Greatest Quarterbacks of the Super Bowl Era

Top QBs of the Super Bowl Era
Rank	Quarterback	Years	Total	Top 5	JAWS
50	Vinny Testaverde	1993-2001	22.67	22.67	22.67
51	Daunte Culpepper	2000-2004	22.17	22.17	22.17
52	Ron Jaworski	1978-1983	21.21	20.38	20.79
53	Neil Lomax	1983-1988	20.59	20.59	20.59
54	Jim Plunkett	1971-1986	20.59	18.09	19.34

How The Ranking Is Compiled

Every Saturday morning, I do a sports talk radio show in Rockford, Illinois, on WROK radio called the Stateline Sports Hour. The show's producer and cohost is a Green Bay Packers fan and therefore believes Aaron Rodgers could cure cancer if he wasn't so busy being "the most talented quarterback ever."

I challenged that assumption on one of our shows. What makes Aaron Rodgers more talented than, say, Steve Young? Young was a far better runner and arguably the most accurate thrower. He led the NFL in completion percentage five times, including four in a row. If winning takes talent, there are several quarterbacks who were on teams that won more, including Joe Montana and Tom Brady.

In terms of just arm strength, I've never heard of Rodgers having an arm in the class of Dan Marino or even Cam Newton. The "most talented quarterback ever" tag seems to be a social media phenomenon where one commentator said it and it's been copied again and again.

This site is called the "100 Greatest ..." but for this ranking I'll be listing the 54 greatest quarterbacks of the Super Bowl era - one for every Super Bowl so far.

In today's football world, everything is broken down statistically and no position is broken down more than quarterback. I'm not going to compete with the quants and come up with a new metric. I'll use existing metrics.

The four that I'll use are:

The NFL's quarterback rating. This metric goes back to pre-Super Bowl days. A weakness is that running doesn't factor into the system and neither does the amount of yards lost to sacks.
Pro-Football-Reference.com's Approximate Value ranking, which puts a single number on the seasonal value of a player at any position from any year.
Football Outsiders' Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement (DYAR). This compares the performance of each player to a replacement-level baseline level player. DYAR is a total stat and favors workhorse players that don't miss games.
ESPN's QBR Ranking, which creators believe is a more accurate ranking than passer rating because it factors in rushing yards and sack yards lost.

Instead of trying to create a single number, I'll give points to quarterbacks who finished in the top 10 for that metric. So if a quarterbacked ranked first in ESPN's QBR rating, they get 10, second gets nine, third eight and so on.

Of course, DYAR is only calculated back to 1986 and ESPN's QBR only goes back to 2006. So Roger Staubach is only able to get points in two of the rankings, while Tom Brady can get points in all four. To even things out, I'll take the total points of the QB and divide them by the total possible points.

In 1977, Staubach was the top ranked quarterback in Approximate Value and second in quarterback rating. That means he collected 19 points out of a possible 20 so his regular season score in my system is 9.5

In 2018, Drew Brees was third in Approximate Value (worth eight points), first in quarterback rating (worth 10 points), second in DYAR (nine points) and second in QBR (nine points). So Brees collected 36 out of 40 points, which equates to 9.0 in my system.

Quarterback reputations, though, are made in the playoffs. Unfortunately, only two of the metrics have playoff stats - quarterback rating and ESPN's QBR. In 1977, Staubach had highest quarterback rating of any quarterback in the playoffs so he earned five points (I only gave points to top five QBs in the playoffs). So Staubach's total score for 1977 was 14.5 (9.5 + 5.0).

Drew Brees in 2018  was third in ESPN's QBR playoff ranking. That was worth three points, but he wasn't top five in the passer rating. So his average score between the two was 1.5 and his overall score for 2018 was 10.5 (9.0 + 1.5).

That's how I calculated the year-by-year scores. To come up with a final ranking, I used the popular JAWS ranking in baseball. First I added up the total points for a quarterback's career. Then I added the points from his top five seasons. Since you only get points if you finish among the top 10 quarterbacks in the league, there are several QBs on this list who didn't get points in even five seasons. I added those two together and divided by two.