{"id":707741,"date":"2026-06-16T16:19:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T16:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/707741\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T16:19:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T16:19:10","slug":"dallas-cowboys-qb-dak-prescott-keeps-interesting-company-in-qbr-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/707741\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott keeps interesting company in QBR rankings"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re going to look at an EPA-based metric to see how today\u2019s NFL QBs hold up under an advanced stats microscope, and to do that, we turn to ESPN\u2019s Total QBR.<\/p>\n

Why not simply use the better-known passer rating? Because the trusty NFL passer rating was designed to evaluate the passing game only. It does not account for a quarterback\u2019s running game, his ability to generate first downs, the amount of sacks he takes, penalties, success rate, and many other things.<\/p>\n

ESPN\u2019s QBR is an attempt to fix some of the weaknesses of the traditional passer rating. ESPN\u2019s Sharon Katz and Brian Burke explain the concept<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Traditional box score stats distort the performances […] because they (1) fail to account for all of the ways a quarterback can affect a game, (2) don\u2019t put plays into the proper context (a 5-yard gain on second-and-5 is very different from a 5-yard gain on third-and-10), and 3) don\u2019t acknowledge that a quarterback has teammates who affect each play and should also get credit for everything that happens on the field.<\/p>\n

Total QBR, much like the Expected Points concept, looks at every single play, adds context (e.g. down-and-distance, score differential, win probability etc.) and then allocates credit to the quarterback and his teammates to produce a clearer measure of quarterback efficiency. Uniquely to ESPN\u2019s Total QBR, the resulting metric is expressed as a number on a 0-to-100 scale to produce a player\u2019s Total QBR.<\/p>\n

An average quarterback will have a QBR around 50, and a Pro Bowl<\/a>-level player will have a QBR around 75 for the season. On a game level, however, a QBR of 75 means that holding all other factors constant (defense, offensive teammates, etc.), a quarterback\u2019s team would be expected to win about 75 percent of time, given that level of QB play.<\/p>\n

In the tables further down this post is a look at 45 active NFL quarterbacks (plus Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Eli Manning, for reasons that will become clear later) and the games they started between 2015 and 2025. In games in which those 45 QBs started, had at least 10 pass attempts, and posted a QBR of 75 or higher, they are a combined 717-164-2 for a win percentage of .812, which is not far from the 75 percent ESPN talks about above.<\/p>\n

If we accept that a Total QBR of 75 or more denotes a good game by the QB, it follows that a QB with a lot of 75+ QBR games is a good quarterback.<\/p>\n

But instead of simply summing up the number of good games for each quarterback, we\u2019ll use \u201cGood game percentage\u201d (games with a Total QBR above 75 as a percentage of total games started) as our metric of choice. This accounts for the fact that the quarterbacks in this analysis have played a different number of games over the last 11 seasons. Matthew Stafford for example has played 161 games over that span, while Brock Purdy has only 45. Looking at \u201cgood game percentage\u201d corrects for that.<\/p>\n

Also, why the seemingly arbitrary cutoff in 2015? Because that\u2019s the year the average passer rating (not QBR) hit 90 for the first time after steadily climbing from the 70s in the early 200s. Scheme changes, rule changes, and better quarterback protection lead to that steady increase, and 2015 marked the transition into a new era where the passer rating has consistently oscillated around 90.0, as you can see from the graph below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And with all that out of the way, here\u2019s a look at the 36 NFL QBs with at least 20 starts since 2015 along with their \u201cgood game percentage\u201d. We\u2019ll look at the QBs with fewer than 20 starts a little further down this post.<\/p>\n

The table is color coded into tiers to improve legibility, and I\u2019ll expand on those tiers after the table. The presumptive backups (per the latest ourlads.com depth charts) are marked in italics.<\/p>\n

Tier
\nQBs with 20+ starts
\n2026
\u00a0Team\u00a0
\n\u00a0Games Started\u00a0
(min 10 PA)
\n\u00a0“Good Games”\u00a0
(QBR > 75)
\nGood game
\u00a0percentage\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tier 1: Planet Mahomes\u00a0
\nMahomes 17-22
\nKC
\n79
\n41
\n51.9%<\/p>\n

Brock Purdy
\nSF
\n45
\n22
\n48.9%<\/p>\n

Jordan Love
\nGB
\n48
\n22
\n45.8%<\/p>\n

Patrick Mahomes 17-25\u00a0
\nKC
\n126
\n57
\n45.2%<\/p>\n

Tier 2: Borderline Top 5
\nDrew Brees (ret.)
\n—
\n84
\n36
\n42.9%<\/p>\n

Josh Allen
\nBUF
\n124
\n50
\n40.3%<\/p>\n

Tom Brady (ret.)
\n—
\n126
\n49
\n38.9%<\/p>\n

Dak Prescott
\nDAL
\n138
\n53
\n38.4%<\/p>\n

Lamar Jackson
\nBAL
\n105
\n39
\n37.1%<\/p>\n

Justin Herbert
\nLAC
\n95
\n34
\n35.8%<\/p>\n

Tier 3: Above average
\nDrake Maye
\nNE
\n27
\n9
\n33.3%<\/p>\n

Matthew Stafford
\nLAR
\n161
\n49
\n30.4%<\/p>\n

Joe Burrow
\nCIN
\n77
\n23
\n29.9%<\/p>\n

Deshaun Watson
\nCLE
\n71
\n20
\n28.2%<\/p>\n

Aaron Rodgers
\nPIT
\n151
\n42
\n27.8%<\/p>\n

Kirk Cousins
\nLV
\n158
\n44
\n27.8%<\/p>\n

Jared Goff
\nDET
\n151
\n40
\n26.5%<\/p>\n

Jayden Daniels
\nWAS
\n23
\n6
\n26.1%<\/p>\n

Jameis Winston
\nNYG
\n89
\n23
\n25.8%<\/p>\n

Baker Mayfield
\nTB
\n120
\n31
\n25.8%<\/p>\n

Jalen Hurts
\nPHI
\n78
\n20
\n25.6%<\/p>\n

Tier 4: The bus drivers
\nTua Tagovailoa
\nATL
\n65
\n16
\n24.6%<\/p>\n

Kyler Murray
\nMIN
\n86
\n21
\n24.4%<\/p>\n

Daniel Jones
\nIND
\n80
\n19
\n23.8%<\/p>\n

Bo Nix
\nDEN
\n34
\n8
\n23.5%<\/p>\n

Sam Darnold
\nSEA
\n90
\n20
\n22.2%<\/p>\n

Marcus Mariota
\nWAS
\n83
\n17
\n20.5%<\/p>\n

Trevor Lawrence
\nJAX
\n60
\n11
\n18.3%<\/p>\n

Tier 5: The Eli Manning
pit of endless misery
\nEli Manning (ret.)
\n—
\n67
\n12
\n17.9%<\/p>\n

CJ Stroud
\nHOU
\n45
\n8
\n17.8%<\/p>\n

Geno Smith
\nNYJ
\n68
\n11
\n16.2%<\/p>\n

Andy Dalton
\nPHI
\n104
\n16
\n15.4%<\/p>\n

Caleb Williams
\nCHI
\n34
\n5
\n14.7%<\/p>\n

Joe Flacco
\nCIN
\n89
\n13
\n14.6%<\/p>\n

Mac Jones
\nSF
\n55
\n8
\n14.5%<\/p>\n

Bryce Young
\nCAR
\n44
\n6
\n13.6%<\/p>\n

Jacoby Brissett
\nARI
\n64
\n8
\n12.5%<\/p>\n

For a long time, Patrick Mahomes was a planet unto himself. Over a span of five years (2028 -2022), every second game he played was a >75 QBR game. And even if he wasn\u2019t able to maintain a good game percentage above 50%, since, he still stands tall above almost all other QBs on this list.<\/p>\n

To understand how his career has progressed, here\u2019s an overview of how his good game percentage has developed over the years. Mahomes only started one game in his 2017 rookie season so I\u2019m bundling that game into the 2018 numbers in the little table below.<\/p>\n

Patrick Mahomes\u00a0
\n\u00a02017-18\u00a0
\n2019
\n2020
\n2021
\n2022
\n2023
\n2024
\n2025<\/p>\n

Games Started
\n17
\n14
\n15
\n17
\n17
\n16
\n16
\n14<\/p>\n

>75 QBR
\n9
\n7
\n9
\n8
\n8
\n5
\n5
\n6<\/p>\n

Good game percentage
\n52.9%
\n\u00a050.0%\u00a0
\n\u00a060.0%\u00a0
\n\u00a047.1%\u00a0
\n\u00a047.1%\u00a0
\n\u00a031.3%\u00a0
\n\u00a031.3%\u00a0
\n\u00a042.9%\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mahomes entered the league on a blistering pace, and his play only dropped off in 2023 and 2024 before picking up again in 2025. How his Achilles injury will affect his numbers going forward is anybody\u2019s guess, though the Chiefs were willing to bet half a billion dollars over the next eight years that things will work out.<\/p>\n

Circling Planet Mahomes are Brock Purdy and Jordan Love, even if both are still early in their careers with 45 and 48 starts respectively. After 46 games (2017-2020) Mahomes was sporting a 54.3 good game percentage, so both Purdy and Love are off that blistering pace, and it remains to be seen whether they can maintain their high percentage over time, or if they\u2019ll move down a tier. Still, the 49ers and Packers will likely dominate this decade with these two quarterbacks.<\/p>\n

Drew Brees and Tom Brady are both HOF-bound and highlight this tier, which I\u2019m only calling \u201cBorderline Top 5\u201d because calling it the \u201cElite Tier\u201d would likely ruffle a lot of feathers. Either way, Brady and Brees are easily two of the best QBs over the last two decades and are surely deserving of the word \u201celite\u201d, in large part because they\u2019ve sustained elite performance over almost two decades, something the other players in this tier haven\u2019t really managed yet. Dak Prescott is a case in point. Even if his good game percentage is almost identical to Brady\u2019s, he\u2019s had a much more up-and-down performance than Mahomes for example.<\/p>\n

Dak Prescott
\n\u00a02016\u00a0
\n\u00a02017\u00a0
\n\u00a02018\u00a0
\n2019
\n2020
\n2021
\n2022
\n2023
\n2024
\n2025<\/p>\n

Games Started
\n16
\n16
\n16
\n16
\n5
\n16
\n12
\n17
\n8
\n17<\/p>\n

>75 QBR
\n9
\n6
\n3
\n7
\n2
\n6
\n5
\n8
\n0
\n7<\/p>\n

Good game percentage
\n\u00a056.3%\u00a0
\n\u00a037.5%\u00a0
\n\u00a018.8%\u00a0
\n\u00a043.8%\u00a0
\n\u00a040.0%\u00a0
\n\u00a037.5%\u00a0
\n\u00a041.7%\u00a0
\n\u00a047.1%\u00a0
\n\u00a00.0%
\n\u00a041.2%\u00a0<\/p>\n

Coincidence or not, but the number of Super Bowl rings between the active players in this tier (Josh Allen, Dak Prescott, Lamar Jackson, Justin Herbert) is exactly zero, and perhaps that\u2019s why we can\u2019t yet call this tier the Elite tier.<\/p>\n

But also noteworthy about this quartet of players: they\u2019re all still with their original teams. No other QB with 100 or more starts on this entire list is still with the team that originally drafted him.<\/p>\n

This third tier includes QBs that have an above average good game percentage (the 45 QB average is 25.0%). You might find some names here that leave you scratching your head. Is Aaron Rodgers really \u201cjust\u201d an above average QB? Remember, this is only about data since 2015, and you could easily argue that this is unfair for someone like Rodgers, who may have been the original Planet Mahomes for a while: From 2008-2014, Rodgers was cruising at a 45.6% \u201cgood game percentage\u201d, which would rank him third overall in the list above. But Rodgers hit a slump from 2015-2019 with a percentage of just 28.2%, rebounded in 2020 & 2021 (56.3%) before nose-diving towards the end of his career (2022-2025: 7.8%). For large parts of his career, Rodgers was right up there at the top of the list, but this sample gives him an unfavorable look; such are the vagaries of arbitrary cut-off points in statistics, and such are the risks of extending a career that has run its course.<\/p>\n

This tier contains a bunch of below-average QBs that have a progressively worse good-game percentages. For younger guys like Bo Nix, there at least remains the hope that he can still move up the ranks. For teams banking on their veteran QB\u2019s ability to move up the ranks, that\u2019s highly unlikely to happen. If an NFL QB doesn\u2019t put it together in his first four years as a starter, he never will.<\/p>\n

Tier 5: The Eli Manning pit of endless misery<\/p>\n

This final tier is made up mostly of QBs whose name recognition or draft pedigree has kept them in the league much longer than they should have been. If these guys were called Ben DiNucci (UDFA) they\u2019d be looking for a job as a backup QB in the indoor football league. But alas, hope springs eternal for a highly-drafted underperformer with name recognition.<\/p>\n

On to the mostly younger QBs with less than 20 starts. I felt that the small sample size could possibly distort the overall picture, which is why I\u2019m listing them separately.<\/p>\n

Player
\n2026 Team
\nGames Started
(min 10 PA)
\n“Good Games”
(QBR >75)
\nGood game percentage <\/p>\n

Malik Willis
\nMIA
\n6
\n3
\n50.0%<\/p>\n

Michael Penix
\nATL
\n12
\n4
\n33.3%<\/p>\n

J.J. McCarthy
\nMIN
\n10
\n2
\n20.0%<\/p>\n

Jaxson Dart
\nNYG
\n12
\n2
\n16.7%<\/p>\n

Tyler Shough
\nNO
\n9
\n1
\n11.1%<\/p>\n

Cam Ward
\nTEN
\n16
\n1
\n6.3%<\/p>\n

Will Levis
\nTEN
\n19
\n0
\n0.0%<\/p>\n

Sam Howell
\nDAL
\n18
\n0
\n0.0%<\/p>\n

Shedeur Sanders
\nCLE
\n7
\n0
\n0.0%<\/p>\n

Sticking to the logic of the tiers we used above, Malik Willis, now the starter in Miami, is the clear standout here, but are six starts over four years enough to draw any type of conclusion from? Michael Penix looks like he\u2019s off to an okay start. But can he keep it up in his second year and hold off backup Tua Tagovailoa?<\/p>\n

That starting job is something JJ McCarthy has already lost in Minnesota after one year. The team hasn\u2019t made an official announcement yet, but Kyler Murray is taking that job without even breaking a sweat. And is anybody really betting on Shedeur Sanders getting the Browns starting job? Jersey sales<\/a> may be the only thing keeping this an \u2018open competition\u2019 in Cleveland.
For the Cowboys, there is good and bad news in all of this:<\/p>\n

Jaxson Dart in New York is nothing more than a Daniel Jones clone, who himself is nothing more than an Eli Manning clone impersonating an NFL-quality starter. Famous Jameis may offer more upside than Dart, who is one failure to slide away from IR.In Washington, the Commanders will have to hope Jayden Daniels finds back to his 2024 form (35.3%) and doesn\u2019t pick up where he left off in 2025 (0%). And Mariota is no upgrade at this point in his career.In Philly, a barely above-average QB who can\u2019t throw over the middle is being propped up by a strong supporting cast, but he\u2019s not going to win you a lot of games on his own.The Cowboys on the other hand have a backup in Sam Howell who hasn\u2019t had a 75+ QBR game in 18 starts, and Joe Milton\u2019s two starts didn\u2019t yield any such game either. It\u2019s Dak or bust in Dallas.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it\u2019s not one player that wins and loses games. What the numbers indicate is that some QBs get a lot more help from their teams when they have a good game than others do, a reflection of the fact that it\u2019s not one player who wins and loses games.<\/p>\n

Dak Prescott has more than his fair share of detractors, and even more so among Cowboys fans it seems. But if you judge a QB by the statistical company he keeps, Dak Prescott is at the very top of the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo,\u201d some might say, \u201cDak has had some good games. But my eye test tells me he\u2019s had a lot of bad games. Why are we not looking at those?\u201d<\/p>\n

Those voices may or may not have a point. Because if you want to be a top QB in this league, it\u2019s not enough to have a bunch of 75+ QBR games that give your team a good chance to win. It\u2019s at least equally important to minimize the number of bad games in which QBs actively lose games for their teams. And that\u2019s something we\u2019ll look at in the next post, where we look at \u201cbad game percentage\u201d and may find some surprises there as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re going to look at an EPA-based metric to see how today\u2019s NFL QBs hold up under an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":707742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[167420,399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-707741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-dallas-cowboys-analysis","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/707742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}