QB Rankings: 8 tiers of starters, based on how they will do next season

Seaside Bonus: How bad of a situation are the Seahawks in compared to the rest of the league?

I’ve done enough articles like this by now to know what to expect from the reactions. I write or imply something about a quarterback that is not a popular narrative, I get told that my opinion must be wrong or ill-informed because it is not the commonly held mainstream opinion, I say (or think to myself) that I’m aware of the gap between “What they say” and “What I believe.”

Let’s skip that part this time.

I am willing to admit my mistakes, but let’s wait until we know they are mistakes. I have an open door policies on any old articles or predictions of mine that you want to re-visit.

My unpopular opinions have ranged from “Cam Newton won’t have a long career” to “Jared Goff’s Super Bowl run is the beginning of the end of his Rams career” to “Tua Tagovailoa should not be a first round pick” and I probably crossed over the braggadocios border long ago on what I’ve gotten right so I will spare you the rest. Surely I can’t be trusted to tell you the whole truth about what I’ve gotten wrong.

(Just kidding, but let’s keep Paxton Lynch out of this.)

With three months left to go before the beginning of the season, there is plenty of time for the NFL quarterback landscape to change prior to Week 1. Given the tenuous situations with Baker Mayfield and Jimmy Garoppolo, I expect this list to look a little bit different by the season.

But while they are not on this list (I am only addressing quarterbacks who are presumed starters as of June 10), Mayfield and Garoppolo would not rank much higher than the supposed quarterbacks they will be replacing as starters. If they worth thinking that highly of them, I assure you that an NFL team would have made a move on them around the time that Mitchell Trubisky, Carson Wentz, and Marcus Mariota changed teams to become potential starters.

If Sam Darnold was your team’s starting quarterback, don’t ya think you’d do just about anything to get a significant upgrade to him if one was out there?

I have eight tiers of NFL starters and I do not think that all of them will end up as legit starters next season. There are a few situations, like the Seahawks, where we only have a little bit of information on the competition. Pete Carroll has said that Geno Smith is leading because of his experience with the team, but that the competition is close enough for Drew Lock to close the gap.

Think about what the means for Geno Smith, to only barely ahead of Lock, one of the worst statistical quarterbacks in the NFL over the last two years. Think about what that means for Lock, to be behind Smith.

Yes, that means Seattle is in my Bottom Bottom Tier, the lowest tier you can be in. I’ve separated each tier into four-man groups. The order within each group does not matter. I consider them fairly interchangeable.

There will also be a few eye-popping surprises, though maybe less surprising if you’ve followed Seaside Joe and know my feelings on Zach Wilson already. That’s because I’m basing these rankings on my EXPECTATIONS—either for positive development or negative regression—of next season, not on what has happened in the past necessarily.

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