Re-ranking QBs from 2020 NFL draft

09.12.2022, 20:10 espn.com

Joe Burrow. Justin Herbert. Jalen Hurts. Tua Tagovailoa. With apologies to Jordan Love, the quarterback class of 2020 is woven throughout many of the key storylines in this NFL season. Three of the four passers are key figures in the MVP race. Two have broken out with spectacular junior seasons. All four are in line to get massive contract extensions this offseason, with a billion dollars likely to be sprinkled between a few of the league's most promising young signal-callers. Just one question: If the league was going to draft these quarterbacks again -- knowing what it has learned over the past three seasons -- in which order would they go? What makes these quarterbacks even more fascinating is how they appeal to different arguments and elements of evaluation. Burrow is the winner who is undefeated against Patrick Mahomes and actually has made it to a Super Bowl. As a passer, Tagovailoa is having the best 2022 season of the bunch, leading the league in most efficiency metrics. Hurts is the most versatile of the four and the one who has made the most dramatic improvement since being drafted. And Herbert -- whose Chargers team plays Tagovailoa's Dolphins on Sunday night -- might be the quarterback you would draw on paper if you wanted to construct the perfect passer with prototypical arm strength, accuracy and toughness. You already know all that. I know you want me to order these quarterbacks, and I know you'll probably get mad at my ranking. That's fine. You could literally rank them in any possible order and defend it with some semblance of credibility (although it's tough for me to see a universe in which Burrow is taken fourth). If you're ranking these guys on who'd you want for one drive in 2022, you might have one answer. If you're debating who you'd want for the next 10 years? It might be another. Let's lay out the pros and cons for all four before I make my choice. I'll go in order of where each signal-caller was drafted in 2020, which means we'll start with the guy who closed out the biggest game of Week 13. Jump to a section:Burrow | TagovailoaHerbert | HurtsHow the QBs rank now Pros: Accuracy, toughness, franchise-altering confidence, clutch performanceCons: Propensity for sacks, lack of arm strength The last two meaningful plays of Sunday's dramatic win over the Chiefs were a microcosm of Burrow's 2022 season. On second down with 2:05 remaining and a 3-point lead, the Bengals spread out the Chiefs and asked Burrow to pick a side. He started the play by looking right, where slot receiver Tyler Boyd had a leverage advantage on the slot corner. But he wisely saw that Chiefs outside corner Joshua Williams was looking to trap Boyd's quick out and looked the other direction. He was able to get backup tight end Mitchell Wilcox open at the sticks, but there wasn't time to make a clean throw. He was scrambling amid pressure from George Karlaftis, and Chris Jones also began to close in, so Burrow slid down for a sack. It might be a reasonable play if the clock had been running, but since the play started at 2:05, it was going to stop immediately after the whistle for the two-minute warning. It was a bad sack to take on second-and-4 when a conversion wins the game, and while the protection wasn't perfect, he had enough time to get rid of the football. Mahomes and Josh Allen probably make off-platform throws to Wilcox in that window. On the next play, he erased any memory of that snap. Facing a third-and-11, the Chiefs briefly showed pressure and then sent four pass-rushers. The right side of the line failed to deal with a twist and let interior lineman Mike Danna through relatively cleanly. In a situation where nearly all of the league's 32 quarterbacks -- including some very good ones -- would bail from the pocket, get happy feet or stare down that pressure, Burrow just threw a slant into a teacup for Tee Higgins on what was the game-winning conversion. Don't think you can say enough about this pass from Joe Burrow. Third-and-11, game on the line, free rusher in his face. Burrow doesn't panic or try to escape and delivers a rope to beat excellent coverage. pic.twitter.com/uneTIJRplK— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) If it were up to him, he likely would line up on every snap out of the shotgun in empty formations. Nobody is better at seeing a spread field and picking teams apart than Burrow, who compensates for a lack of prototypical arm strength with excellent accuracy and decision-making. He has a preternatural ability to get the offense in the right play and pick the correct matchup at the moment of the snap. It has won Cincinnati games at times, with the Jaguars' victory early in 2021 as the most obvious example. Burrow has thrown for more yards out of empty backfield formations since the start of last December than anybody else, and it isn't really close. He gets plenty of opportunities there, but his completion percentage over expectation (CPOE) out of empty since the beginning of last season is plus-6.8%, a figure topped by only Hurts. The only quarterback who has averaged more yards per attempt out of empty over that stretch is Tagovailoa, who doesn't do it nearly as often. While it gets lost in the wake of more dramatic improvements by Hurts and Tagovailoa, we've also seen Burrow take strides over the course of his professional career. Including the postseason, he has now made 42 starts. Owing both to his inexperience as a rookie and the time it took him to recover from a significant knee injury, we've seen him improve notably as a passer between the first half of his career and the second: Improving by nearly a yard per attempt might not seem like much, but that would be the difference between Burrow ranking second and 13th in yards per attempt this season. He has also made those improvements count by getting much better in the red zone, where his QBR has jumped from 21st in the league last season to third in the NFL this season. Having Ja'Marr Chase and Higgins helps, but Burrow has kept his numbers up with Chase missing November due to a hip injury. We've also seen him make strides with what had been his biggest weakness and the most obvious point of concern for his professional future. Burrow's sack percentages keep his QBR down and eliminate drives for the Bengals. In 2021, the offensive line was blamed for his sack count -- and understandably so, given the personnel. The Bengals swapped out most of their line for the 2022 season, but when the sacks continued to mount over the first two weeks of the season, he took some of the criticism. (In hindsight, he also played the Steelers with T.J. Watt and the Cowboys with Micah Parsons, which is going to heat up any passer.) Sacks are a quarterback stat, even if the offensive line can be to blame for some or many of those takedowns. Burrow's line last season wasn't up to the rest of the offense's standards, something we saw as the Bengals dissipated in the second half of the Super Bowl against the Rams. Both last season and this season, though, he deserved some of the blame for those sacks. His desire to extend plays and stand tall in the pocket was a problem on second down against the Chiefs and a virtue on third down. Quarterbacks have to toe a fine line between being skittish at the first sign of pressure and ignoring it and taking drive- and season-killing hits. Burrow was pressured on 29.4% of his dropbacks last season. Since Week 3, that mark is down to 23.3%, which is the league's fifth-best rate. He's processing and getting rid of the ball faster; he has gone from taking 2.69 seconds before each pass a year ago to 2.58 seconds this season, with the latter standing as the third-fastest average. The only passers who get the ball out quicker are Tom Brady and Trevor Lawrence. The last point in Burrow's favor is how far he has gone. The other three quarterbacks on this list have combined for one playoff start, a Hurts' loss against the Buccaneers in the 2021 season's wild-card round. Burrow won three playoff games en route to the Super Bowl last season, including a furious comeback victory over the Chiefs at Arrowhead. He had the Bengals ahead of the Rams in the second half in Los Angeles during Super Bowl LVII, too, before the offensive line was overwhelmed. Moribund franchises dream of landing a quarterback who can revitalize their organization as quickly as Burrow has in Cincinnati. Much like Allen changed the stories surrounding the Bills after his breakout, Burrow has turned the Bengals into appointment television. A team that hadn't won a playoff game in 30 years now feels like it's going to be in the mix to win one every season. And a coaching staff that looked to be a whiff turned into a success story. Yes, he has been blessed with great receivers, but they've also been blessed to play with him. Pros: Accuracy, clutch performanceCons: Lack of durability, shorter track record of elite play Even acknowledging last week's frustrating loss to the 49ers, what Tagovailoa has done this season is nothing short of astonishing. Adjusted net yards per attempt (ANY/A) is a stat that aims to improve on passer rating by more accurately weighing touchdowns and interceptions and including sack yardage. ANY/A+ normalizes that metric versus the rest of the league so players can be compared across seasons and generations. A 100 ANY/A+ in any season is the league average. By ANY/A+, Tagovailoa is having the best season any third-year quarterback has had since Roger Staubach in 1971. Staubach started 10 games and threw the ball 211 times that season, so Tagovailoa has been only microscopically less efficient with more volume, having thrown 311 passes. He is just ahead of Kurt Warner, Boomer Esiason, Peyton Manning and Mahomes in the top 10. Tagovailoa's propensity for avoiding sacks in 2022 has aided his value, but let's use a more familiar metric. Pro Football Reference, which is the home of ANY/A+, also has an era-adjusted passer rating metric. By this simil