Patrick Mahomes sits on top but where does the rest of the AFC rank?
The Kansas City Chiefs are fortunate to have the most valuable player in the NFL in quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Having an elite quarterback is the biggest advantage you can have in the NFL (and maybe all of sports). I was recently looking over all the starting quarterbacks in the NFL and started to realize that there is far more depth of top talent at the position in the NFC than there is in the AFC. Yes, the AFC has some of the best young stars at the position, but after that, there simply isn’t a lot more there.
In the NFC, you can rattle off multiple guys who are in the conversation for the top half of the league. Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, Carson Wentz, Dak Prescott, Matt Ryan, Matthew Stafford, Kirk Cousins, Jimmy Garoppolo, and even Kyler Murray might all be thrown out there. In the AFC you have Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson, Ben Roethlisberger and… then it gets a little harder.
That drop in quarterback talent makes for a big advantage for the teams that do have a proven star there. So I thought this week it would be interesting to put together a quarterback power rankings for the AFC.
This is actually a lot harder than you might think because there is so little difference between number 16 and number 5. If you asked 10 diehard NFL fans to do it, I promise you would get ten very different lists. In fact, some of you are going to have huge problems with my list. When I set out to do this, I never would have guessed I would have ranked the guys I have at 5-10 as high as I did, but there simply weren’t any better options.
For the sake of these power rankings, I am going off of this season only. A team might have a young quarterback with upside that would be more desirable long term than a journeyman veteran, but for the sake of these rankings that journeyman veteran might rank higher if I thought he would outproduce the younger player this season. So this isn’t a ranking of who has the best situation long term, but who I think will produce the best this season.
So let’s start with the quarterback(s) that are at the bottom of my list.