If we wrote about sports performances like we do businesses with quarterly earning and growth projections, I’m fairly certain that whatever consulting firm we hired to do the one about “NFL quarterback play” would return a single conclusion: playing quarterback in the NFL is the most difficult job in the world.
There are obviously more physically taxing roles and ones that hold more power and responsibility, jobs that are more dangerous for your short- and long-term physical and mental health and stuff that is so soul-crushing (we should ask the aforementioned consultants about that) that nobody should be burdened with such a horrible lot in life. Modern industrial capitalism tends to do that.
But is there any job more difficult and specialized per capita than playing NFL quarterback?
Playing NFL quarterback might be the most difficult job in the world
There are, depending on your opinion of Jared Goff, between 10 and 12 human beings capable of doing it well at the highest level. There are probably another eight or nine who we would call “passable”, and a bunch of guys just hanging on for dear life. Many college and alternate-league pro quarterbacks probably think they could hack it in the big time, but current returns and historical analysis show the number is around 12 people on Earth that can handle this. Twelve!
I am eternally fascinated by this truth. Talent and hard work will always differentiate people until we all glob together in the hivemind from Pluribus, but in American football we have actually created an job that is so necessarily difficult to execute that only about two Honda CR-Vs of people on the planet can really do it well.
The number of things a quarterback has to manage from moment to moment is, frankly, ridiculous and probably emotionally unhealthy. Pre-snap movement, defensive shells and stunts on the line, timing up double moves and getting the damn ball out of their hands within three seconds lest a 275-pound Laestrygonian violently flings them to the ground. And they do this all behind a helmet that limits their peripheral vision and with no guarantee that they will not be blindsided, tabletopped or smoked like a brisket because that is the whole objective of the other team.
It also leads to impossible debates about who the 12 guys actually are that can do this, and what the proper order of those guys are within the top group. The two rankings I linked above — Mike Sando’s NFL QB tiers at The Athletic and Steven Ruiz’s QB rankings for The Ringer — have massive discrepancies between spots. C.J. Stroud falls seven spots, Jared Goff is or is not top 10 and Brock Purdy remains a cultural flashpoint. But there are a few broadband debates I want to have, because they illustrate the problem of quarterbacking and the impossibility of media evaluation. We call this the self-defeating column — one whose unifying principle (evaluating QBs is impossible) undermines its goal (evaluating QBs).
The Joe Burrow/Justin Herbert Theory
Burrow and Herbert are two quarterbacks with impressive career statistics and irrefutable physical talent. But one could question if they are winners, a critically important facet of quarterback evaluation even though it is the dumbest, least interesting farce of an opinion this side of “I know it when I see it.”
Burrow and Herbert are obviously top-tier quarterbacks, and suggesting they are not says more about the epidemic of misappropriation of blame than it does about their own abilities. Burrow is 5-2 in the playoffs and has made a Super Bowl, but has not been to the postseason since 2022. Herbert, meanwhile, has strung together a number of impressive statistical seasons without so much as a single playoff win. But I reject the notion that their inability to win playoff games, either recently or ever, should be counted against their rankings.
Football is an incredibly fast-paced sport with a relatively small number of games and, thus, data points. While Pro Football Focus and others have made some effort to empiricize the game, popular coverage of the league is still often a memory-and-vibes-based discourse. Most remember the Bengals’ two-year playoff drought, horrible defense and injury problems, finding it hard to recall that Burrow’s last healthy season, 2024, saw him throw for 4,900 yards, 43 touchdowns and only nine interceptions, or that he has the highest completion percentage of any player in NFL history. Nor can you ignore the obvious one-of-one physical abilities of Herbert, who has been on some abhorrent rosters in his still-young career.
I would personally choose Burrow over Herbert if I were starting a team today, not because he has won more playoff games but because he has hyper-accurate processing power that is 100 percent unique along with every physical tool required to run an elite offense in the NFL. It’s a super tight comp, but Burrow has the edge.
Bonus round: Wins are a quarterback stat … unless you’re Jalen Hurts
Nowhere is this issue of “winners versus losers” more obvious than with Jalen Hurts, these days in the low-to-mid teens in most rankings — which very much feels like the worst possible outcome for a former Super Bowl MVP and league MVP runner-up. Hurts stock is way down, and the Philadelphia Eagles have been in a downward vibes spiral since the moment they won that Super Bowl … somehow.
If the whole point of football is to win the Super Bowl, and the quarterback is the main guarantor of that project, then it seems insane to suggest Hurts is a middling-to-bad quarterback. But that’s where we’re at. Visually, last season was rough; there was an inability to throw over the middle, an unceremonious playoff exit and a general feeling of Eagles malaise. He did not have appreciably worse stats than he did in his 2022 MVP-level campaign, but the team won three fewer games.
Wins certainly are not a quarterback stat, but the inconsistency with which we have applied them to Hurts is maddening. A 22-touchdown, six-interception 2022 gets roses and awards, while a 25-touchdown, six-interception 2025 gets booed off the face of the earth. It goes to show you how shallow quarterback discourse can become, with groupthink controlling the universe like a malevolent force of psy-op doom.
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