NFL Powerless rankings: Dolphins, Browns and the worst QB rooms right now

There's been plenty of good quarterback play over the first few weeks of the NFL season. Geno Smith and Jared Goff just staged a duel for the ages in Detroit on Monday Night Football. Josh Allen looks downright superhuman at times. Sam Darnold appears to finally be making good on the talent that made him a top-three pick all those years ago. For all the consternation about passing numbers being down league-wide, there are plenty of success stories.

But unfortunately, that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're here to talk about the other side of the coin: the quarterbacks whose play has been, well, not great. Whether due to injury, regression or plain lack of talent, several teams around the league find themselves with QB situations so dire that it's a struggle to be competitive on a weekly basis. But just which team can stake a claim to the very worst? Here's our power(less) ranking of the bottom five.

5. Las Vegas Raiders

Vegas might have a lower ceiling than several of the teams below them on this list, but at the very least the duo of Gardner Minshew and Aidan O'Connell establish a floor somewhere above the sub-basement. Minshew is what he is at this point — a physically average passer who will mostly keep things on schedule and occasionally make one of the most baffling decisions you've ever seen on a football field — but we've seen him look perfectly fine in the right system. That's more than you can say for a lot of the QBs still to come.

4. Denver Broncos

Perhaps this seems harsh for a team starting a first-round pick with just four NFL starts under his belt, but just because Sean Payton thinks that Bo Nix is the next Patrick Mahomes doesn't mean everyone else has to. If anything, Denver is treading water right now in spite of Nix rather than because of him: Payton's offense is built around Nix's total inability to push the ball downfield, a limitation that cost them dearly against the Seahawks and would have cost them against the Jets if it weren't for a heroic defensive performance. Maybe Nix taps into some as-yet-unseen upside, but right now he looks a lot like the guy he was at Oregon, a serviceable backup who can't make the sorts of throws required to be a plus starter at the highest level.

3. Tennessee Titans

Say what you will about Nix, but at least he knows how to make quick decisions and (largely) keep the ball out of harm's way. Will Levis, meanwhile, is just about the polar opposite: a QB with obvious physical tools whose sense of danger is liable to go haywire at any moment. It would be one thing if this were a Jordan Love situation, where the back-breaking turnovers came with palpable upside; but Levis wasn't consistently good at either of his stops in college and has yet to show that he can be consistently good in the NFL. Combine that with a below-average backup in Mason Rudolph, and you get one of the bleakest quarterback rooms in the league.

2. Cleveland Browns

Levis might be a loose cannon, but at least he's willing to, you know, actually try stuff. Deshaun Watson, on the other hand, feels like a broken player at this point; it's alarming how skittish he's become in the pocket, dropping his eyes even before there's any messiness in the pocket, and it's totally short-circuited the Browns passing game — struggling against the Cowboys is one thing, but he's averaged fewer than six yards per attempt against the Giants, Raiders and Jaguars. At this point, there's been plenty of time to shake off the rust. If Watson were going to look anything like the player he was a few years ago, it would've happened by now, and Cleveland is left with the reality that it handed a record-setting contract to a quarterback who can't pilot a functional NFL offense.

1. Miami Dolphins

Even Watson manages to clear the bar set by Tyler Huntley, who managed just 96 yards passing on 22 attempts in an embarrassing Monday night loss to the Titans to close out Week 4. Huntley was thrust into the lineup in place of the injured Skylar Thompson, but Thompson hadn't looked much better in relief of Tua Tagovailoa. At the very least, all of the prior quarterbacks had things that they could do reliably at the NFL level. I'm not sure we can say that about either of these guys, even in a Mike McDaniel offense that is as point-and-click as it gets.