Written by Jason La Confora at CBSSports.com
A year ago I engaged in one of the ultimate exercises in futility, trying to loosely rank the 32 likely NFL starting quarterbacks into tiers . I sought to find natural points of delineation between clusters of passers.
One spring later, I’m going to double down on the matter and take a look back at last year’s list and adjust it accordingly. I’ll be grading myself, more or less, and taking stock of which QBs are rising and which have taken a tumble, perhaps for good. As a reminder from a year ago, this isn’t a 1-32 ranking, per se, but more of me trying to find seven firm categories that apply across the board, and then seeing which quarterbacks make the most sense within them.
I opted to limit it to 32 quarterbacks again this season. There are five additions to the list from a year ago — Dak Prescott, Jimmy Garoppolo, Mike Glennon, Josh McCown and Brian Hoyer — and six departures: Ryan Fitzpatrick, Blaine Gabbert Robert Griffin III, Teddy Bridgewater, Brock Osweiler and Jay Cutler. I opted to leave Tony Romo within the top 32, because I still believe he is a starting quarterback in 2017, somewhere. And by somewhere, I mean you, Houston, which explains the absence of Tom Savage or, gulp, Brandon Weeden from this list.
I also don’t have any of the Browns’ current quarterbacks on the list — sorry, Osweiler — because I am holding that spot open for Garoppolo. Frankly, I’m very comfortable with Jimmy G on this list rather than any number of stop-gap backups like Matt Schaub, Chase Daniel, Case Keenum, etc.
If you currently are without a contract — Cutler, Fitzpatrick, Colin Kaepernick — at this stage of the offseason, you aren’t on the list. I went back and forth on adding Trevor Siemian to the ledger, but in the end I stuck with Paxton Lynch, who represented the Broncos here a year ago. All things being equal, I expect Lynch to win that job eventually this year, although, for the record, I would put Siemian in Tier 5 (guys, veterans and place holders) if he were included.
Some of the biggest risers include Matt Ryan, who bounced back in 2017 with an MVP campaign after one of the worst seasons of his career. Matthew Stafford, Ryan Tannehill and Tyrod Taylor showed me enough to get a nice bump up a few tiers as well. As I wrote a year ago, I agonized over putting Taylor in at least Tier 4 a year ago. On the other end of the spectrum, Joe Flacco and Carson Palmer took a tumble, and while I was only lukewarm on Blake Bortles to begin with (he didn’t crack my rising stars category), he plummeted, too.
By and large I feel pretty good about my maiden voyage with this list a year ago and mostly there are cosmetic changes, like shipping out a journeyman at the bottom of the list in place of another journeyman who has now secured that starting job. I think I’d give myself a solid B, overall, for the 2016 effort. Below I break down the tiers again and show where I differ from a year ago:
Tier 1: Bona fide franchise quarterbacks
2016: Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, Russell Wilson, Cam Newton
2017: Brady, Rodgers, Roethlisberger, Wilson, Newton, Drew Brees
I struggled with where to put Brees a year ago and after much hand wringing I barely slotted him in Tier 2, with concerns about Father Time catching up to him and how much the Saints had to throw the ball from behind and what that might mean for his health moving forward. But he should’ve been in this group all along and he showed it again in 2016. I’m giving Newton a mulligan because he had no offensive line and other teams were allowed to assault him, beginning with the opener in Denver a year ago.
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