NFL starting QBs ranked by analytics before 2026 season

Earlier this week ESPN released its QB rankings from a poll of coaches and scouts around football, which caused quite a stir. On the one hand it was a lesson in the disconnect between fans and people inside football, while on the other it was difficult to understand the rubric by which the people were judging. Now we’re diving into the fray to release our own QB rankings ahead of the 2026 season, judging every quarterback in six key areas required for success.

It’s important to understand the methodology before we dive into the rankings themselves, as well as the tiers that each QB belongs in.

• Offensive Impact: This evaluates how much of a team’s total offense came directly from a quarterback’s passes and running game. Functionally how much they individually influence a drive.
• Accuracy: An expression of pass accuracy, with drops removed and evaluated bad throws adding a penalty
• Explosive plays: A combination of air/ground plays which gained 20+ yards, combined with Yards per Attempt in the passing game
• Scoring: Total touchdowns in both the passing and running game
• Lack of turnovers: Interceptions combined with fumbles lost
• Clutch: A factor of Game-winning Drives, 4th Quarter Combebacks, as well as touchdowns scored on “important drives” in which teams were within one score of each other
• Tilt: These are plus/minus points (fewer than five total) to mitigate aberrant seasons. Without a tilt Patrick Mahomes would have been a middling QB based on 2025, while Malik Willis would be the No. 1 QB in the NFL.

How scores are factored: This is a cross-the-league evaluation of each quarterback vs. their peers. A score of five operates as the league average, with scores of 8-to-10 being significantly above league-average, and 1-to-3 being significantly below league average.

Known problems with this model: This scoring format naturally hurts quarterbacks with fewer starts in the NFL, because these numbers pull heavily from the 2025 season, with the tilt being evaluated based on career body of work. In reality, Cam Ward and Jaxson Dart should be higher in the rankings — but we just don’t have enough to tilt their rankings up. Similarly, Shedeur Sanders had one of the worst runs as a starter not just in 2025, but in NFL history. This gives him a lot more wiggle room to move up, but it can’t be reflected at this time.

If you’re feeling mad about these rankings, or think that they are wildly wrong — I get it. I’m a Panthers fan and think Bryce Young is better than 21st in the NFL, but this is just what the model shows. At the end of the day this is all about seeing where a QB is right now, and the beauty of football is that models are consistently thrown out the window as players surprise us, in good ways and bad, throughout the course of a season. We’ll obviously learn more when football begins once more.