ESPN's top 75 quarterbacks
Ranking college quarterbacks is hard, how do you even approach the task?
Back when I decided to write a book about college football I had an original plan that was very different from where I landed. My initial plan was to write a book called, “the top 10 quarterback in Big 12 history.”
It seemed simple enough. The Big 12 only had about 20 years of history to peruse and I’d taken in most of it live, yet I ran into a number of issues. One was how to qualify quarterback greatness and what really made one quarterback “better” than another. My plan was to emphasize distributive skill sets as the ultimate barometer for quarterback quality. As in, the more ways a quarterback could effectively distribute the ball the easier it was for him to unlock different skill talents around him and power an offense.
Guess who ranked no. 1 in my later drafts due to that process? I’ll give you two hints.
It was the same player Bill Connelly picked on his recent “top 75 quarterbacks of the 2000s” list for ESPN and it rhymes with “cake or hay field?”
I may or may not have changed my mind before publishing, but another issue I kept running into was my desire to tell the history of the Big 12 conference as a haven for offensive innovation. I was filling up chapters before I even got to any of the quarterbacks while still debating who to rank where and why. So I tried to see if I could tell the history of the Big 12 with the list of quarterbacks and then jettisoned the quarterback paradigm altogether and reworked the project as Flyover Football.
So I appreciate Connelly’s task in trying to build a list like this and can even sympathize with his remarkably controversial choice for no. 1. I tend to think his project is largely misunderstood and a more thoughtful and interesting task than people assume.
But naturally I also disagree vehemently with some of his selections and have a few of my own thoughts on the topic.
The ESPN top 25
Here’s Connelly’s top 25:
Baker Mayfield – Oklahoma Sooners/Texas Tech Red Raiders
Cam Newton – Auburn Tigers
Vince Young – Texas Longhorns
Tim Tebow – Florida Gators
Joe Burrow – LSU Tigers/Ohio StateBuckeyes
Deshaun Watson – Clemson Tigers
Kyler Murray – Oklahoma Sooners/Texas A&M Aggies
Lamar Jackson – Louisville Cardinals
Marcus Mariota – Oregon Ducks
Robert Griffin III – Baylor Bears
Trevor Lawrence – Clemson Tigers
Colt McCoy – Texas Longhorns
Johnny Manziel – Texas A&M Aggies
Kellen Moore – Boise State Broncos
Sam Bradford – Oklahoma Sooners
Jameis Winston – Florida State Seminoles
Matt Leinart – USC Trojans
Andrew Luck – Stanford Cardinals
Bryce Young – Alabama Crimson Tide
CJ Stroud – Ohio State Buckeyes
Tua Tagovailoa – Alabama Crimson Tide
Phillip Rivers – NC State Wolfpack
Carson Palmer – USC Trojans
Case Keenum – Houston Cougars
Jalen Hurts – Alabama Crimson Tide/Oklahoma Sooners
Bill Connelly in the past once wrote a book called “The 50 Best College Football Teams of all Time.” It’s an interesting read and one of the real missions of the book is less to find the teams who were literally the best at football and instead to find teams who’d have a major impact in the storylines and major plot of college football.
So I tend to think he’s doing something like that again here. His goal was to find the guys who have been the greatest in the Michael Jordan sense.
Michael Jordan isn’t literally the greatest basketball player to ever live, miss me with your complaints Gen X, we all know it’s true. Not only is LeBron James a more skilled and gifted basketball player but there have been a few other guys since MJ who could claim likewise.
However, none of them dominated their eras or brought in fans and generated interest like MJ did during his two three-peat runs.
In terms of mythos or being larger than life, Jordan truly is the greatest of all time. His greatness transcends in a way you don’t see from guys who are or were better at the game of basketball. Maybe the average Spartan Hoplite would have whooped Achilles’ butt we don’t remember their names.
If you look at the list above you see the dominant characters you’d need to tell the story of 2000’s college football. If you want to tell Connelly he’s an idiot because Bryce Young is a million times more talented than Kellen Moore, I doubt he’d disagree. But his counter might be, “Moore’s greatness transcends that of Bryce Young.” And really, he’d be right.
Boise State’s elite run under Kellen Moore changed the game of college football and lead to the alterations of the championship process in order to maintain a gate around National Championship access. The powers that be in college football were working hard to figure out how to keep Moore and the Broncos away from the primetime money slots. Bryce Young’s main achievement was making us wonder if Nick Saban had been permanently supplanted by his former pupil Kirby Smart over at Georgia.
I think most of us within the college football commentariat would disagree with Connelly’s ranking if it were designed to rank the 75 quarterbacks by order of how good they were at playing college football. I would offer that it’s an extremely difficult task to compare guys like Cam Newton and Joe Burrow and you will be hard pressed to develop a criteria you can apply consistently while getting the results you want to see at the end. In some regards, Connelly’s approach makes more sense.
A more interesting challenge is to examine and question Connelly’s offerings on the criteria he appears to have chosen to select them.
Contrar-Ian questions the greatness of the Top 25
Baker Mayfield as the greatest quarterback of the century is the ultimate Bill Connelly move in keeping with the process he applied on his “50 Greatest Teams” list. As a fan of analytics and statistical measures, Connelly loves the notion that the truly greatest teams don’t always win because winning comes down to more than just skill but also luck and context.
I think there’s some truth to that and yet I also subscribe to the wisdom of Will Muschamp who once poignantly noted that “stats are for losers.” Analytics can quickly become excuses for why we shouldn’t just allow the scoreboard to determine who the greats are.
So should Mayfield, a guy who went 0-2 in the playoffs and lost to a Charlie Strong Texas team quarterbacked by Jerrod Heard get to be no. 1? Additionally, within the “transcendent stories and characters” paradigm, I don’t think you can make the case that Mayfield is the most important figure in 21st century college football.
If you did the case would be something like, “he was one of the first highly successful transfers who set the stage for the era of the transfer portal, player movement, and coaches like Lincoln Riley building winning teams from the portal.” Combine that with his longevity, starting three years for Oklahoma, and you have a pretty important character. Even beyond that, Mayfield was a real character.
But a more important character than Trevor Lawrence, the 5-star freshman who won a National Championship on his first try? Bigger than Tim Tebow who was the main face of the SEC during its ascension as the dominant conference in college football? The main face of spread offense? Bigger than Joe Burrow, who also transferred for opportunity and then lead the most potent offense in college football history?
I would have preferred to pick a winner myself. The “first big-time transfer” stage setting was truly massive though, there’s no denying it.
The “this list is for the main characters” argument does run aground with some other choices though. For instance, CJ Stroud who’s mostly famous for blowing Ohio State’s winning streak over Michigan and failing to win a playoff game. Is that how we define greatness now? Ditto Bryce Young, who will go down as the guy who should have had a historic career and perhaps won back-to-back championships but instead lost them to a walk-on at Georgia because all of his receivers were injured in 2021 and Nick Saban couldn’t replace them in 2022.
I also think putting Cam Newton over Tim Tebow due to a one-year wonder run after transferring in from the JUCOs just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Don’t bother countering with “well Newton was a better football player” because if that’s what we’re doing here than Burrow would be above them both.
There’s a sort of bias here too that feels political. Why exactly is Marcus Mariota or Lamar Jackson or Kyler Murray ahead of winners like Trevor Lawrence or Andrew Luck? Why is Johnny Manziel so low? Johnny Football was THE story of college football for two years, completely dominating big and imposing SEC defenses and forcing guys like Nick Saban and Kevin Steele to remake their defenses and downsize into dime packages to handle the stress of dealing with his quickness and playmaking in a wide open Air Raid.
Mariota seems like an attempted nod to Oregon’s overall run, Jackson’s inclusion an attempt to right the wrongs of history with him being somewhat overlooked at Louisville despite his dominance, and I dunno why Kyler Murray is so high given he only played one season at OU ad lost two of the three biggest games of the year. Watching at the time it seemed possible Murray was the most dominant athlete to ever play the position, but there was a nagging uncertainty because OU’s schedule was weak that season and they lost the Red River Shootout AND the playoff semifinal.
Finally, what exactly is Sam Bradford doing here? Representing all the system quarterbacks who benefitted from being in charge during a major philosophical innovation (tempo offense)? While he seemed like a bid deal at the time, I would say that history has not been particularly kind to Bradford’s legacy. Why? Because like several other system quarterbacks who rode innovation to big numbers and success, he lost the biggest games on the schedule and floundered in the NFL. If Connelly is trying to rectify the blow to his legacy then I think he’s running afoul of the historical mission here to capture historical significance rather than trying to establish it.
Winning is the ultimate tie-breaker in subjective comparisons of greatness and Connelly repeatedly eschews it in favor of…playing ability? Well then why aren’t guys like Trevor Lawrence or Andrew Luck who had unbelievable abilities ranked higher?
He’s treated some of these Oklahoma quarterbacks and other guys like they’re topnotch, non-champion prizefighters. Like when the UFC had Jorge Masvidal fight Nate Diaz for the “baddest motherf***er” belt.
“Maybe these guys weren’t champions but boy were they the real BMFs, let me tell you about ‘em.”
Fine, then who do you think is the greatest?
By my own terms or Connelly’s? By my own terms it’s Joe Burrow. You won’t find a more dominant player anywhere in the history of the game.
Between the heavy emphasis on…
Empty formations
RPOs
Dropback passing
…Burrow had amazing command of the action from the field level in his final year at LSU. You’ve scarcely ever seen someone tasked with so much decision-making and given so much potential impact for what happens on the field. And what did he do with all that responsibility? He completely obliterated everyone.
You can knock him for only starting for two seasons with one of those seasons being much less compelling, but for one year Burrow was the greatest player to ever play this game and college football is all about short-term legends.
By this reckoning Baker comes up short. I praised him at the time as being a high level field general who kept OU on track and maximized opportunities. In reality he was in great command of a terrific Lincoln Riley offense and he operated it flawlessly. But he didn’t control the game on the field so much as he allowed Riley to do so. When Georgia figured out their gameplan in the playoffs and started clamping down in man coverage, the OU offense dried up and Riley started trying to use trickery to manufacture offense late, which failed.
Many of these running QBs could really control a game like Burrow. The true dual-threats who could throw and also scramble or take it themselves on direct runs have always had a massive impact on the college game. When the spread empowered those guys and we started seeing more topnotch athletes at the position the game cranked out some true greats, whom you can see filling out Connelly’s top 25.
As for producing a full top 10 of my own, that’s a task beyond me for the present day. I will note a few things.
First, these guys were a big part of schematic breakthroughs which changed how the game is played:
Vince Young showed what was possible when topnotch, dominant athletes were trained (by patient coaches) to execute a passing game well enough to make their running ability impossible to counter.
Tim Tebow was one of the ultimate option quarterbacks, doing the dirty work himself as the dive/power runner. He wasn’t particularly explosive but he made it easy for Florida to surround him with explosive players.
Deshaun Watson took the VY formula and flipped it, showing that a mastery of the spread passing game is even more deadly than the scramble, which he also possessed in his repertoire. You could argue Colt McCoy did something similar but Watson’s achievements were greater.
Joe Burrow took things up another notch from Watson, adding RPOs to the mix and minimizing the quarterback run element.
That’s where we are today.
Finally, regarding Patrick Mahomes…this guy was absolutely dominant at the college level. Many people act as though he was a rough, unfinished gem Andy Reid polished into the world’s biggest diamond. Mahomes did improve significantly in the pros…like every other pro you’ve ever heard of in your life. He was also unstoppable in college.
People don’t want to hear it because he lost so many games, but it wasn’t his fault he didn’t have dominant weapons around him or a half-decent defense. Burrow is the only player I’m really comfortable ranking above him if we’re judging by quality of play and impact on the field. In his two seasons as “the guy” in Lubbock the Red Raiders scored 45.1 ppg while giving up 43.6 and then scored 43.7 while giving up 43.5.
No one Connelly ranks ahead of him had to put up with that nonsense. If he wasn’t throwing for 400+ they were losing. If not for the NFL his achievements at the college level would have been lost to time and I would have gone insane screaming into the ether that this highly productive Air Raid quarterback wasn’t like the others just because his stats were good. If you’re looking for a guy to uphold the BMF title for non-champion greats, I think Mahomes should receive more consideration. If you’re talking pure quarterbacking ability, he also has to be mentioned.
So Burrow, Mahomes, and y’all can debate the rest in the comments…
Only one guy from all of Yankeedom on the Top 25 list. Really says a lot
Wasn’t entirely sure where you were going to land until the Burrow and PM picks, and then all was right.