2023 quarterback rankings and top analytical comps

Adding analytical comps to existing research to rank-order the top quarterback prospects in the 2023 draft class

It’s draft week and time to finally stop compiling and mulling over the data and have some skin in the prospect-rankings game. This piece has my rankings for the 2023 quarterback class, in a year with five potentially going in the first round. I already published research on some of my favorite quarterback metrics to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable, like relative performance under pressure and pressured sack rate.

Here I’m going to add some new data, with draft-agnostic top comparable players, based on a matching algorithm uses a number of advanced and charted stats from PFF. Specifically, the matching stats are:

• Accuracy percentage (excludes drops and throwaways)

• Yards per attempt

• Big-time throw rate

• Turnover-worthy play rate

• Depth of target

• Time-to-throw

• Scramble rate

• Designed run rate (runs as a percentage of total quarterback plays)

• Relative pressured passing (YPA under pressure minus YPA from a clean pocket)

• Pressure-to-sack percentage

The numbers below are all given as percentiles among all quarterbacks from 2014-2022 who dropped back at least 200 times in their final college season. For stats that are considered negatives, I reverse the percentile so that lower is better, e.g. a lower turnover-worthy play rate has a higher percentile. The other stats I did this for are time-to-throw and pressure-to-sack rate.

Each of the comparable players has a similarity score (Sim Score) that quantifies the euclidean distance,¹ or similarity, between the normalized values of all metrics. For simplicity, each metric is weighted equally, as the goal is to find players who had a similar statistical profile without attaching value judgments.

Because draft position is not part of the matching features, you should make a mental note when comps are way out of the players’ like draft ranges, but also think about what that might mean. Eight historical draft classes isn’t the biggest sample, but it’s all we have for these advanced metrics. The historical comps were restricted to prospects who ended up with at least 50 dropbacks in an NFL season.

TIER 1

Bryce Young is the only tier 1 prospect for me in this class. The comps do not account for size, and obviously that’s a factor and concern you have to build into projections. The purpose of the comps is to look strictly at how they played, without outside factors.

Young’s closest analytical comp is Joe Burrow, as both hit the marks on the major quarterbacking stats like accuracy, efficiency and making big plays without a bunch of mistakes. They also showed functional mobility with good scramble rates, and outperformed under pressure relative to their play from a clean pocket. That’s especially hard to do when their clean pocket stats were so good. Young was even better in terms of sack avoidance under pressure, a sticky stat going from college to pro.

Tyler Huntley is an interesting inclusion as a former UDFA, and I think we’d all agree he’s outperformed his draft status, or lack threreof. The jackpot comp is next, with a player working towards GOAT status in Patrick Mahomes. Like Young, Mahomes hits the marks on my favorite pressure stats, and while it might sound absurb, the likely No. 1 pick has already been compared to Mahomes because of the traits that would help under pressure. This from ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay:

To me, Bryce Young is a smaller version of Patrick Mahomes. He’s so poised inside the pocket. He has an understanding of where pressure is coming from. He can carry your football team.”

A couple other former first-round picks make the list in Mac Jones and Jameis Winston. Neither was quite as strong as Young in relative pressured efficiency, and Winston had a more elevated turnover-worthy play rate, which was ultimately his downfall in the NFL, even though his advanced EPA metrics looked better than the worst of his ugly mistakes. From 2015 to 2022, Winston ranks 12th in EPA per play (+0.142) among quarterbacks with at least 3,000 dropbacks, only slightly lower than Russell Wilson (+0.143), Kirk Cousins (+0.144) and Matt Ryan (+0.150). A less turnover-prone version of Winston would be a great NFL quarterback.

TIER 2