Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Kevin Cole explains how to analytically rank all-time quarterbacks

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Matthew Coller is joined by analytics expert Kevin Cole of the Unexpected Points newsletter. He talks about his GOAT rankings for quarterbacks and discusses where Randall Cunningham, Fran Tarkenton, Daunte Culpepper and even Kirk Cousins land on his list -- plus, how he determines No. 1 ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Purple Insider is presented by Oakley. Express yourself. Build a look that's made for you. When you wear Oakley, there really is more than meets the eye. Try it for yourself. Oakley is not only the best looking, but the best quality. So head on over to oakley.com for more information today. Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here and returning to the show from the Unexpected Points newsletter. One of my favorite people, that's why he's back. Kevin Cole, what's going on, Kevin? How are you? I'm doing good and getting the off-season content, which I'm sure we'll talk about here.

I prefer to tackle a project, again, this this QB goat thing that I'm doing rather than report on the most inconsequential detail of what someone is posting on Instagram, perhaps this week and what it's and what its implications may be. But, you know, to each its own, I think people may actually be more interested in the latter. Yeah. A common bit on the show that I just created recently is taking pro football talk headlines and then putting a blank at the end and so it's like you know Sean McDermott says he can't wait to blank and then the other person has to guess what it is that he can't wait for and it's like see the defense like well okay I mean you're everybody's trying but I I guess, you know,

when you're just taking the most inane quotes and making them into headlines, then they're quotes that you didn't even get yourself. It's pretty tough. Pretty tough times out there in June. But, yes. Now, so you're actually putting in the summer effort into your QB Goat Series, in which you have created all sorts of fun charts and graphs to count down the top quarterbacks of all time using an analytical process. And I just think,

you know, it's a fun way to look at it, trying to take the numbers and tell us what the numbers say about the greatest quarterbacks of all time. So maybe we could talk about the process of doing it first, because even though I am not a general fan of power rankings with teams that can be a little bit boring, I do like ranking stuff. And on my newsletter, I've been ranking stuff as well this week. So tell me the process that you decided upon to rank your goat quarterbacks. Yeah. yeah. So I'm going to have a contrarian opinion that rankings are good in the same way, actually, it's kind of similar to post draft where I was saying instant grades on the draft are good, but the problem is most people's

rankings and most people's post grade drafts and a lot of that sort of stuff are not good, right? That there's not really a good process. Like if you have a good process, what's more important than, you know, power ranking teams, if you can really figure out who the best teams are and have a real process, which you can expect, you can inspect and really get into the details of, and maybe look at, it's not totally opaque. It's not just, uh, you know, today I'm thinking this is the best quarterback in the NFL. And then two weeks from now, okay, today i'm thinking this is the best quarterback in the nfl then two weeks from now okay now i'm thinking this is the best quarterback in the nfl so so that's what i'm trying to do with this series and i think if you have a a season to

go on there's probably too much information and too many moving parts and integrating all of that to figure out rankings for quarterbacks in one season, let alone the process of what I'm trying to do here, which is going back all the way through what I'm calling the modern era of the NFL. And modern is a pretty broad definition here, going all the way back to 1947, a year after the NFL was reintegrated at that point. And then looking at all of the value contributions

for these quarterbacks over time and then sorting them in a list and a rank. And I think this is when, you know, quote unquote, analytics can really be helpful. It's not correct, but good luck finding someone who's going to watch the film for every single one of these quarterbacks and be able to remember everything, sort everything, and then give you a rank ordering for how good they are. It's going to be a much more difficult process. So I think this is kind of the best way and a conversation piece for at least

looking at guys who are forgotten. Sometimes guys who may be overvalued and thinking about that as part of the process. So you didn't PFF grade Johnny Unitas's passes to Raymond Berry. No, no, I didn't do that. That would be an interesting exercise. I guess you'd probably don't have the all 22 for some of that. You might have some grainy footage there. But I mean, thank God for resources like Pro Football Reference that we have all of this

data going back in time. And we have a general formula. I know that the big thing is like expected points added nowadays. We don't really have that that going back in the past but we do have a proxy for passing efficiency which is adjusted net yards per attempt which is a little bit more intuitive it's just yards per attempt you get a bonus for each touchdown of 20 yards you get a uh you get turnovers or minus 45 uh yards and then you take the sacks out of that, and boom.

You have a metric then also which you can error adjust and then line all these quarterbacks up against each other and look at their value. And that's really the primary metric I'm using. Of course, adding rushing value into it also. Right. Yeah, I think that that's always the hardest part when we're talking about error adjustments. And I like to look back at these things all the time. And even if you go back like six or seven years, the numbers are different than they are right now. So imagine what they are if you're going back 20 years.

But it's really funny that there are sort of these pockets of decades where you see some like peaks and valleys. And I'm sure that this is very difficult to adjust for but it goes through every you know kind of quarterback's career but I was thinking about like the the late 90s and like what the greatest show on turf and what the Randall Cunningham Vikings kind of did to you know the 90s quarterback play because 90s quarterback play outside of a handful of guys like Steve Young and Dan Marino is pretty rough I mean there's not a lot of great statistics I remember when I first got I think it was like a John Elway football card and I turned it over and I looked at it I was like oh I bet

his stats are amazing John Elway's amazing I was like the guy has a 70 quarterback rating like this doesn't make any sense. One of the things is that, you know, that is hard is that touchdown number. And of course, over a long period of time, the greatest quarterback is going to have touchdown numbers. But I remember sort of laughing at John Elway, where the running backs would steal touchdowns from him. He was like their entire offense, but they'd have some running back with like 12 touchdowns.

Like this guy doesn't even do anything except for run it in at the goal line so it is a it is a tricky venture like I like your process of making it kind of simplified to you know the adjusted net yard stat but I do think about sometimes how how difficult it is with eras even based on the way that some of these teams used to play in comparison to how they do now. Yeah, when I'm looking at the errors, I have like a rolling five-year period that I'm looking at for efficiency and then for volume. So players also get more credit if they're passing at a higher volume than the league average or vice versa.

So when it comes into play, you know, things have obviously, as you mentioned, changed a lot over time. I mean, primarily, if you look at the components of passing efficiency there's yards per attempt and honestly that hasn't changed a ton over time in fact some of the the the highest yards per attempt of all time are guys like you know auto gram or old quarterbacks from from a very long time ago it's changed somewhat the how how it the components of that have changed it's a higher completion percentage and a lower yards per completion, which has ended up taking that up slightly over time. So that one is touchdown percentage. Not a huge change necessarily there. The big change really comes in interception percentage. And the fact that that has gone dramatically down so far. SAC percentage also has gone down generally over time and I think that's also the

interesting point when you look at counting stats and comparing people's forever we'll have people you know who bring up Peyton Manning's rookie season right but I think he had more interceptions than touchdowns to say hey our quarterback's not that bad because over his first two years and they'll squish those together for Peyton Man, even though I think he was second in offensive rookie of the year voting to Randy Moss. And he was AP two, I think second team all pro and is in his second year quarterback. But you look at those two stats, you can almost throw any new quarterback nowadays. And he looks roughly similar to that. So I'm trying to make adjustments to that where we're players and where teams can maybe

get a bit of a contextual bump that they don't deserve is obviously having good teammates, being able to get into the playoffs a lot and things like that. And if you're at the front end of an era where things are changing, so maybe the 49ers and how they kind of redefined passing offense and then had a little bit of a jump on people. Maybe Dan Fouts also and and the system, the air choreo system that he had there, maybe gets a bit of a bump because he's ahead of the curve when those sorts of things happening. So those can happen. I don't put those explicitly into the formula, but it's more of let's have everything be explicit to what's happening.

And then we can think about those contextual adjustments. Right. Yeah. And if you try to adjust for absolutely everything, you will just adjust your brain to insanity because you just never you just never get there because it's like, well, you know, Kurt Warner. I remember when Kurt Warner was with the Giants and it was a horror show and people were like, oh, it must have been that Mike Martz. And then he goes to Arizona and then he's great again. And this has happened to many quarterbacks where, yeah, usually if you're a great quarterback, you have some things that are going your way. Like no one is out there with an AAF team, just throwing for 5,000 yards and 40 touchdowns just doesn't happen. I mean, drew breeze with Sean Payton, but how are you supposed to peel those things apart and say, well, it was, it was more Sean Payton than drew breeze. No way, because Ian book didn't do it well with Sean Payton. So it's yeah, that's, that part is

impossible. So you kind of have to simplify the process this way. So what I wanted to do with this, cause I don't want to spoil because your, you know, your list has not gotten all the way down to the top, but I want to throw some quarterbacks your way with obviously some viking spin and we could talk about overrated underrated properly rated versus what you found uh so we'll kind of take our general ideas of what people think of these quarterbacks and then we'll discuss them and i think a great place to start is dante culpepper because dante culpepper has always had a lot of intrigue from this show. It was a short run, but a spectacular one, but a volatile one. And he's a guy that kind of gets debated with Vikings fans. How good was he really?

There was a time not too long ago, people on the internet debating him versus Kirk Cousins. And, you know, Dante pops up on your list. And I'm like, wow, the guy only had like four seasons. So maybe we can talk about whether Dante was underrated because it was so long or kind of overrated because he had the one peak 2004 season. Like, what did you find with him? Yeah, I mean, it's hard because we talk about the overrated, underrated. Although I do like to have those discussions sometimes too, even though I think they can be a little inane sometimes.

Normally people think of overrated meaning like bad as opposed to versus like their actual perception and then underrated meaning good. So for Culpepper, it probably depends on who you're talking to. I mean, I would say for the general like NFL fan, it's probably forgotten somewhat, like the highs that we're talking to. I mean, I would say for the general like NFL fan, it's probably forgotten somewhat like the highs that we're talking about here, especially in that 2004 season where,

I mean, his numbers were off the chart. Good. It just happened to be that same season. Peyton Manning had the most efficient passing season of his career, like by far. So think about that, like the most efficient kind of regular season passer had his best season by far. So it trumped what Culpepper was able to do that year. But I think what also gets maybe a little bit underrated is he had obviously extreme rushing value that came into that. And perhaps his attachment to Randy Moss has him being somewhat underrated because you have to think about the fact that the year before Culpepper got there, you know, we talk about people's careers and these peaks and valleys. I mean, Randall Cunningham was basically playing at an MVP level very, very late in his career when Randy Moss was there, too.

So perhaps that that weighs against it a bit. I mean, I would say he's underrated, especially because the peak was so high there, especially in that 2004 season. And he had the injury, right? So he had an injury where it was fairly catastrophic on his knee. His rushing production definitely went down because of that. But even more so, I think we find that it can affect people's passing production when they are this physical force who can just throw off tacklers

by time in the pocket, things like that. Once that becomes somewhat compromised, it becomes a problem for people like Culpepper. Yeah. And I mean, when we do the underrated overrated, it's really based on your perception of what other people think. So that's what makes it fun is that, you know, we can't really take a poll, what every person thinks of every quarterback. So it's kind of just your general. I think that historically he'll kind of go forgotten, but maybe doesn't deserve to go forgotten because of the short burst of greatness.

And what is so interesting about that 0-4 season is that Moss was banged up that year and did not have his best year, and yet Culpepper. And the other thing too, Culpepper was the whole offense for that team. There wasn't like an Adrian Peterson at that time to hand off to, or even a Robert Smith to hand off to. It was just Dante. He was running for five, six, 700 yards. And this is another part too,

that when we talk about quarterbacks and quarterback stats, and I'm glad that you've implemented rushing as part of this, because for someone like Elway or someone like Cam Newton, we just pull up the passing stats and you go like, I don't know. I mean, why was this guy as big of a star? And then you forget about the 50 other touchdowns that he scored or all the other yards and all the other first downs. I started thinking about this with, and I don't mean to get off on a tangent, but I'm leading into something with this,

but the Daniel Jones getting more first downs than Delvin Cook this year, it just really stuck with me. Like, yeah, that, that running game for the quarterback really matters over the long term. And I wonder what you thought of Randall Cunningham. You brought him up. His 98 season is one of the great seasons in NFL history by a quarterback. But I've always felt like the injuries that were in Philadelphia kind of slowed him down. People's general perception of all these running quarterbacks, they don't win Super Bowls and so forth. I feel like that's hurt Randall in the long term. And I don't know if he has a Hall of Fame case. I think he's one of the best quarterbacks of all time. I don't know where you landed on him.

Yeah, you know, Cunningham is someone where I would give contextual, like a bump up from what my rankings are because of, and this is one thing that I think is not always the best thing to look at but I do think if you look at awards whether it's MVP voting first team second team all pro that gives you at least some bit of evidence in a similar way to kind of how I like to use PFF grading along with advanced stats it gives you some maybe contextualish sort of thing there and what's interesting about him is his efficiency was never that great passing until later on in his career because dude took a lot of sacks. I mean, he took a lot of sacks. And I think that is something that tends to be underplayed in people's minds.

We've become a lot smarter now about the fact that it's probably more on the quarterback than it is on the blocking so if you look at a stretch run here he led the NFL in sacks taken and sack yards five out of seven seasons to start the first eight years of his real career I mean I'm talking about really when he was starting here when he was playing a lot there he was leading that every single year now two of those seasons though he was second in MVP voting during those years and those are years where his passing efficiency was not really close to getting up to the level which would have had him ranked second there now he was rushing probably not as much as he would be rushing in today's game so i think it's combining those things now what happens later on in his career when he came to minnesota when he was much uh older in his career his you know his sack rate

which he actually had a 25 he led the nfl and sack rate one year when he only had 200 uh pass attempts in his second year um the season he led the nfl in sack yards but he was well above 10 in many of these seasons and then when he came to minnesota later it was under five percent in that great season that he had in 1998 so it's really being able to weigh all those things like how much of that was him needing to do that because he did not have the surroundings around him talking about being a one-man show there so i would bump him up but his ranking is more in the 60th sort of range for me as opposed to getting into the top 50 when you look at the actual components which are going to include the sack losses in there folks i know you have heard me talk a ton about my Oakley sunglasses

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but the best quality as well. Head on over to oakley.com for more information today. Oakley, express your style and build a look that's made for you. Yeah, that year where he had 72, I think, sacks. That was where Buddy Ryan got a little galaxy brain. It was playing, I think, Ron Jaworski on first and second down and Randall Cunningham on third down, which, I mean, just imagine if somebody did that today,

they would be fired pretty much instantly if they were running out a separate quarterback for third down. And the whole idea was just run around and make a play, and he got sacked a ton. yeah that definitely hurts him I think the trailblazing element to Randall Cunningham in my mind makes him one of the best uh and probably the fact that they didn't know what to do with him in that era and then I think in the early 90s they they make a coaching change they start throwing some shorter passes and he has a little more efficiency but it was kind of way too late for that um so that goes under the like one of the best quarterbacks you've ever seen play if you watch him have one of his best games it's one of

the most mind-blowing things you've ever seen but the career year in and year out probably doesn't add up to necessarily being on this list how about about Fran Tarkenton? We talk about Fran Tarkenton more on the show than probably most shows about their quarterback from the 60s and 70s, but that's the last time the Vikings have had a true franchise quarterback. I think Fran also goes under the underrated. When he retired, he was the leader in a lot of all-time categories. Again, when you go back and see 3,000 yards passing you're like huh but 3,000 yards passing back in the day was pretty impressive the running element the scrambling element I think was an important part of his game that

most guys didn't do back then and he sure won a lot uh with a great defense so what do we think of Fran and it's okay if your numbers say overrated it's okay to say it on the show, but I tend to think underrate. Yeah. I mean, okay. So I will give a little context to how the numbers work, maybe a little bit more for the methodology. So there is like a career value. So it looks at their value over average by the number of standard deviations they've kind of accumulated over the course of their career during the regular season, which is roughly a third. Roughly a third is their peak value. So their five best seasons. Giving an extra weight because like if you're going to win a Super Bowl, you need to have like an extraordinary season. Grinding along the whole way is maybe not the best there. And then there's a third for playoffs and the playoffs are your career accumulation of passing standard deviations over average and how it's weighted is if you have like a full playoff run, it could be worth almost, you know, a half to three quarters of a season's worth of more extremes up and down so i have the playoffs rated fairly like heavily in

this calculation probably more heavily than i would say like who's good or not because you know oh smaller sample we shouldn't wait as much but let's face it like the playoffs matter for winning super bowls and it matters a lot i kind of found that aligns a lot with maybe people's perception on there so if you're going to look at the the the like the regular season number for Tarkenton it's in the top 10 of all time as far as what he was able to accumulate obviously he held like every counting stat passing record by by the end of his career passing at a very very high volume also at the end of his career continued on being highly successful into his mid-30s despite the fact that he was a mobile type of quarterback.

For his peak number, it's inside the top 15, but not quite as high. Again, he had more of the longer career. The issue for him really comes in the playoffs, and he had lots of, well, you could say a decent amount of opportunity with 11 playoff starts but his passing efficiency he had 3.5 adjusted net yards per attempt in the playoffs versus almost 5.5 in his career and just well under average so that's what really knocks him down in my in my standings you could say it was bad luck you could say it's a smaller sample size all those sorts of things but generally there was just too much of that in the playoffs that did not give his team a chance to realistically win and win these super bowls that they could have had there and that's what knocks

him down in my calculation but if you wanted to weigh the playoffs less than he would easily be you know within the top 15 if not bordering on the top 10 quarterbacks of all time yeah vikings fans are pretty aware that the playoffs are problematic for them. Yeah, yeah, that's true. The Super Bowl against the Raiders, the Super Bowl against the Steelers, those did not go well for Fran Tarkenton. So that's understandable. I just think, like, if he had just one, then it would be talked about Fran Tarkenton as one of those all-time great quarterbacks.

But not getting the one does kind of knock them down the list and i agree with your methodology though i mean uh the greatest quarterbacks at least have their moments in the playoffs like it's funny that eli manning only won playoff games in the two seasons but he sure won a heck of a lot of great playoff games i mean going to lambo going to dallas like the two superbow bowls versus brady but uh we kind of forget about the other losses because who cares his best moments were really really good well i mean i i have eli i mentioned eli in here i'm sorry eli that i had to i had to throw him in there because he's like so far out of the top 50 range for someone who is,

I don't know, maybe the discourse is changing a little bit on him, but I think he was like a lock for going into the hall of fame in people's opinions, maybe five years ago. I don't know if that's still the case now. Yeah. I mean, but I, I mentioned what you said, I'm looking at their playoffs overall. Yeah. It was four one and done appearances for Eli Manning outside of that. So then it kind of hints into the fact of, you know, how much of this is luck, how much of it is clutch, how much of it is whatever. I mean, at a certain point, I'm just going to say, I'm going to let the results speak for themselves.

And then, and then you can, you know, others can debate as far as what adjustments need to be made based upon that. Yeah. Eli is an interesting one for me though, because I just have so much respect for what he did in those playoff runs. Again, like if you're here following the Vikings franchise and someone goes to Dallas, goes to Lambeau, wins these road playoff games and then beats Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. And I know it's not a one man game, but man, I mean, the San Francisco game, he has to beat them. They were like unbelievable football team. And yeah, luck plays into it. Alex Smith didn't play that well their defense was great all those things but gosh man you do something

like that like I imagine if somebody did something like that in Minnesota they would have a statue the next day so I totally understand why people love Eli as much as they did and I also there's a Nick Fole there's a Nick Fole statue in Philadelphia is there a Nick Fole statue I believe so I think the um the the Philly special or whatever isn't there like a statue for that I think yeah so it's it's deserved you pull off the Philly special you beat Brady in the Super Bowl you deserve it you deserve a statue what's interesting about Eli Manning is that he threw a bleep ton of interceptions during his time. And when you go back and look, and I looked at this using the PFF data, the dude's average depth of target was really far down the field. Like he was, he was gunning. if you had a keen Knicks or if you had well, why am I forgetting Mr. Salsa man for a while there? Victor Cruz was awesome there. And then of course,

Odell Beckham when he came in and like, there wasn't a ton of success necessarily for Eli or even the team, but man, there was, there was some great fantasy, get the wide receiver one for for the giants and you were doing well in fantasy. But he had that run where like stylistically it was different I think from other quarterbacks it was almost like he was playing like he was still in the 80s with the amount he was throwing down the field and I think that that impacted his interception numbers but he was often in the top

in a lot of different categories except for it wasn't that long he has a very weird career to me because you can just draw a line on his pro football reference page like pre-washed post-washed and if he just retired at if he did like Andrew Luck and just said all right I'm good we would be like what a career that this guy had and uh you know I think passing was a little harder at that point so I don't know sometimes that's a part of it and I know that you tried to take the five-year peaks but he's always interesting for me where he just played way too long and if he just stopped after the second Super Bowl or maybe a year or two longer we might think of him different yeah yeah I think it's it's it's totally fair for Giants fans in particular to hold him in high

regard and have that warm spot for him because he was there for a very very long time if anything i feel like and it was interesting you know they had the whole kerfuffle where they brought in i guess it was gino right for him for a while and then it went back and everything else like i'm fine letting these guys kind of play a little bit too long if they want to play maybe it hurts their reputation i guess ben roethlisberger might be another guy we may have hurt his reputation a little bit or even drew breeze by playing a little bit too much there at the end, but I'm fine with that, with that sort of stuff. One, one thing I wanted to mention is another thing that I think about in part of the analysis, even though it's not explicitly part of it is, you know, the NFL 100 team that they came out with a number of years ago, the a hundred greatest players

of all time. They also had finalists for, for for the award so if you look at quarterback they had 20 like modern era finalists at 22 total but some of these guys are playing in like the 1930s and uh targetton was one of those finalists so one of the top 20 that they had on this list along with other guys who did not make the the top nine kind of modern era finalists like steve young and others so so he did make that list so I think there is a recognition at least in some quarters that he was a really a top quarterback of all time yeah no that's true that's why the underrated overrated thing is hard to figure out but I think it's maybe only underrated just because if you had the Super Bowl it would be his name would get brought up all the time um as as much as one

brings up names from the 60s and 70s uh well let's talk about kirk because kirk is on the list uh at the back end of course but on the list well he's slightly outside the list the list is the top but i did i did mention him on there because you know that that'll get people excited that's right yes okay right slightly outside the list but uh but mentioned nonetheless yeah so here's an interesting question who who's like a similar quarterback to kirk cousins career-wise because this is another one that's kind of strange the guy doesn't start for a number of years, comes in and has really good statistics. No playoff success outside of the one win against the Saints where he did play very well. But that's it for him. And he's always had pretty good efficiency.

It's not a super long run. And we can kind of put it. I mean, almost put a bow on it right now, unless what a pro football talk says is true. And he goes to the 49ers and then wins a Superbowl next year with them or something. But we kind of know what Kirk Cousins is for his career. And now he's at the latter portion of his career. I kind of use the hall of fame monitor by pro football reference to find some comparables you get kind of like a Mark Brunel or a Trent Green kind of quarterback I wonder who you think historically he comps to yeah I mean okay I'm just trying to like bring up some some ranking sorting so I'm looking guys I'm gonna look here at people who are around 50th of all time in career regular season value which is where he

pops more than anything else just accumulating over all this this period of time I mean like him or not you know he has a he's he's missed I think one game due to injury during this entire stretch with Kobe with Washington and with uh Minnesota and he has you know higher passing efficiency than guys like stafford and other sort of guys so somewhere in that 50th maybe a little bit better range they're looking at a peak that's maybe between 50 and i don't know 70 ish and then looking at someone who has underperformed a bit in the playoffs because cousins ranks 67th out of the top 100 out of this list of the top 100 overall quarterbacks as far as playoff

contribution and you mentioned Mark Brunel so he's someone who shows up on there but Brunel is a little bit worse in each sort of of category I mean another player who shows up who did not have the same career arc is Carson Palmer you know Palmer was the number one pick Palmer was someone who's fairly successful I don't think he's that successful during his career, but at least he was starting a lot and he didn't have to work his way up the bench here for others. Trying to look at some other ones here. There's not a whole lot.

Craig Morton. I'm not really even that familiar with Craig Morton, but he shows up on the list here. So yeah, it's just, it's hard. I think Brunel is probably a good comp who people can think about but it's kind of like more of like a rich man's version of what brunel was able to do and maybe brunel if he played on better teams you know non-expansion teams he could have also been in that sort of range yeah uh brunel also played in an era where they love to run he played

with tom coughlin who really loved to run so he he, and he, and those years, those Jacksonville years with Jimmy Smith, Keenan McCardle, it's a short run. I mean, they weren't together for that long where they were peaking that, but their peak was like a 14 and two season and they were awesome. How about like a Jeff Garcia? I think the one that people talk about a lot now is Derek Carr might be in that conversation. I think that Ken O'Brien comes up on the hall of fame monitor like players like that and I think that all of those are kind of fair like a very good quarterback who deserves to be somewhere in the range of this list but doesn't really have that breakthrough type of season or moment uh despite eight fourth quarter comebacks i don't know where

that goes in the in the list of weird things that you run across statistically but yeah i think that there's a like maybe a garcia comp in there yeah you know i actually have garcia quite a bit higher believe it or not and he's someone who is well first of all maybe you would want to put in this like 49ers discount or something for the passing efficiency but he's someone who you know very very strong passing efficiency in a number of different seasons I think what gets lost when we're talking about Garcia is almost 2200 total rushing yards during his career in 26 touchdowns so like he gets a big bump from that rushing production which largely goes unnoticed uh i think in his career so so he's a bit higher for me um one thing i'll mention about cousins which i thought was interesting i was i was looking

up uh justin net yards of it for attempt their career number for all of these different players he has the at 6', he has the exact same number as Russell Wilson for his career passing efficiency is, is Kirk Cousins. And Wilson's been an efficient passer. Obviously Wilson has the playoffs and the rushing bump to get them up there, but that just gives you an idea that like Kirk Cousins has a pretty good number for passing efficiency over his career. Yeah. And I think that I made this crack last year before Wilson was horrible for the whole season, but if you take away his legs, he's just Kirk, right? I mean, because I know that there was a lot of let Russ cook and look how efficient he is passing, but

Kirk is a nice test case for if you push the gas pedal down for more pass attempts, the efficiency goes down as well with Kirk Cousins. And I think that Russell Wilson might be some of that as well. Also, there's a reason why Pete Carroll wanted to run play actions and throw down the field with Russell Wilson all the time, like Mike Zimmer did with Kirk Cousins, rather than sort of playing point guard with him because of some of the shortcomings and the sacks are a big part of that that hurts him but if you put if you put turbo legs on Kirk Cousins you probably can win the Super Bowl right like we've always thought that it's with Kirk it's

always so interesting because it's it's it's always about what he can't do that has held him back and it feels almost unfair to bring it up all the time because it's not like he can get faster but it's like this is one of the reasons why you're not higher considering how accurate and good at throwing the football you are yeah yeah i mean i think the the playoff exit probably against the giants last year was like was a pretty perfect kirk cousins like encapsulation if you look at the game he completed basically% of his passes while averaging about seven yards per attempt, which isn't fantastic, but it's pretty good enough to like get the win. And it's especially plenty good enough to get the win when he had zero

turnovers and he took zero sacks during the game also. So it's kind of a very, very clean game, but then just wasn't there to like make the play to win the game and of course the fourth and eight you know to check down discourse and everything else it kind of just perfectly encapsulated this where you know you you know i i do my nerd dave gettleman thing and i enter it into the model but it says oh kirk cousins great game he had a great game there and then everyone watches that game they're like oh kirk cousins did it to us again and we lost yeah i will say that uh kevin o'connell deciding to throw a pass to kirk cousins in that game um it maybe should get brought up as much as fourth and eight

but you're right though that was kind of the like this is why they haven't gone anywhere even though he played terrific in that game and by the way get a get a stop, feel free to get a stop. Don't give up 31 points. Don't give up 31 points to a Giants team. That's really, I mean, just look at the skill positions, like look at that, look at that roster. So yeah. Something called Isaiah Hodges ripped them up to paraphrase our friend, Eric Eager. But so let's, let's talk about the goat goat part of this of this. Again, don't want to spoil the list and tell everyone who's like number one, but I think that there's a couple of dudes who are just above the rest. And I want to know how we deal with modern quarterbacks versus the dudes who are above the rest.

So we're talking about the Johnny Unitas Joe Montana Dan Marino like players that are talked about all the time is up in that true elite of the all-time elite echelon how do we take somebody like I mean is Mahomes already in that discussion how do we take someone like Aaron Rod, which I'm sure Vikings fans don't really want to hear more about, but guys who have played in this era where passing is just bananas and a lot of quarterbacks are good, but still there's some all-time great quarterbacks. How do we compare them to the kind of established, everybody agrees, we're talking about overrated, underrated, everyone agrees. Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, John Elway. Like these are some of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. So how do you kind of manage that when you're comparing all of them? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it just goes down to

the methodology and just being explicit about it. So like era adjusting the efficiency, which has obviously gotten better over time. then again having these volume adjustments where i'm looking at like the average team's number of pass attempts i discount it by about 10 to say you know every starting quarterback isn't throwing every single pass for every single team and then where do they combine on that and then i have that as kind of being an upwards or downwards factor now one of the bigger either tough things of doing is figuring out the playoff contribution, because nowadays we're talking about, what is it, 14 different teams that can make the playoffs. You could have four games, every single playoff series, whereas for Johnny Unitas, it was basically the NFL championship game, and that's it for some of these years. So I make adjustments based upon that. And I think what it could end up doing is really magnifying the value of one or two games for some of these older quarterbacks.

Sometimes it's good. And I guess Montana is not not old, old, but he does have some years where he went into the playoffs where they have a more contracted playoff picture and playoff run there where it gives him a lot. It gives someone like Terry Bradshaw a lot and a big bump up here. I'm trying to think of who else is another guy's Bart Starr gets a huge bump and he's someone who really played in that era back in the day. It actually hurts Johnny Unitas quite a bit. Believe it or not, he made it to the championship a lot playing on the Colts team, but did not

perform that well in there. And versus more recent type of quarterbacks and even someone like Tom Brady doesn't get maybe as big of a playoff bump as some people would think because of the fact that his overall playoff efficiency was OK. It wasn't it wasn't fantastic, you know, but again, having all those opportunities, maybe he fits into something also kind of this Unitas sort of case, having so many opportunities to get to the championship. You're going to get a lot of championships if you have well-timed performances. So it's just trying to properly weight all those things together. And I don't just have the modern guys at the top. There are some modern guys at the top.

Montana makes it up there. Unitas makes it up there. Patrick Mahomes is an interesting one. I'm probably going to have to do a post for him after this just to talk about where he ranks right now because he has had such a strong run to the beginning of his career. All right. Let's go just real quick. Some rapid

fire overrated or underrated because we're just talking about guys here. Since Matt Ryan's done playing football, is Matt Ryan underrated or overrated? I mean, he'd be underrated by this methodology. I think he's, I don't think he's a hall of famer. I don't think he's going to get into the hall of fame,

but career numbers wise, it's very, very strong there. Julio Jones factor maybe plays into it. That's sort of the Tony Gonzalez Gonzalez Roddy White for a while but no but by purely by the numbers he belongs there there's probably no hall of fame quarterback who just had nobody receiver who had you know Malcolm Jenkins or well I got into it like a Matt Ryan versus Philip Rivers discussion in the past and I don't know that was one thing I had somewhat of a differentiating factor I mean Antonio Gates is great but it really helps to have Julio Jones, I think, playing that many snaps for you. It's like an automatic yards per attempt boosting mechanism. Sure doesn't hurt to check down to

LaDainian Tomlinson though, as far as your efficiency. Let me tell you why check downs are not really, let me tell you about running backs. Well, I mean, I don't, I don't have his numbers up, but I mean, Marshall Falk or LaDainian Tomlinson could get like 12 yards of reception or something. So, you know, it is a little different for them. I was going to ask about Rivers though, if Rivers is overrated or underrated. Well, he would be criminally underrated

according to this methodology, even though it doesn't give him much credit for the playoffs. But he's one of those ones where he fits into this box where when you're playing in the same era as, you know, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, maybe a little, you know, some overlap, obviously with Aaron Rodgers,

all of these guys who are like top, top, Drew Brees. It's just really hard to say I stacked a lot of like top two, top three type of seasons. But when you're just stacking top five seasons over and over and over again and passing efficiency, it's really he would he would be one of the most underrated, I would say. Yeah, and I just aesthetically, it was some of the like weirdest and ugliest looking football, which I just love, like, you know Like when the guy's just a gunslinger and didn't he play a playoff game

with an ACL tear or something? I mean, who can't like, and one of the most robbed, robbed by kickers, robbed by that fumble in the playoffs against the Patriots, like just didn't really deserve his fate. Great trash talker also, so clean, always clean trash talker. How about, one of my favorites is Steve McNair. I've always thought he was underrated in the longterm kind of goes a little bit forgotten. Um, but I, I think that he falls under the underrated category. Yeah, no, he, he came in this honorable mention sort

of category. So right outside of the top 50, he was 54 in there. Definitely underrated when we talk about regular season. I mean, he's one of the few MVP quarterbacks, although he shared it with Peyton Manning to not be in the Hall of Fame. Not good in the playoffs though. So he really gets hurt by my methodology in the playoffs, which is a little bit weird because they did make that Super Bowl run,

but he had some very poor games in the playoffs, which ends up hurting his overall status and keeps him out of the top 50. Yeah, I also think that if I'm remembering correctly, they had to play the Ravens a couple of times in the playoffs, which may have hurt them as well. But yeah, no, definitely had outside of that trip and outside of being this close to winning a Super Bowl.

Very slow start to his career also, which I don't think would happen nowadays. You know, that's just kind of dual threat type of quarterback, number three or two overall pick. I don't know. He was right up there at the top and then he barely started for the first few years of his career.

So that really took away an opportunity to accumulate value. That might be somewhat of an error adjustment that would be reasonable is to say nowadays we're if you're start if you're sitting for more than a season you're like you're you're basically your career is over and you might as well you might as well go to the xfl or something uh you trey lance and um but back then it was something that was fairly common for even some of these higher picks. Cole, Trey Lance should go to the XFL.

I can see it on Pro Football Talk now. Okay, two more quick ones. One thing I've gotten into arguments about is Troy Aikman. I know his regular season stats aren't great, but the funny thing to me is, again, that like Emmitt Smith took all the touchdowns. He could pass the ball all the way down to the one yard line and Emmitt Smith would run it in. And, you know, great team. Of course, it's a great team. It's not a long run for him. His great years are pretty short. His playoffs are unbelievable at times. I don't know where he stands on the list, but I think that he is deservingly rated as one of the all-time great quarterbacks.

Yeah, I mean, according to these numbers, he's going to be maybe overrated if you're considering him. And he was part of this finalist list of the top 20 quarterbacks of all time. And it comes down to exactly what you were saying as far as volume is concerned, number one. He just never had the volume during the regular season. Didn't even really have the volume that much in the playoffs he had really really strong efficiency in the playoffs but didn't really have the volume and the touchdown thing you mentioned is critical i don't have the exact numbers in front of me but if you look at his touchdown percentage versus equivalence for guys who are just as efficient passing the ball it's way way lower and that hurts them by my formula where you get 20 passing yards for every touchdown and yeah you know your your typical uh

i'll i'll besmirch aaron rogers a little bit your typical one yard aaron rogers touchdown maybe shouldn't count as much you shouldn't get as much extra credit for that as you do from a little bit further out but he was just not getting those those touchdowns those real cheapies that most quarterbacks are getting during their careers. Now, here's an interesting thing. I'd love, I'd love to hear the answer to this. Maybe if you ever do it, you could tell me what if we just gave quarterbacks, all the offenses touchdowns,

like if we just took because they are most responsible for getting to the end zone outside of like 75 yard touchdown runs, which don't happen that often. If we gave the quarterback credit for all the touchdowns you go back and look at the Dallas offenses they're like number one number two number three every single year like well I think Aikman was kind of behind that but you know there was a different era they ran a lot the other one I won't go into the whole rant but uh another guy that i saw absolutely maul the buffalo bills and super bowls so i have to have respect for last one is just stafford i think stafford has always been a very highly debated quarterback i kind of wrote one time about how stafford and cousins

cousins beats him in almost every statistical category but there's something to stafford where he could just up and have the most ridiculous throws of all time and win and then he did in the Super Bowl with a no-look pass but uh the accumulation to me has never been all that impressive I don't think he has a Hall of Fame career but uh what's your takeaway yeah I mean this is we used to have the like offseason Stafford someone would always tweet about him belonging in the hall of fame, like clearly belonging in the hall of fame. It can't just be like, maybe he should be in the hall of fame.

It was like clearly. And I would, I would always laugh those off pre 2021 before he came to the Rams. But you know, the super bowl run was huge. I mean, for me, it was almost twice as valuable as any other season that he's had. And it was the first time that he really got into the top two, three, as far as his passing efficiency in that season. He's been an accumulator, accounting stat guy. His career adjusted net yards per attempt is a tenth of a yard worse than Derek Carr

over his career. So that gives you an idea of how he's been for passing efficiency, though, at a very, very high level. The problem with him is he, you know, he followed up his 2021 when the surroundings were all perfect and had this great season. And then the bottom fell out last year as far as when things weren't going well around him. And of course, an injury-marred season, but I'm not sure if the concussions like affected his play. It was just bad up until there.

So I think he needs you know at least one more really strong season um if you really got a deep playoff run or even to the super bowl again that would be something i don't really see that happening with this team but he's someone who barely cracks the top 50 now because of a lot of accumulation but i don't think he'll ever get really high enough to get well into the 40s or thirties to say like, put the stamp on them for a hall of famer. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think that he's a guy whose peaks are incredibly exciting and, and could be incredibly good at times,

but also we can't ignore the wild interceptions. We can't, you can't ignore how many games he played while he's banged up. I get toughness is a thing but also if you're constantly being banged up and you're playing the second half of seasons poorly you're not really helping your team win and I thought there were times where he deserved criticism in Detroit for not getting them like decent teams over the top yet of course proved what the best version of him can be in the super bowl i mean he had some bad defenses but i think like this idea that he didn't have anything offensively at least is countered a

bit i mean their past blocking grades for pff was in the top 10 six different times during that like 10-year stretch that he had there and you know calvin johnson for almost half of his drop backs he was playing with golden tate prime golden tate for almost half of his dropbacks, he was playing with Golden Tate, prime Golden Tate for about 45% of his dropbacks. Marvin Jones, who was, you know, pretty good at the beginning when he first got there for maybe another 40% of his dropbacks. I don't think he had like the serious, serious lack of talent. It was more the defense that was bad and kept him maybe out of some playoffs. But he did in 2021 what was really like a massive missing element, not only the Super Bowl run, but just saying,

hey, if you have the talent to be one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, have a full regular season where you're a top two, top three quarterback. And he did that. So I have to give him credit for that. Yeah, no doubt about it. And, you know, of course, McVay and Cooper Cup and Odell Beckham and, you know, whatever.

It's the number one pass blocking offensive line in the league a great setup, but that's, that's a lot of quarterbacks. That's how it works. So anyway, the unexpected points newsletter, unexpected points on sub stack, go check it out. It's a fantastic. I mean, that's why you're on the show all the time. Cause you're always writing super interesting analytical stuff uh and so make sure you go check that out as always and i'm sure it's uh what at kevin cole on twitter so um triple triple underscore at the end i know it's embarrassing i gotta figure out what to do with that i mean i was gonna do nfl but i don't know i can't do the nfl i can't do the nfl thing so i gotta i got i've just left it and just have given up on this one i gotta got to find – supposedly, like, Elon was going to start attacking some people.

They're just sitting on these names. So I got a lot of people on my list. I got at Kevin Cole, at Kevin underscore Cole, you know, at Kevin Cole underscore all these guys. I want these guys. Get them off of Twitter, Elon. Give me some priority for Twitter followers. Right, and they're just pictures of like some random Jaguar player and they just like favorite random,

you know, political tweets or something. It's, yeah, it's a strange world out there, but whatever. If you search Kevin Cole, you'll eventually find you. Anyway, well, thanks again for your time, man. It's a really fun discussion and we'll do it again soon. All right. Thanks for having me.