Falcons All-Time Top 5 QBs: Matty Ice, Ron Mexico and Peachtree Bart

Plus, a quarterback who was briefly "better than John Elway" and another who could have been ...

Just a reminder that Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac is now available! It’s the same publication you trusted as Football Outsiders Almanac and Pro Football Prospectus for 20 years, and it features EIGHT chapters by me! You can read my sample Chargers chapter for free here. The print version of the Almanac should be available by the time you read this or soon after.

Also, Monday Walkthrough returns to the Too Deep Zone on July 29th. I tentatively plan to post three articles per week starting in August: two on current events and one All Time Top Five. We’ll see how it goes. Once the season begins, we will definitely be in three-feature-per-week territory.

Now, on with the Falcons countdown.

1. Matt Ryan

(The following was published at Football Outsiders in the 2021 offseason. A few paragraphs have been trimmed. The stats have not been updated but should not have changed much.)

Matt Ryan’s Hall of Fame portfolio can be summarized as follows:

• NFL MVP in 2016.

• Led the Atlanta Falcons to a conference championship in 2016.

• Led his team to the playoffs five additional times.

• Named to four Pro Bowls (including 2016 of course).

• Very impressive bulk career totals.

In other words, Ryan’s portfolio is categorically that of a quarterback who will not be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Don’t believe me? Let’s check out Boomer Esiason’s portfolio:

• NFL MVP in 1988.

• Led the Cincinnati Bengals to a conference championship in 1988.

• Led his team to the playoffs one other time.

• Named to four Pro Bowls.

• Very impressive bulk career-total statistics. When Esiason retired in 1997, he ranked ninth in all-time passing yards, precisely where Ryan ranks now. 

Now, let’s check out Steve McNair: 2003 NFL MVP, led the Tennessee Titans to one heartbreaking Super Bowl loss, led the Titans and Baltimore Ravens to the playoffs three other times, was named to three Pro Bowls, and accumulated impressive bulk passing and rushing statistics.

Did someone say Ken Anderson? One MVP award, one Super Bowl loss, four playoff appearances, four Pro Bowls, impressive bulk stats and the best rate stats of any quarterback of his era. Anderson ranked seventh on the all-time passing yardage list when he retired. 

If we ease back on the MVP requirement we get Donovan McNabb: one Super Bowl loss, seven playoff appearances, six Pro Bowl selections, impressive all-around career stats and one MVP-caliber year (2004, when Peyton Manning set a new touchdown record and won the award). We also get Drew Bledsoe: one Super Bowl loss as a starter, four Pro Bowls, four playoff appearances (one as a backup, of course), career passing yards that ranked seventh on the all-time list when he retired.

Perhaps we should stick with the MVP requirement though; after all, earning an MVP award is a Hall-of-Fame-type of accomplishment. In that case, let’s get nutty with Rich Gannon: 2002 MVP, one Super Bowl appearance, four Pro Bowls, six playoff appearances (three as a starter). Or we can go back to Roman Gabriel, the 1969 MVP who was named to four Pro Bowls, led the Rams to the playoffs twice in the era before Wild Card games and retired eighth on the all-time passing list. 

Of the seven quarterbacks just listed, only Anderson is the subject of any serious Hall of Fame discussion, mostly because of his “black ink” accomplishments and role as a West Coast Offense pioneer. Ryan has had a better career than Gannon, of course, and cases can be made that he’s better than several of the others just mentioned. 

The problem is that Ryan clearly ranks somewhere among this “tier” of Quarterbacks Who Lost Super Bowls and Had One Great and Several Really Good Years, and it’s a tier that is unequivocally below the Hall of Fame standard.

Big Stats/No Rings

Dan Marino, of course, also won one MVP award and lost a Super Bowl. Any Matt Ryan for Hall of Fame campaign would likely lean into Ryan’s bulk stats and market him as a Big Stats/No Rings guy like Marino, Dan Fouts or Warren Moon. Jim Kelly and Fran Tarkenton are also Big Stats/No Rings guys, but of course losing multiple Super Bowls is a little different than losing one.

Ryan currently ranks ahead of Fouts and Moon in all-time touchdowns. He’s about 1.25 decent 17-game seasons from overtaking Marino in yards. At a bottom-of-the-subreddit level, comparing Ryan to the all-time stat champs currently in the Hall of Fame works. But Football Outsiders readers are well aware that passing rates and offensive totals have been increasing steadily for over 40 years. Even a more casual observer can see that Ryan flunks the “black ink test” compared to the others:

• Dan Marino led the NFL in passing yards five times, touchdowns three times and rating once. 

• Dan Fouts led the NFL in passing yards four times and touchdowns twice.

• Warren Moon led the NFL in passing yards twice and touchdowns once.

• Matt Ryan led the league in rating once.

Marino, Fouts and Moon can also lay claim to various “innovator” mantles (as can Anderson, Esiason and perhaps others on the previous list). Ryan can make no such claim.

It’s important to note here that Pro Football Hall of Fame voters are generally unimpressed by bulk stats. In baseball, 3,000 hits get you into the Hall of Fame, even if you hang around for six years as a DH to get them. That rarely applies in football, but casual fans have a habit of thinking that all pro sports Halls of Fame are like Cooperstown and that all Hall of Fame arguments are baseball arguments. 

Pick any random year and you will find non-Hall of Famers near the top of the quarterback leaderboards. I chose 2002 and found Vinny Testaverde ninth, Dave Kreig 10th and Esiason 11th among the all-time yardage leaders. Kreig was also eighth in all-time touchdowns that year, Esiason 11th and Testaverde and John Hadl tied for 12th; the touchdown leaderboard is more durable at the top than the yardage board, but not by much. 

Making Exceptions

If I were trying to craft a serious Hall of Fame argument for Ryan, my goal would be to breathe life into seasons like 2013-2015 and 2018-2020. No, no no, Hall of Fame Committee, I would argue, Ryan wasn’t just racking up big numbers on weak teams. He was doing something unique and special.

That’s a tough argument to sell. Unlike McNabb, McNair or Gabriel, Ryan didn’t spend his career with weak receiving corps and/or conservative coaches. Instead, Ryan spent most of his career throwing to Hall of Famers (Tony Gonzalez, probably Julio Jones) and other impressive receivers (Roddy White, Calvin Ridley). 

The Falcons often fielded some miserable defenses, but it’s hard to claim that the organization was holding Ryan back in some way when they built two separate playoff nuclei. Perhaps 2018 was a stealth “Hall of Fame” season: 35 touchdowns and 4,924 yards for a Steve Sarkisian offense and a 7-9 team that lost by scores of 43-37 and 37-36. But it’s hard to drag any of Ryan’s other non-Pro Bowl seasons across the finish line.

Football Outsiders stats, which are not designed for Hall of Fame debates, would be of little help to Ryan’s case. Ryan led the NFL in DVOA and DYAR in 2016. He finished in the top 10 in DYAR ten times and the top 10 in DVOA nine times. That’s impressive at first blush, but not particularly compelling, especially because Ryan had a habit of finishing fifth through ninth in both categories. “Fifth-to-ninth best quarterback in the NFL for over a decade” isn’t exactly a rallying cry.

A Ryan Hall of Fame argument could be Frankenstein’d together by pointing out that he was statistically better than most of the quarterbacks like McNabb who had similar playoff/Pro Bowl profiles but had better playoff accomplishments than guys who played forever and ended up near the top of leaderboards (Krieg, Testaverde). Also, he was cut off from the league yardage and touchdown titles, plus most of the trophies, by Brees, Brady, Rodgers and others for nearly all of his career. 

Again, pointing out that Ryan wasn’t nearly as good as several of his contemporaries is an odd way to frame his Hall of Fame candidacy, but that’s what we’re down to.

Hall of Fair to Middling

Based on what we have seen so far, Ryan’s Hall of Fame candidacy died on February 5th, 2017, when the Falcons blew a you-know-what-to-you-know-what lead against you-know-who in Super Bowl LI. It may not be fair to judge Ryan based on what his team did in one game. But it’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Fair. It’s for guys who helped their teams hold onto Super Bowl leads, or whose fourth-quarter comebacks in championship games (2014) didn’t stall at the 10-yard line, or guys who didn’t get stoned on a pair of quarterback sneaks (2011) and held to zero offensive points in a playoff game they were favored to win. Barring that, it’s for guys who led the NFL in touchdowns a few times instead of always finishing sixth-through-ninth. 

Barring some resurgence, Ryan simply will not make the cut for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But at least he’s in good company among the likes of Esiason, McNair and McNabb: great players who shouldn’t have to apologize for their Super Bowl losses.

2. Steve Bartkowski

The Falcons joined the NFL as an expansion franchise in 1966, when the league was trying to block the AFL from entering major markets by adding new teams, no matter what it did to the available talent pool. The Falcons were immediately dreadful. Their early management team was totally overmatched. The Falcons 1967 draft may have been the worst in history; I might attempt a writeup of it next summer. 

The Falcons hired Norm Van Brocklin as coach/GM in 1968, not long after Van Brocklin left the Vikings in a huff after years of feuding with Fran Tarkenton. Van Brocklin was 42 years old going on 72. He certainly had some football acumen, but if he were alive today, he would post memes on Facebook like “in my day, we didn’t wear seatbelts and there were rusty nails sticking out of the monkey bars in our playground,” but then fly into an uncontrollable rage at the sight of a gay couple holding hands in an episode of NCIS. 

Van Brocklin brought some professionalism to the personnel department and made the Falcons respectable using R. Lee Ermey tactics. But the 1974 offseason players’ strike absolutely broke him. Van Brocklin sided with management to a point just short of offering to train a fire hose and attack dogs on his players. The players responded by starting the season 2-6. Van Brocklin then turned on reporters. 

“When a newsman asked him if he was still a fighter, as he had insisted several weeks ago, Van Brocklin challenged the writer to a fight,” the AP wrote at the time. “He extended the invitation to about a dozen other writers, broadcasters and photographers in attendance.” Van Brocklin famously offered to “stack chairs” so he could rumble with the press pool. The Falcons fired him.

Laconic defensive coordinator Marion Campbell, a longtime Van Brocklin lieutenant, took over as head coach, with Vince Lombardi’s former personnel director Pat Peppler as general manager. Peppler engineered a trade to move up from third to first overall in the 1975 draft to select Bartkowski, a two-sport (football and baseball) All-American who led the nation in passing at Cal in 1974.

A week before the draft, a call came to a house Bartkowski rented with some college teammates in Orinda, California. Then-Falcons coach Marion Campbell was on the phone.

“He introduced himself. He told me a deal was in the works and they were going to trade for the number one spot and I was going to be their pick,” Bartkowski said. “It was a big night in Orinda. I can remember that. We had a pretty neat celebration that night.” – Michael Rothstein, ESPN, 2021.  

As Rothstein notes in the article cited above, trading up in the first round for a quarterback was unheard of at the time. The draft was held in late January back then, just a few days after the Senior Bowl. Some teams, like Washington and the Eagles, preferred to trade their top picks for veterans whenever they could. Peppler and Bartkowski began paving the way toward the modern draft in 1975. Also of note: Bartkowski became Leigh Steinberg’s first client, back in an era when few players retained agents.

Bartkowski was very good as a rookie in 1975, but the Falcons were not. Bartkowski, playing behind an awful offensive line, suffered a knee injury early in 1976. Peppler fired Campbell early in the season and took over as interim coach. 

Leeman Bennett took over for Peppler in 1977. Bartkowski re-injured his knee in the preseason. Bennett played Bartkowski in the second half of one preseason game with a large brace on his knee, then wisely started veteran journeyman Scott Hunter in the season opener instead. Bartkowski returned for the second half of the year and played poorly. The Falcons, however, were competitive again thanks to the Grits Blitz defense led by star pass rusher Claude Humphrey.

So far, Bartkowski’s career has taken a rather familiar downward trajectory: top prospect, promising rookie season, some injuries, some less-than-reassuring performances when healthy.

Things got worse in the 1978 preseason. Bartkowski was awful. Backup June Jones, an undrafted rookie the previous year, rallied the Falcons each week in relief. Bartkowski was even seen crying on the sideline after one of his brutal exhibition performances. Bennett benched him in favor of Jones for the season opener. Bartkowski reacted poorly to the benching. It was Zach Wilson-worthy stuff, and it looked like Bartkowski was on his way out of Atlanta, if not the NFL.

Jones, however, turned out to be completely ineffective. Bartkowski relieved him in Week 3. A few weeks later, the Falcons went on a tear, going 6-1 in one stretch. The Falcons reached the playoffs for the first time in their history, beating the Eagles in the Wild Card round. 

Bartkowski. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Bartkowski attributed his career turnaround to a renewed faith in the man upstairs. No, not Bennett. “I just had an awakening,” he later said. “I was playing awful and realized that football was God at that point. I was humiliated and I was at a wits end. I had never failed anything athletically. I heard the message.’’ 

In addition to finding religion, Bartkowski found LPGA star Jan Stephenson sometime in 1978. “She also carried the latest bouquet of red and yellow roses from the Atlanta Falcon quarterback, Steve Bartkowski,” per a wire story after a golf tournament in May of that year. “He had sent her a bouquet each day of the tournament.” 

I mention Stephenson because I am becoming obsessed with the leering tone of the sports media of the era. “A whole roomful of hearts skips a beat, and not a man stops smiling,” wrote Barry McDermott of Sports Illustrated in a feature on Stephenson informatively entitled “Not Just Another Pretty Face.” “Stephenson, the 30-year-old golfing sprite from Australia, is no longer just another pretty face. She's rich and famous. They know it. She knows it.”

Stephenson did, in fact, have an Olivia Newton-John flair to her. But what happened to her romance with the handsome Bartkowski? Apparently, she picked golfer Eddie Vossler instead.

Bartkowski is a striking, matinee-idol type, with curly hair, and he then had a playboy reputation. Peachtree Bart, the writers called him. He and Stephenson laughed a lot. But he wanted to wear jeans to the country club. And then he went off to training camp and a monk's isolation. You can probably guess the rest. There was a tournament in Japan where Stephenson won $2,000 for making a hole in one. She called Vossler. Then she called Bartkowski. Then she called Vossler back. Her phone bill was $1,800, and afterward she was right back where she started, back with Eddie. -- Barry McDermott, Sports Illustrated, January, 1982.

Let’s hear a shout-out in the comments from anyone old enough to remember getting the phone bill and going line-by-line through the long-distance calls to figure out why it was so damn expensive (though usually not $1800). I dated a girl from Bucks County and we wrote each other letters to save money. Letters! 

Anyway, back to football. 

The Falcons began coming into their own around Bartkowski. Mike Kenn and Jeff Van Note headlined what grew into one of the NFL’s best offensive lines. Tight end Russ Francis, wide receivers Alfred Jenkins and Alfred Jackson and running back William Andrews led a deep playmaker corps. Defensive coordinator Jerry Glanville kept variations of the Grits Blitz going after Humphrey’s departure. Bartkowski threw 31 touchdown passes as the Falcons went 12-4 in 1980, narrowly losing to the Cowboys in the playoffs. Bartkowski threw 30 touchdowns in 1981, though with 23 interceptions for a Falcons team that missed the playoffs. He brought the Falcons back to the playoffs in strike-shortened 1982.

Dan Henning replaced Bennett in 1983, bringing the two-tight end version of the Air Coryell offense. Bartkowski led the NFL with a 97.6 passer rating, throwing just five interceptions while completing 63.4% of his passes.

Bartkowski completed 67.3 percent of his passes in 1984, but he missed the final four games of the season with another knee injury. He was also developing a reputation as a quarterback who would hold the ball forever and take too many sacks. 

Bartkowski’s contract expired after the NFL season, but he had no interest in playing in the USFL or anywhere alse. "Atlanta is definitely my home," Bartkowski said, per Jill Lieber of Sports Illustrated. "It will be until the Lord comes back or takes me home to live with Him. I have no desire to play somewhere else. For me to take a 32-year-old body somewhere else and walk away from all I've tried to do all these years, to try and help make this team something this city can be proud of...would be the greatest hypocrisy I can think of...."  

The Falcons tried and failed to trade Bartkowski. Instead, they signed him to a two-year contract in July of 1985. He started the season 0-5, absorbing 18 sacks in 129 dropbacks. He was benched, placed on injured reserve (his knees remained a problem) and then released in November.

Matt Ryan holds the top eight passing-plus-rushing DYAR seasons by Falcons quarterbacks. Jeff George ranks ninth for 1995, Bartkowski 10th for 1985. Michael Vick’s 2002 season ranks sixth among non-Ryan seasons on the Falcons list, but Bartkowski ranks seventh for 1982 and would rank higher if not for that year’s strike.

Bartkowski was the first Falcons quarterback of any relevance, one of the first quarterbacks to produce back-to-back 30 touchdown seasons and an important figure in NFL draft history. He still ranks second to Ryan on the all-time Falcons passing list in all meaningful categories.

I write all of that to forestall any criticism for selecting Bartkowski over the next guy. 

3. Michael Vick

Vick doesn’t get extra credit here for how talented or exciting he was. He doesn’t get credit for how much fun he was to play in Madden or what he might have done in different circumstances or a different decade. He doesn’t even get credit here for his Eagles comeback; he’s a better all-time quarterback than Bartkowski, but we’re focusing on Falcons accomplishments.

Vick doesn’t suffer an undue punishment here for his involvement in a dogfighting ring; losing three prime seasons of his career — not to injury but the kind of antisocial behavior that should not have been very difficult to avoid — is punishment enough. He gets credit for his rushing ability, of course, but his fumbles and sacks are also taken into account. 

Vick is evaluated here for four seasons as a healthy starter, three Pro Bowls, two playoff runs and one season as the MVP runner-up (2004). Vick never finished higher than 15th in passing DYAR (2002), though he led the NFL in rushing DYAR for a quarterback in 2004, 2005 and 2006. He had an excellent game against the Rams in the 2004 playoffs, then a poor one in the NFC Championship Game on an icy afternoon in Philly. The “Ron Mexico” stuff surfaced in 2005, well before the dogfighting allegations, and it's safe to say in retrospect that Vick wasn’t 100% with the program in his final seasons in Atlanta, after the Falcons gave him a 10-year, $138-million contract. 

Vick captured the imagination of Millennial fans as a breathtaking talent, a tragic figure with a redemption arc, a defiant scrambler and a video game character. He flashed greatness, but he only briefly achieved it for another team after a prison sentence and a humbling reboot of his life and career. I was inclined to rank him second, but Bartkowski threw for more than twice as many yards and touchdowns as Vick in a much less pass-friendly era. What Vick was capable of never really meshed with what Vick actually did, at least not with the Falcons. I loved watching him as much as anyone. But he can only get so much credit for that.

4. Chris Chandler

Sometimes, analysis goes too far. That’s what Chris Chandler thinks of the frequent argument he hears that the Falcons may have the edge at quarterback against the Broncos in Super Bowl XXXIII.

Chandler is the new kid on the block here, while this is John Elway’s fifth time around the Super Bowl block. Chandler had a superior rating this season, but he does not understand how anyone can give him the edge over a proven commodity like Elway.

“It’s something I don’t think anybody can really say and back up,” Chandler said yesterday in his final session with the media. “John Elway is similar to Michael Jordan in that regardless of how he may be playing, he could take over, turn it on and probably win the game for you.

“Some people feel I may have the edge, but very few people really know the game well. I’ve been playing quite well and I’m very confident in what I can do. But you’re going a little bit too far when you say that anybody is better than John Elway.” – Paul Schwartz, New York Post, January 29, 1999.

The Chandler-is-better-than-Elway proto-meme began with a Dan Le Batard column in the Miami Herald in the days leading up to Super Bowl XXXIII. I cannot find the original article, only reactions to it. T.J. Simers referred to Le Batard as a “future editor” for making the assertion. “This kind of nonsense is very disturbing in the newspaper business, but very necessary,” Simers quipped. “It’s a newspaper’s way of identifying editors, you know, the guys who can’t write.” 

Simers, who had a gift for the extremely toxic, also called Chandler “Stiff” throughout his column. Chandler’s given nickname, “Crystal Chandelier” (for his many injuries), was not much better.

The Falcons traded a fourth-round pick for Chandler, 32 years old and fresh off a two-year stint holding off/mentoring Steve McNair for the Oilers, in 1997. His early-career injuries behind him, Chandler had a fine season in 1997. Everything suddenly came together for the Falcons in 1998: Jamal Anderson taught the world how to do the Dirty Bird, Jessie Tuggle and Chuck Smith led a stout defense, and the Falcons went 14-2 en route to the Super Bowl, beating the 11-point favorite Vikings in the NFC Championship along the way.

Chandler was not destined to out-duel Elway and prove the young Le Batard correct. Instead he threw three interceptions in a 34-19 Super Bowl loss. “I could sit here and try to explain a lot of things, but going through it again sounds like excuse-making,” he said after the game. “To explain to you [reporters] is not important.

“It wasn’t a really lucky night for us tonight. Hopefully, we’ll do this again in our home stadium next year. Being satisfied this year, considering where we came from, that’s OK right now. But we can’t stop here.”

The Falcons stopped there. The 1998 season was lightning in a bottle. Anderson got hurt in 1999 and would never be the same. Chandler went back to being a journeyman in his mid-30s. He stuck around for three more years, mentoring Vick in the final one.

The 1998 Falcons were one of the most unlikely Super Bowl participants in history. They came from nowhere, then went back. But they briefly looked like a team of destiny, and Chandler earned his momentary chance to share the stage with Elway.

And Le Betard? He seized control of the narrative, forcing other writers to respond to what he said instead of saying their own things. That would become an essential skill in our industry in the 21st century. A future editor? Hardly.

5. Jeff George

June Jones’ run ‘n’ shoot offense was a delight to watch with George at the helm. George wasn’t all that efficient – he ranked sixth in DYAR in 1995 but 14th in 1994 due to high interception and sack rates – but he had outstanding receivers (Terrence Mathis, Andre Rison, Eric Metcalf and others, though not all in the same year) and could execute throws few others would dare to attempt.

As a bonus, you might get to enjoy George yelling at Jones on the sideline when you tuned into a mid-1990s Falcons game.

George started 35 consecutive games for the Falcons, before Jones yanked him after he threw an interception against Philadelphia. Before the interception, George had completed 11 consecutive passes.

He responded by unleashing a stream of profanities toward his coach -- on national television, no less. The Falcons suspended George, tried to trade him and ultimately released him.

Some Atlanta players (though not many) supported their quarterback.

"I don't think the organization stood behind Jeff enough," former Falcons cornerback D.J. Johnson said. "I don't think they ever supported him the way they should have. They left him open for criticism.

"Somewhere along the line, they needed to stand up and say, 'He's our guy.' They needed to say to the fans, 'Stop all this (stuff).' No matter how the people saw it, Jeff's a good guy.

"He's the most physically gifted guy and the toughest quarterback I've ever been around. No one ever gave him the credit he deserved." – Ron Kroichick, San Francisco Chronicle, February 17, 1997. 

There was a lot of armchair psychoanalysis of George in the media throughout his career, with reporters like Kroichick interviewing past coaches and teammates to get a grip on George’s prickly personality. George was a family man but not a people person. He was quiet, except when advocating for himself. He admitted to immaturity during his time with the Colts, but he never outgrew a me-first, smarter-than-the-coaches reputation. His performance surely suffered from his resistance to hard coaching: he had Dan Marino-level talent but remained sack-prone and streaky for his entire career. 

It takes a particular mental/emotional makeup to be a quarterback, just as only certain individuals are cut out to be teachers or lawyers. Not every big, rifle-armed fellow is cut out for the job. That doesn’t make someone like George a bad citizen or human, just a bad fit in his profession. George went as far as pure talent and hard work without “soft skills” could take him. It was not nearly as far as saying “Yes, Coach” a little more often or working on his public persona and/or relationships with teammates might have taken him . Because gosh, the man sure could throw a football.

6. Chris Miller

A first-round pick in 1987, Miller was briefly effective with the Jerry Glanville/June Jones run ‘n’ shoot Falcons in 1991. The Falcons had a 23-43 record with Miller as their starter.

7. Bob Berry

Berry was Norm Van Brocklin’s guy: a stationary pocket presence who took orders and sacks with dignity. Van Brocklin imported Berry from Minnesota and started him whenever he was healthy for five years. A mid-century Mike Glennon.

8. Bob Lee

Van Brocklin liked pocket-bound Vikings imports named Bob. I think he just wanted very badly to show up Fran Tarkenton (who happened to be a Georgia native) by trying to make something of Tarkenton’s backups. Lee, a punter/quarterback, was effective as a field general and handoff machine for the Falcons in 1972. He threw three touchdowns and 14 interceptions while enduring 31 sacks in a half-season of action in 1973, when Van Brocklin was fired.

9. Desmond Ridder

I cannot bear to put late-career Bobby Hebert on this list, creating a hattrick of Bobs, though he surely deserves it. We’ll meet Hebert and give him the star treatment very soon. Ridder was not that awful last year.

10. Kirk Cousins

One typical Cousins season would rank him above Ridder. Two typical Cousins seasons would rank him fifth. Let’s get out of here before this gets any weirder.