TLDR:
- Mahomes and Purdy are the gold standard for QBR, post-2006.
- Russell, Gabbert, and Zach Wilson … not so much.
- QBs who met QBR-inspired standards for immediate, consistent competency: Mahomes, Purdy, Matt Ryan, Garoppolo, Kap, Dak, Watson, Herbert, Tyrod Taylor, and Luck.
- Keenum, Dalton, and Derek Carr took the longest
- Over 80% of successful QBs had a good 5-game stretch in their first season.
- Young QBs meeting this standard: Stroud, Jayden, Drake, Nix.
- Young QBs not meeting this standard: Bryce, Richardson, Caleb.
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AppropriatelyLDidR:
“We’re breaking free, soaring, flying, there’s not a star in heaven that we can’t reach.”
- Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez, battling over control in the High School Musical apotheosis
Quarterbacks are not so different from high school protagonists in increasingly dated – more optimistically, retro – cultural touchstones. Some have that sunkiss’d Troy Bolton main character energy. Others effuse the desperation of ancillary also-rans like Sharpee.
How can we disentangle the bright stars of the firmament from the black holes that subsume entire franchises into their inescapable orbits?
QBR! The authoritative answer to everything, if you are an intellectually lazy lemming like myself. The question we pose: Which QBs experience sustained success? For the ones that do, how long does it take to achieve it?
Now then, we need a definition.
Question: What is sustained success?
Answer: Any 20-game stretch where the QB achieves an average QBR of 60 or higher. 20 games gives us allowance of a little more than a season of consistency, and as it turns out, the 60-cutoff splits the qualifying QBs in our dataset pretty evenly in half between the ones that do achieve it, and the ones that don’t.
Since our starting point is 2006, that means we sadly have to kick out a handful of QBs who were in full stride prior to that, since they will skew the data. That means we say goodbye to luminaries, no less, than *mmmeehhh* the GOAT himself.
So we’ve kicked those guys out of the club.
Now, armed with our definition and our Madame Defargian registry of exclusionaries, who then are the Successful QBs?
Among the post-2006 era, Mahomes and Purdy achieve this 20-game QBR milestone, and lead the pack with average career QBR. 40 other QBs likewise meet the standard, and for the most part, there are not many names on the list one would deem a “bust”.
You find the usual suspects of Rodgers, Allen, Lamar, Matty Ice, Luck, Rivers, Chef Russ, 9-God, and Burrow. No surprises there. Then the secondary tier of fine gentlemen who you wince when giving them a $50 million dollar check, but certainly you can’t accuse them of underachieving (Cousins, Kyler, Goff, Baker, Tua, Dak, you know the lot of them).
Watson for his own complex reasons, and guys like Winston, Wentz, Mariota, Bortles, Freeman, and (heretofore) The Prince that Was Promised don’t quite fit the bill of “successful franchise quarterbacks”. Others like Tyrod, Jimmy G, and Keenum were not prototypically homerun destiny-changers, though to be fair they were not drafted with that expectation. Bye and large, seemingly the “20-60” mechanism does a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff, whereby we debate with Always Sunny-esque clarity what that actually means.
Next: the fail-sons we isolate in the contagious diseases wing of the hospital:
Not a modicum of competence to be found. Though maybe that’s a bit unfair to The Sanchize, and if we included 2024 data, Darnold would finesse his way off of the list.
To find Russell and Kapono in the Top 3 is no great surprise; maybe a bit of a surprise to find Gabbert at the silver spot, and though “colossal shipwreck” would not be an unfair designation for his Jaguars tenure, per Wikipedia he did literally save a bunch of people from a shipwreck, so we shall not speak ill of him.
Gradkowski, Mills, Edwards, Glennon, Ponder, Weeden, Mitchy … a murderer’s row of false sirens who, perhaps for a half, fooled you into believing they could be the saviors long foretold in the ancient texts, but when the beers wore off, in the cruel light of morning you were left feeling used, abused, and alone.
We have separated the haves from the have-nots. Among the haves: how long did it take the QBs to reach their first 5-game stretch of average QBR greater than 60? 10-game stretch? 20 games?
The Shanahan troika (Purdy, Jimmy-G, and Matthew Ice), Kap, Dak, Watson, Herbert, Taylor, Luck, and Mahomes all accomplished the 5-Game, 10-Game, and 20-Game feat in minimal time.
It maybe says something about the nature of the above charts that immediate success does not guarantee superstardom: to wit, only Mahomes, Luck, and Ryan are bona fide franchise quarterbacks to accomplish all three feats in optimal time. However, it does at the very least seem to be a necessary precursor to competency.
Keenum, Dalton, and Carr required the most career starts to accomplish these feats.
Fitzy is kind of funny, in that he required only his first 7 career starts to get the 5-Game stretch badge, but 91 starts to get a 20-Game stretch under his belt. Fitzmagic inhabits an ethereal plane we can only hope to understand.
So these were rankings: il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. There’s also the moderately inquisitive side of me that would dare to ask: how quickly should be expect a QB to demonstrate consistent competency, if he has any hope of being a successful QB?
Well, the Italian who plucked himself from relative to obscurity by making himself shorthand to future Excel enthusiasts, comes to our aid now: Pareto!
By which I mean, what x% of QBs required y games or fewer to have a 5-game stretch of average QBR over 60?
The takeaway that interests us: over 80% of “successful” QBs had a 5-game stretch with average QBR over their first 16 games.
More plainly: if you are going to be a successful QB in the NFL, you better show signs of it within your first season’s worth of starts.
The latter phrasing of it is of course a brutal over-generalization, but it is the main takeaway of this barefoot romp through the snake-infested ravines of Appalachia.
With those formulations in mind, which young guns are succeeding in meeting that standard? Which are failing?
The Young Guns: Bryce, Richardson, Stroud, Caleb, Jayden, Drake, and Nix.
The Standard: Do they at any point have a 5-Game stretch with an average QBR of 60 or more in their first season of starts?
The Brief Explanation: The base dataset only includes through 2023, so basically excludes all of the Young Guns. I went ahead and added 2024 to the dataset for the purposes of this analysis.
The List of Good and Evil:
This finding is really what motivated the whole she-bang: Is Caleb Williams flashing enough signs of consistent competency to inspire the belief that he will be a successful QB in the NFL?
The short answer: no.
Of course, there are a few caveats here, chief among them is that I don’t believe that conclusion myself. Were I betting man, one of those cool cats that can effortlessly employ poker terms like “too rich for my blood” and “down the river”, I’d lose a shirt and then some in betting he will still be not simply a star, but a superstar.
But to date, Stroud, Jayden, Drake, and Nix look to be the future of the NFL. Bryce (probably correct), Anthony (definitely correct), and Caleb (sigh) do not.