There are fewer “elite” QBs in the NFL than you’ve been told

We’ve become surprisingly casual with the word “elite.” One of the most common shortcuts for “elite QBs” in the NFL is counting Super Bowl rings. That may have worked forty years ago.

The problem is that rings have become a remarkably poor way of separating truly elite quarterbacks from everyone else.

When nearly one-quarter of the NFL’s starting quarterbacks own a Super Bowl ring, winning one can no longer be the benchmark for elite quarterback play.

Think about it. Elite literally means rare. If almost one fourth of starting quarterbacks satisfy your definition… your definition is wrong.

But that hasn’t always been the case. Somewhere during the early stages of the Super Bowl era (Super Bowl I was played after the 1966 season) the idea of the elite QB must have been born, and with it the notion that an elite QB had to have won a Super Bowl ring. And that notion held true throughout the 70s and 80s when only a select few QBs in the league were actual Super Bowl winners.

Whether the increase is driven by player longevity, free agency, the salary cap, or simple chance doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a Super Bowl ring no longer separates the truly exceptional from the merely accomplished.

If we’re looking for “elite,” we need a better definition.

One way of doing that is by quantifying how much better a given quarterback was versus his peers who were playing at the same time. ProFootballReference.com provides such a metric which they call Passer Rating Index (or Rate+) and which calculates a QB’s passer rating relative to his NFL peers playing at the same time.

Here’s a list of the 11 QBs that were at least one standard deviation better than their peers over the course of their entire career:

The list contains multiple champions, multiple non-champions, Hall of Famers, and players who will never reach Canton.

Notice what’s missing from this list. Super Bowl rings.

Five Hall of Famers sit at the top of the list. Steve Young, Joe Montana, Len Dawson, Roger Staubach, and Peyton Manning top the list, and there’s little doubt in my mind that these guys were some of the best to play the game – in their time. Montana and Young played until they were 38, (Staubach played until he was 37 but only started at age 27 due to his Navy commitment), so QB longevity is nothing new to the NFL, but long careers often come with a downside: they tend to ebb away towards the end.

Aaron Rodgers is a good example of this. No doubt he is a top 10 QB of all time, but a decade ago, with 103 starts under his belt (2008-2014), he was sitting at the top of this list with a Rate+ of 127. Since then he’s mixed standout years with average years and his career Rate+ has dropped to 118 accordingly. This is obviously a watchout for the two “young” QBs on this list, Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow, and a reason I’ve set the minimum threshold for most of the tables in this post to 50 starts.

Tony Romo recently said his only regret is not winning the Cowboys a Super Bowl. I might have phrased that differently; the Cowboys were unable to put together a team capable of leveraging the 12th best passer in league history to get to a Super Bowl.

Thanks in no small part to Tom Brady, who vacuumed up seven Super Bowls by himself, there are only 18 Super Bowl winning QBs over the last 30 years. Here they are, sorted by their Career Rate+:

When one third of the Super Bowl winning quarterbacks (6/18) have a below average, or slightly above average (Brand Johnson, 103) Career Rate+, then using Super Bowls to define elite passers is no longer a relevant argument.

There are 207 QBs, active between 1955 and 2025, with at least 50 starts to their name. Here’s where you could draw the line by Career Rate+:

115 feels a bit restrictive for the elite tier, 112 feels about right (113 would be 9%), and 110 feels a bit generous, but is a nice round number. If we use the 110 as the cutoff for an elite QB, then only seven of the 18 Super Bowl winners above were truly elite, further rendering moot the argument that elite passers can be defined by their number of rings.

At least once in his of her life, every single Cowboys fan out there has been involved in a debate about how the different quarterbacks the Cowboys have had over the last 60+ years compare to each other.

The difficulty in these discussions is that you’re discussing different players, on different teams, in different eras. But now you can compare them with Rate+, which might actually change our understanding of Cowboys history.

So below is a rundown of the Cowboys illustrious list of QBs along with each QBs Career Rate+ along with a Rate+ number for his time in Dallas.

The Cowboys have been fortunate to have four periods of top-level QB play. For the first two, Staubach and Aikman, the front office was able to build top-quality teams around their QBs and were rewarded with five Super Bowls in total. The franchise was completely lost in QB purgatory for half a decade before successively lucking into Tony Romo and Dak Prescott. Only this time, the front office as unable to surround the two with top-quality teams, and despite two decades of top-level QB play, the franchise only managed four playoff wins over that span.

Compared to their peers in their own eras, the Cowboys have had a number of excellent QBs. However, Roger Staubach stands tall above all others in the peer comparison, as does Troy Aikman. Craig Morton, Don Meredith and Danny White all compare favorably to their peers in their time, and Tony Romo is arguably the best Cowboys QBs since Roger Staubach, but all of them will always carry a little asterisk in the Cowboys history books for what they did not achieve. Dak Prescott’s task is clear: avoid the asterisk.

Quarterbacks don’t become elite by winning Super Bowls. Super Bowls simply determine whether elite quarterbacks are remembered differently.