 MVP award. Both of these statements can be true at once. Both are true at once.

Like I often do when talking about a tier zero number one placement, I’m running into the issue of having very little to say about the player who should be being given the most spotlight of all, because it all feels so obvious. Name a statistic, and I’ll tell you that Lamar did much better at it this year than last.

In 2024, Lamar took Josh Allen’s place as the elite QB who threw the very longest and very most difficult average pass. In so doing, he played more to his strength, which is throws between seven and 20 yards. Lamar tends to struggle both on throws shorter than seven and on throws longer than 20 yards, but between seven and 20, there is nobody that can match what he can do, with Lamar’s 12.2 CPOE on throws of this distance putting a lap between him and everybody else.

In addition, Lamar finally lived up to his fullest potential, and got his sack rate into the four percent bracket. This is the holy grail. This is what football fans like myself were waiting for. For his entire career, Lamar’s feet in the pocket have always been his biggest weakness. If he could ever learn to avoid a sack, he may just be unbeatable, and in 2024, he finally posted a sk%+ of 117, without even a top ten offensive line to aid this effort.

Uh oh.

Lamar Jackson with the ability to avoid a sack is an extremely frightening proposition, and makes him not just the best QB in the NFL right now, but by far the best QB in the NFL right now, which is why he gets a tier of his own. His 127 INT%+, even on a 4.6 CPOE, is liable to come down some in the years ahead, but I don’t think his 2023 level of 118 is unreasonable. Even Lamar’s rushing numbers got better this year, as his 841 rushing yards per 600 touches is his best in a full season since 2020.

There are people that can compete with Lamar in terms of throwing accuracy. There are people that can compete with Lamar in terms of sack avoidance. There are people who can compete with Lamar in terms of QB rushing value, but there is nobody that can compete with him in all three at once.

This absurd collection of skills is what leads to Lamar actually slightly underperforming his xEPA/Play last year, despite an INT%+ of 127, and despite an absolutely fantastic 0.296 EPA/Play.

It does have to be said that it does not hurt to have an offence with as many weapons as the Ravens have. Baltimore is filled to the brim with elite pass catchers, with four top 40 receivers for the second year running in 2024. I did not think Lamar Jackson would ever again have the quality of offence that carried him along in 2023. I was wrong about that. He had it again this year, but he carried them this time.

I once again remain confident that there is no way the Baltimore offence (or any offence) can remain so stacked for the third year in a row. Somebody is going to have a down season next year, be it Zay Flowers or Mark Andrews or Derrick Henry or somebody. It’s almost certain that Lamar will not have as much offensive help next year as he had this year, but considering the lead he’s pulled on the pack, I’m not sure that will be enough to stop him.

We will wait and see about the sack avoidance. That newfound ability to avoid tackles in the pocket is the lynchpin of all this, and Lamar’s career sk%+ (including this 117) is only 98. As such, I’m not ready to declare that Lamar will be the best QB in the NFL next year too, but if this is a new Lamar Jackson we’re looking at, and this 117 has any degree of permanence to it, then Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, and everybody else has been passed. There’s a new sheriff in town.

If Lamar Jackson can post a 117 sk%+ again next year, I don’t believe there’s anybody that can compete with him.

---

That’s it. It’s finally over. I told you it would be a long journey.

23000 words later, and complete with a miniature breakdown of every NFL QB’s 2024 season, we are finally finished my reveal of my 2024 QB tier list, and I’m left with just a few takeaways:

1. For all the talk in the Mahomes-Allen-Burrow era of the AFC’s dominance of the QB position, 2024 actually represents the first time one conference has monopolised the top three positions since the extraordinarily QB weak 2017 season, when Tom Brady, Philip Rivers, and Alex Smith (yes, Alex Smith, I told you it was a weak league) locked out the top three for the AFC.

   
   If we choose to ignore outlier seasons in terms of leaguewide QB play, because I do not believe 2024 to be an outlier, no individual conference has locked out the top three positions since Philip Rivers, Tom Brady, and Peyton Manning represented the 2010 AFC. Very rarely is the great QB play concentrated into one conference the way it was in the AFC in 2024, and a lot of good that did, because none of these three QBs represented the AFC in the Super Bowl anyway. Speaking of which…

2. It truthfully did feel like the importance of the QB position declined leaguewide in 2024. In my opinion, since 2004 changed the game, QBs have never felt less important than they do now. I discussed the patterns of top five QBs missing the playoffs in the Joe Burrow entry, but another way to analyse this is to look through the lens of the two Super Bowl QBs.

   
   With 12th ranked Jalen Hurts playing 9th ranked Patrick Mahomes, the combined ranking of the two Super Bowl QBs in 2024 was 21. This is extremely poor. Most seasons in the post-2004 era, the combined rank of the Super Bowl participants is less than ten. In 2023 it was eight. In 2022 it was four. 2021 felt like an outlier when sixth ranked Joe Burrow played seventh ranked Matthew Stafford, for a combined ranking of 13, but that’s got nothing on this year.
   
   2017 is a push, when first placed Tom Brady played non-qualifier Nick Foles, but if we don’t include that, we haven’t seen a QB matchup this bad in the Super Bowl since Peyton Manning alone ranked 33rd in 2015, and if we want a matchup where both players contribute to the relative ineptitude, like happened in 2024, we have to go all the way back to 2012, when 15th placed Joe Flacco played 17th placed Colin Kaepernick in the big game.
   
   It’s possible that 2024 could be a rogue outlier, but combined with everything else we’ve seen (less leaguewide QB touches, more elite QBs missing the playoffs, etc.) about QB play slightly waning in importance in the last few years, it feels emblematic of something more. The 2024 Eagles became the first team to win a championship without a top ten QB since Peyton Manning and the 2015 Broncos, and maybe we’ll begin seeing that more as we move forward.

3. The NFL is thick at the top with elite QBs, but thin in tier two at the moment. The ranks of the elite QBs are difficult to break into, but the final spot in the top five has been laying wide open ever since Patrick Mahomes abdicated it. In 2023, Brock Purdy swooped in and took it. In 2024, it was Baker Mayfield. In 2025, who knows?
   
   If a QB is ever looking to get a top five season onto his record, now is the time to do it. Will anybody think of Baker Mayfield as a top five QB when his career ends? We’ll see, but I think most would agree the answer to that question is probably not. Nevertheless, he swooped into the extremely weak final spot in an extremely strong top five. If he can find a way to do it again, all of a sudden he will have the same amount of top five finishes as Jim Kelly, who was only able to find two, due to spending his best years in the extremely strong late 80s era, and his prime not going long enough to reach the extremely weak 1993-1995 period that followed, during which even Jeff Hostetler got a top five finish.
   
   Very rarely does the NFL find itself in the position of being thick with tier one guys, but thin on tier two guys, but that’s exactly where it finds itself right now. In previous years, I’ve felt comfortable extending the ‘Great Starters’ tier back to 12th and sometimes even 14th place, but in 2024 it started at only tenth and contained only six people, two of whom (Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold) were outside the top 32 within the last three years, and one of whom was a rookie. That’s really thin.
   
   I’m not sure what exactly this means, but it’s interesting to take note of. In terms of elite players at the QB position, the league is set, but in terms of great ones, it’s a little meh at the moment.

Those are my main three takeaways from the list this year. First, the extent to which the AFC monopolised the league’s very best QBs was rare, and went underrated, although to the NFC’s credit, they did have everybody from 4-7 to compensate a little bit. The second thing is that QB play tended to correlate with final result less in 2024 than it had in years past.

This is true at the top, with the league’s second (Derek Carr) and third (Joe Burrow) best xEPA/Play finishers barely being able to scrounge a .500 record, and it’s also true at the bottom, with negative xEPA CJ Stroud finding a winning record again, Justin Herbert punching well above his weight for what feels like the tenth time, and even Anthony Richardson leading the Colts to a 5-5 record in his ten true starts.

The final easily noticeable thing is that the league is thin at the QB position. Not thin at the top, but thin in the upper-middle. I suspect this is why the 2024 season had an unprecedented for the new millennium 44 qualified QBs, as there were many fewer unimpeachable starters in the NFL than there would be in a typical season, leading to much more change for the sake of change, which has become a common theme in the QB position in the 2020s.

At last, I have said my piece. 24000 words later, I am done talking about the league’s QB play in the 2024 season. I would like to thank everybody for making it this far. This article is seminal for my publication every year. It’s also the longest, and the very most work for me. Restacks and likes and such are good for business, so do that if you’d like, but you guys know how much I love a good conversation. If you’d truly like to reward me for my hard work, the best way to do so is to leave a comment. Any comment.

If you’re an Anthony Richardson defender and want to talk about how him being ranked 41st is ridiculous to you, do that. If you’re sad about the Derek Carr situation and want to discuss how a league already a bit weak in the 5th-15th area losing its second place xEPA/Play finisher is liable to make things even worse, do that. If you want to remark on how the number one player on my QB tier list has now failed to win the MVP twice in the three years this writeup has gone on this particular Substack page, go for it. I would just love to chat with you all about this.

At that though, it’s finally time for me to stop talking. My statement on QB play in 2024 has been made. Thank you all for making it this far with me, and apologies this took so long. You guys know I’m not one to make low effort list articles, and compiling all this info about every single qualified QB in the game was a big project this year. Much bigger than I expected.

Regardless, it’s over now, and once again, thank you all for reading.