How many quarterbacks are capable of winning a Super Bowl?

The questions about Daniel Jones keep coming to the Big Blue View weekly mailbag. Last week, one of them asked whether Jones isn’t in fact a lot of what you ask for in a quarterback. That raises the question, though, of what you are looking for in a quarterback, and how many quarterbacks in the NFL these days fit the bill. Underlying all such questions is what we used to call the $64,000 question (I’m dating myself – $64K doesn’t buy much these days): How many NFL quarterbacks can win a Super Bowl, and why? Few would put Jones on that list, but the New York Giants are running it back with him again.

The first cut at the question is to ask how many active quarterbacks have won a Super Bowl. It’s a small list because one guy keeps getting in the way of all the others – Patrick Mahomes. Besides him, only four active quarterbacks have a ring. One of them is now a backup (Joe Flacco), and the other three are gearing up for what may be their last shot at one (Aaron Rodgers, Matthew Stafford, Russell Wilson). A few others have come close, and you’d have to say they are candidates to eventually get one: Jared Goff, Joe Burrow, Jalen Hurts, Brock Purdy.

Traits of great quarterbacks

That’s not the way most experts think about the question, though. They look for quarterbacks who have championship “traits” that enable them to get things done. It’s not just how many yards and TDs, or what completion percentage or Pro Football Focus grade or big-time throw rate they have. It’s the physical and mental characteristics they display during a game that matter.

Those things are difficult if not impossible to measure, so any assessment of QBs will be subjective and thus will differ from person to person. ESPN “convenes” an NFL “Quarterback Council” every off-season to assess the relevant traits and try to understand who has them and who doesn’t. The Council consists of all of ESPN’s football analysts, a couple with playing or personnel evaluation experience, and others without. They haven’t met yet for 2024, but it’s interesting to look at their 2023 pre-season assessments. They vote on the top 10 QBs for 10 specific traits and also list other QBs who didn’t make the top 10 but at least got one vote. I took the lists, assigned each quarterback a number from 1-10 for each trait based on their lists, and assigned all other QBs who received at least one vote for a given trait an 11 (or 12 when they had a tie for 10th), and for any trait for which a quarterback did not get at least one vote, assigned the next highest number after all the QBs who did get votes were counted. The panel included the 2023 QB draftees in their rankings even though they hadn’t played an NFL game yet. That seemed silly so I left them out.

The result, in effect, is (sort of) ESPN’s overall ranking of quarterbacks. If nothing else, it’s a simple way to try to answer the question “How many NFL QBs are capable of winning a Super Bowl?” as of the start of the 2023 season. Here are the results:

The categories themselves answer the question of what you ask for in a quarterback. Some of them are mental rather than physical traits: Field vision, decision-making, pocket presence. Some are a mix of physical and mental traits: Arm strength is largely physical, while accuracy, touch, and mechanics combine physical talent with communication between body and brain. Toughness is physical, but it’s also mental – the best competitors are the ones who can take a licking but keep on ticking, as the old commercial used to say.

The overall rankings I get by adding up the individual rankings for each trait give me a top 10 that is a pretty good list of the QBs in today’s NFL who most people would say are capable of winning a Super Bowl (again, ignoring the 2023 draftees, plus the 2024 class draftees who were still collegians). Lamar Jackson winds up lower on the list than most fans’ and analysts’ assessment of where he ranks – that’s because his rushing ability and talent for making off-platform throws, which loom large in actual games, are offset by the more numerous aspects of his throwing game that aren’t up to the talents of the best QBs as viewed by the panel. Maybe that makes my overall score biased against his strengths specifically…or maybe it tells us why he hasn’t made a Super Bowl yet even though the Ravens are a perennial contender.

Looked at now, after the 2023 season was played, the list shows with the benefit of hindsight how much difference a year can make. Trevor Lawrence (No. 7) will probably not rank as high now after a difficult sophomore season. Jared Goff, down at No. 20, will surely rank higher this year after almost getting Detroit to its first Super Bowl. Brock Purdy is No. 23, but like Goff, his stock soared in the 2023 season after taking the Chiefs to overtime in the Super Bowl. Ryan Tannehill is looking for work, Trey Lance, Mac Jones, Kenny Pickett, Sam Howell, and probably Justin Fields are being paid to ride the bench, and Jacoby Brissett and Sam Darnold may begin the season as starters but not end it that way.

Meanwhile, neither the ESPN analysts nor anyone else saw Jordan Love and C.J. Stroud coming – no one gave them even one top 10 vote on anything (although one analyst noted that Stroud enters the NFL with a reputation for good decision-making). On the other hand, Bryce Young, who had a rough rookie season, and Anthony Richardson, who lasted four games before an injury ended his season, did get votes. As John Sterling might say if he had changed sports, “That’s football, Suzyn.”

Can Daniel Jones improve his traits?

Daniel Jones comes in 19th among NFL QBs overall, though the list becomes more questionable as one moves downward because of the way I assign numbers when a QB does not receive a vote in a given category. Jones only made the top 10 in one category – rushing ability, as you might have guessed. He received at least one top-10 vote in six of the other 10 categories, though, so he may not be as far away from being an effective, even good, quarterback as we imagine. Those categories are:

• Arm strength
• Touch
• Field vision
• Decision making
• Compete level, toughness
• Off platform throws

The traits no one saw him as being blessed with are

• Accuracy
• Mechanics
• Pocket presence

Matt Waldman of the Rookie Scouting Portfolio did a film room analysis of Jones back in 2019 before the NFL Draft. It’s interesting to watch it now with five NFL seasons worth of hindsight about Jones’ strengths and weaknesses at the NFL level because the baggage surrounding Jones has become so overwhelming that an assessment of him before most of it happened is revealing. Waldman makes a few main points, several of which are right in line with the consensus view of the ESPN panel and a couple that aren’t:

• He feels that Jones does have good arm strength, but mostly in what he calls the “vertical range” of 40 yards or less but not the “deep range” of more than 40 yards.
• He is generally, but not completely, positive about Jones’ field vision, decision-making, and ability to throw off-platform. He shows several examples of Jones getting off his first read quickly and going to a second read. Not doing that has been one of the biggest criticisms of Jones in the NFL.
• He sees Jones as having great toughness – he had to stand in and take a lot of punishment behind Duke’s terrible offensive line, good preparation for being a Giant. I think all of us can agree that the one thing Jones does have is no fear of being hit.
• Accuracy is Waldman’s single biggest reservation about Jones. He sees Jones as having “general accuracy,” i.e. he gets the ball to a spot where the receiver can make a play on it, but he does not have the “pinpoint accuracy” that puts the ball in a spot where the receiver can get the ball in stride, gain substantial yards after the catch, and avoid being clobbered by the defender. This is why he didn’t see Jones as an elite prospect. No single stat can isolate this, but we can get some hints. Here are the YAC/completion rankings for the 2022 season, Jones’ best:

Courtesy of Pro Football Reference

and Jones’ values for that stat in each of his five seasons:

Courtesy of Pro Football Reference

Jones was middle of the pack in YAC/completion, but behind four of the five QBs the ESPN panel sees as most accurate. Despite that, 2022 tied 2019 for Jones’ best year in that stat. The extremely conservative offense that Joe Judge and Jason Garrett ran may explain the lower numbers in 2020-21. This season will provide the acid test – can Jones get the ball to Malik Nabers in space and in stride where he can do serious damage in YAC? Regardless of the numbers, Waldman shows that Jones at Duke often got the ball to his receivers in places where they had to reach behind them, or up, or move toward a defender to catch it.

• Waldman also notes that Jones can be accurate in the 30-40-yard range but is less so on longer throws. That’s a contrast we saw last season after Tyrod Taylor took over since the deep ball is Taylor’s bread-and-butter while the short game is not.
• There were other things Waldman didn’t like. He saw Jones not having anticipation in his throws. That is part of his characterization of Jones’ “general” rather than “pinpoint” accuracy. He shows examples of Jones hitching two to three times and waiting to be sure his receiver is open rather than getting the pass off as soon as it’s clear the receiver has leverage. To the ESPN panel that is included in touch, along with other things like speed and layering of passes depending on the defense. Waldman also saw Jones as having trouble recognizing “ancillary coverage,” i.e., a second defender that Jones seemed not to recognize in deciding where to throw the ball. This is a skill in reading the defense. (Devon Witherspoon pick-six, anyone?)
• Something that will surprise Giants fans is that he saw Jones as having good pocket presence, and he shows numerous examples since plenty of opportunities to move the pocket existed with that leaky Duke OL. That is not Jones’ NFL reputation. Indeed, he did not get a single top 10 vote in this category from the ESPN panel.

What happened to Jones at the NFL level? In his stirring first game as a Giant, he eluded a rush from Shaq Barrett, drifted left to buy time, and completed a deep pass to Darius Slayton. On the game-winning score, he let the rush come to him, waited for the seas to part, then moved up and ran it in for the winning touchdown.

Has today’s Jones been beaten down so much by the Giants’ OL deficiencies that he loses his cool in the pocket? Does he need some level of competence in pass blocking to regain what Waldman thought he had in college? Is it possible for him to learn anticipatory throwing at this point in his career? Can he recapture his college ability to go through at least limited read progressions? Surely Brian Daboll and Mike Kafka saw the pros and cons in Jones’ prior tape before they ever coached him. They must have thought they could improve these aspects of Jones’ play. They must still think that to some extent or else they would have selected one of the three available QBs at No. 6 in the 2024 Draft.

Maybe we will get some insight from Hard Knocks Off Season about how Daboll and Kafka view Jones. Do they think he has the potential to be better than the 2022 version with better players around him? Do they feel they’ve done as much for him as they can do? If we find out how aggressively Schoen tried to trade up for the No. 3 draft pick and how disappointed he and the coaches were when it didn’t happen, we’ll know.

Do the great QBs lack some traits?

If you buy the ESPN panel’s assessments, for the most part, no. Some QBs are just ridiculous. Mahomes ranks no lower than No. 3 in every single category except rushing ability (which includes scrambling), where he still finishes in the top 10. You have to get all the way down to QB10 (Lamar Jackson) before you find a real chink in the armor (in Jackson’s case, accuracy). Overall, though, the scores jump dramatically from Jackson to No. 11, Kirk Cousins, who is at least ranked top 10 in a few categories.

Maybe that’s your list of QBs who can win a Super Bowl. Can Matthew Stafford, No. 13, or Russell Wilson, No. 15, both of whom have won Super Bowls, do it again, or is their time past? What about No. 20, Jared Goff, who is top-10 in decision-making, touch, and mechanics? Goff got to one Super Bowl but was flummoxed by Bill Belichick’s Vic Fangio-inspired two-high zone defense. He almost made another one last season, perhaps only a Dan Campbell decision not to kick a field goal away from making it. The ESPN panel sees Jones as roughly Goff’s equal overall but they are very different quarterbacks with very different strengths and weaknesses.

Goff has benefited from a good offensive line and good receivers during much of his Rams and Lions career, which Jones has not. Right now Jones does not have the passing skill that Goff has, though he has a stronger arm. If a more solid offensive line and a more dangerous receiving corps allow him to develop his game beyond what we saw in 2022, what do the Giants do with him in 2025?