QB Rankings and the Brock Purdy Secret Hidden in Plain Sight

I Think I Found Kyle Shanahan's Real Quarterback Superpower

With NFL Training Camp suddenly here, the league-sourced top-10 lists that get fanbases whining are out. More so than the other sports, football produces a lot of insider-informed, prestige media-published rankings. One reason there’s a demand for this is the sport is known to be complicated. We get that the professionals grasp football on a level that we never will, so there’s an inherent curiosity over how their views might differ. Here’s one such quarterback ranking from ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler.

And here’s one blanket rebuttal to such lists, posted by sports writer Scott Kacsmar:

I’ve been very consistent for a long time about not overreacting to the last NFL season in ranking QBs. That’s why I had Manning, Brady, Brees, Rodgers, Ben as the top 5 for half a decade in the 2010s. Once a QB is established, they rarely play significantly different skill wise. Any statistical gains or losses are usually some combo of health, teammates, change in coaching, schedule, etc.

Kacsmar is correct, but the wrinkle I’d add is that NFL culture doesn’t overreact to the latest stats. In my view, they overreact to what they think are the stats, like how pre-Moneyball baseball analysts made assumptions on the basis of RBI variance and what not. Even more confounding, NFL culture also reacts to what they think the stats should be, on a hypothetical neutral field.

The Fowler list, love it or hate it, has almost no correlation to how statistically efficient NFL quarterbacks were in recent seasons. This is common among such lists and serves as built-in gripe for us whiners in the Bay, and those whiners out in Green Bay, who respectively point out that Brock Purdy and Jordan Love get judged differently than quarterbacks who play less efficient ball. Since becoming starters, Purdy and Love have been top 10 in QBR each season, but are generally less respected in rankings relative to their output.

Oh well, that’s life. Purdy and Love will have hundreds of millions in earnings to console themselves with. But I find the whole dynamic rather curious. This is America’s most popular sport and it broadly doesn’t believe in data. This is charming, in a way, but also sort of insane? In other sports, we’ve accepted the idea that the “eye-test” is often bunk, and must be checked against statistics. As I’ve said, the NFL is stuck in a pre-Moneyball stone age. Because of that, people who know infinitely more about this sport than I do produce rankings that I’ve got good reason to doubt.

Since fandom will both make you a biased homer, and also lead to analytical discoveries, I want to dive further into the Curious Case of Brock Purdy. I’m not going to argue against his place in rankings, seeing as he missed nearly half of last season. Instead, I’ll explain why his analytics dominance tells you something about a) what 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan values and b) what NFL conventional wisdom doesn’t value enough.