NFL

Philip Rivers - (2010, 2015, 2020)

Other QBs who have done it:

Phil Simms 1984, Dan Marino 1992, Kirk Cousins 2017, Jordan Love 2023

Philip Rivers also lead the NFL in passing yards in 2010 with 4710 yards while doing this.

I imagined that after leaving Richmond, Ted would get offers from football (soccer) teams around the world. But what about American football? His previous US football coaching experience was with a mid-tier college team. Would the top college teams or the NFL want him?

I'm sure someone has attempted something similar in the past, but I haven't found anything like it, so I decided to take some time to analyze the hit rate of some notable NFL draft "experts" when it comes to ranking QB draft classes. Before I get into my scoring system, I should note a few things:

1. I limited the scope of my review to the "top 5" performing QBs of each class. As far as what "top 5" constitutes, this was admittedly subjective. I'll explain my rationale for each below.

2. I also limited my review to draft years 2018 through 2022. 2018 was a logical cutoff because it became increasingly difficult to find projections for analysts that were older than that.

3. My rankings for Kiper and McShay may not be 100% accurate. I had difficulty sourcing their rankings and didn't want to pay for ESPN+. It was a bit frustrating that they keep old content behind a paywall. I am more confident in Kiper than McShay, and I mainly had issues finding information related to the poor 2022 class.

So, without further adieu, here goes:

I. Scoring System:

After much consideration, I decided to use a relatively simple scoring system, whereunder I rewarded correct rankings equally with a score of 25 points. From there, the points decrease based on the number of "spots" that an analyst was off in their rankings. For sake of simplicity, the range of scoring was limited to QB1 through QB5 and then any QB beyond QB5 was lumped together as "NR". A table outlining the scoring is below:

II. QB Rankings Based on Current Careers:

III. Analyst Performance:

Rank by Score:

1. PFF (Palazzo/Renner)

2. Mel Kiper

3. The Ringer (Danny Kelly)

4. Chris Simms

5. Walter Football (C. Campbell)

6. Daniel Jeremiah

7. Lance Zierlein

8. Todd McShay

A few observations stuck out to me. One being that analysts were actually very consistent at identifying QB1 in most classes. The only times they struggled were in classes without a consensus pro-ready talent. This bodes well for Caleb Williams. On the other hand, the hit rate for non-consensus prospects is incredibly low, which does not bode well for other guys in this draft (unless this year is like 2020, which it may be).

Lastly, most beyond QB1, most of these analysts are guessing as much as anyone else when projecting how QBs will fare in the NFL. There wasn't a huge separation here, but McShay was a consistently bad exception.

IV. Actual Analyst Rankings:

To make the data more digestible, below is a table of the actual rankings I found for each analyst: