2024 was supposed to be a down year for college quarterbacks entering the 2025 NFL Draft. After reading this piece, I'm not sure I'm seeing that, particularly when you include Sanders in the mix. With the recent positive performance of rookie quarterbacks entering the NFL, it appears that the NFL's adoption of familiar collegiate passing schemes and designed dual threat QB runs are allowing for easier integration into the NFL.
Not to be overly provocative, but are we entering a period where the position is becoming so well developed for the NFL that we will soon see an oversupply of quarterbacks entering the NFL?
With 4 to 6 solid NFL ready QBs each year entering a League for about 15 openings at the position (and an average career arc of 15 years or so), that paradigm shift is not particularly hard to see coming. When you consider the additional solid quarterbacks taken at the bottom or outside of the first round - Lamar, Purdy, Prescott, Hurts, Levis, O'Connell/Minshew, Cousins etc. - the arithmetic gets very interesting very quickly.
Economics could play an important part. Surpluses tend to drive prices down. With price of quarterbacks currently exploding relative to the cap (now more than 25% at the top), teams might look to embrace the cheaper collegiate pipeline every 5 years or so and use their cap for other impact pieces. Beyond Mahomes, the lack of Super Bowl success from these high priced "franchise" quarterbacks is alarming. You need to go all the way down to #14 - Matthew Stafford - to find success in this group. Hurts and Burrow were on rookie deals - and playing with loaded rosters - when they touched the Super Bowl.
In the late 90s it was common to read that retirements at the position would result in a crisis from a shortage of high performing quarterbacks. 25 years later, it seems the exact opposite is happening.
Notre Dame just missed it; Sam Hartman had 74.3 PAR last year.
I'm realizing I never defined how the points added metric works -- it's set so that this value is zero across all FBS QBs by changing the coefficient on (passes + rushes):
The coefficient was -0.4253 last season. And then once we have PAA, we get PAR by adding back in a constant of 0.1133 per (passes + rushes), which is based on ESPN's QBR value over replacement figure.
Then finally, the schedule adjustment takes SRS SOS, multiplies by team games (to get total points of SOS above/below average), by 0.25 (the share of overall team EPA that is attributable to passing offense in CFB since 2005) and by the QB's share of all team QB plays (to get the passing SOS adjustment scaled to that particular QB) before adding/subtracting that number from the raw PAA/PAR.
Interesting - is that ESPN QBR value over replacement solely based on college QBs? I always have a hard time defining in my head what replacement level - and college is even trickier I think
I definitely hear you, though, on the difficulty of defining what a QB's replacement level is. Football Outsiders used to define it as the level of a backup, which is explicitly higher than for sports like the NBA/MLB/NHL (where it's a freely-available free agent/waiver-wire type). Maybe you could argue those are one and the same in many cases for the NFL and especially college, where the backup is just as often some terrified 19-year-old kid as it is Caleb Williams coming in for Spencer Rattler or Tua coming in for Jalen Hurts. But it's just a fundamentally fuzzy threshold for a sport where backups play so rarely, particularly at higher levels.
2024 was supposed to be a down year for college quarterbacks entering the 2025 NFL Draft. After reading this piece, I'm not sure I'm seeing that, particularly when you include Sanders in the mix. With the recent positive performance of rookie quarterbacks entering the NFL, it appears that the NFL's adoption of familiar collegiate passing schemes and designed dual threat QB runs are allowing for easier integration into the NFL.
Not to be overly provocative, but are we entering a period where the position is becoming so well developed for the NFL that we will soon see an oversupply of quarterbacks entering the NFL?
With 4 to 6 solid NFL ready QBs each year entering a League for about 15 openings at the position (and an average career arc of 15 years or so), that paradigm shift is not particularly hard to see coming. When you consider the additional solid quarterbacks taken at the bottom or outside of the first round - Lamar, Purdy, Prescott, Hurts, Levis, O'Connell/Minshew, Cousins etc. - the arithmetic gets very interesting very quickly.
Economics could play an important part. Surpluses tend to drive prices down. With price of quarterbacks currently exploding relative to the cap (now more than 25% at the top), teams might look to embrace the cheaper collegiate pipeline every 5 years or so and use their cap for other impact pieces. Beyond Mahomes, the lack of Super Bowl success from these high priced "franchise" quarterbacks is alarming. You need to go all the way down to #14 - Matthew Stafford - to find success in this group. Hurts and Burrow were on rookie deals - and playing with loaded rosters - when they touched the Super Bowl.
In the late 90s it was common to read that retirements at the position would result in a crisis from a shortage of high performing quarterbacks. 25 years later, it seems the exact opposite is happening.
I’m surprised Notre Dame didn’t make the top QB lost list - but how do you define “replacement level” in this context?
Notre Dame just missed it; Sam Hartman had 74.3 PAR last year.
I'm realizing I never defined how the points added metric works -- it's set so that this value is zero across all FBS QBs by changing the coefficient on (passes + rushes):
PAA = Coef*(Pass Att + Rush Att)+0.408314*Completions+0.028618*Pass Yds+0.791174*Pass TDs-1.265725*INTs+0.069731*Rush Yds+1.387276*Rush TDs
The coefficient was -0.4253 last season. And then once we have PAA, we get PAR by adding back in a constant of 0.1133 per (passes + rushes), which is based on ESPN's QBR value over replacement figure.
Then finally, the schedule adjustment takes SRS SOS, multiplies by team games (to get total points of SOS above/below average), by 0.25 (the share of overall team EPA that is attributable to passing offense in CFB since 2005) and by the QB's share of all team QB plays (to get the passing SOS adjustment scaled to that particular QB) before adding/subtracting that number from the raw PAA/PAR.
Interesting - is that ESPN QBR value over replacement solely based on college QBs? I always have a hard time defining in my head what replacement level - and college is even trickier I think
Yeah, it's specifically based on their college "QBPAR" (not sure if that was ever public-facing, I did this research all a few years ago for this BYU story: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-byu-became-qb-u/)
I definitely hear you, though, on the difficulty of defining what a QB's replacement level is. Football Outsiders used to define it as the level of a backup, which is explicitly higher than for sports like the NBA/MLB/NHL (where it's a freely-available free agent/waiver-wire type). Maybe you could argue those are one and the same in many cases for the NFL and especially college, where the backup is just as often some terrified 19-year-old kid as it is Caleb Williams coming in for Spencer Rattler or Tua coming in for Jalen Hurts. But it's just a fundamentally fuzzy threshold for a sport where backups play so rarely, particularly at higher levels.