Walkthrough Preview: Ranking the Ranking Rankings

Winning without a #1 receiver, taking the 49ers temperature and learning to flush QB rankings before thinking about them for more then six nanoseconds.

Walkthrough, the Most Respected, Least Respectable Monday NFL column on the Internet, returns on July 29th! Consider this Walkthrough Minus One, but without the kaiju or the kamikaze pilot with survivor’s guilt.

All wide receivers are created equal. Some are more equal than others

The problem with trying to win without a #1 receiver is that the team attempting it usually lacks a #2 receiver as well.

Take the Buffalo Bills. They traded Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans, partly for cap relief, partly for some peace and quiet. They hope to reach the Super Bowl with Josh Allen throwing to a wide receiver committee. Fair enough, except the committee consists of:

Curtis Samuel: Generic nifty-shifty slot guy known for gobbling up short passes for terrible teams.

Khalil Shakir: Another slotty guy. Shakir was a fifth-round pick in 2022 and was pretty good in the second half of last year, going 25-444-1 in the final nine regular-season Bills games and 10-77-2 in the playoffs. But no one would mistake him for, say, Jayden Reed.

Marquez Valdes-Scantling: the Ted McGinley of wide receiver committees.

Keon Coleman: a rookie Diet Deebo with a solid 40-time for a 245-pound linebacker.

Mack Hollins: A special teams ace who runs fast in straight lines.

Andy Isabella: Clearance-rack Cole Beasley.

Chase Claypool: Will be a “surprise” cut at the end of training camp.

If you were assembling some Madden build-a-team, would any of these guys even be your ideal #2 receiver? Maybe Samuel or Shakir if Ja’Marr Chase was your #1 and you spent all your other resources on edge rushers or something. 

I omitted tight end Dalton Kincaid from the list above. He can certainly act as a steady, high-volume possession receiver. Wouldn’t it be great to have both a steady, high-volume possession receiver AND a young tight end instead of one guy in a dual role?

Friend-of-the-Zone Doug Farrar wrote at length about the virtues of life without a #1 receiver in an SB Nation feature that Bills fans likely found reassuring. Check it out: it’s full of detailed tactics which can work for teams that lack elite talent, and will work even better for teams that don’t. Farrar doesn’t classify Brandon Aiyuk or Amon-Ra St. Brown as true #1 receivers, which is understandable, but the Bills would sell a kidney for an Aiyuk or St. Brown right now. St. Brown could be that possession receiver I mentioned in the previous paragraph. 

The Chiefs, of course, have just won two Super Bowls without a #1 receiver. All it took was a Hall of Fame quarterback, head coach and tight end, plus a division full of patsies to sweeten their regular-season record. Tom Brady’s Patriots did the same thing in the late 2010s using the same formula. It’s possible to win without a #1 receiver, but let’s stop well short of calling it preferable, because it's always better to have better players. 

To look at this another way: if Shakir or Coleman were to suddenly morph into Justin Jefferson, Sean McDermott would not scream, “No! There goes my hope of an egalitarian receiver paradise!” The Bills would throw their new superstar 15 targets per game and be the better for it. Making do without a #1 receiver is a justifiable compromise, not a philosophical doctrine. 

The Bills improved down the stretch last year when Diggs played a diminished role in their offense, a fact many fans and analysts have clung to like Rose to a wooden plank since the Diggs deal. To rehash some other important co-variables: the Bills also changed offensive coordinators at the same time, faced the belly-up Chargers and Patriots, scored 20 points to beat the Chiefs and 21 to beat the freefalling Dolphins. As a team, the Bills were outstanding down the stretch. As an offense, any improvement was slight and more qualitative (they ran more and played less heroball) than quantitative (they were, after all, rather good at heroball). And Diggs still led the Bills in receptions from Week 15 through the playoffs (30 catches), though some of them were get-him-the-ball-to-keep-him-quiet throws.

Much of the conversation around Diggs in Buffalo is just a variation on Ewing Theory, Bill Simmons’ old hypothesis that Patrick Ewing actually hurt the 1990s Knicks because they tied themselves in knots to feed him the ball. I am no basketball expert, but Ewing Theory always sounded like corny Boston homer logic to me. The Knicks are wicked stoopid. The Celtics embody everything that is good and noble about the human spirit. I don’t doubt that five very good players, either on the hardcourt or at the skill positions, are better than one superstar and four scrubs. But again, the teams that protest such a point the loudest are the teams that are about to go into action with five scrubs. Or in the Bills’ case: an exciting young tight end, two mid-tier prospects, some role players and Marquez Valdes-Scrubling. 

No one needs contrarian reasoning to put a positive spin on the Diggs trade. The Bills got rid of an expensive 30-year old malcontent, and they used the resources they saved to retain key players at other positions. There’s a battle of attrition atop the AFC standings, and the Diggs departure allowed the Bills to lose less than they might have, keeping them roughly on par with the Chiefs and Ravens (whose receiver corps also bear little resemblance to the 1999 Vikings). The Bills are poised to win this year with offensive/defensive rushing/passing balance, not passing-game fireworks. The Diggs trade was a tactical withdrawal, but a shrewd, effective one, and it extended the team’s Super Bowl window beyond 2024: a wise gambit in a division where the Jets and Dolphins have no plans beyond this year. 

The Bills’ biggest issue at the dawn of camp is not their receiving corps but their schedule, the toughest in the NFL according to Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac. The Bills host the Chiefs and Niners late in the year but visit the Ravens and Texans early. A December Rams-Lions road trip doesn’t sound fun. The silver lining to the tough slate is that it’s back-heavy: the Bills will figure out which of their receivers are useful and which are Chase Scrubpool well before they hit the roughest stretch.

The AFC East also figures to be tough. The Jets are cloaked in an LOL Field right now: stanning for them sounds like either an endorsement of Aaron Rodgers’ general rodgersness or a prefabricated hOt tAeK, so serious analysts approach them like a potato fresh from the air fryer. 

The Almanac has an 8.9 win projection for the Jets, and that feels low to me. There’s probably lots of variance baked into the Jets projection: some 11-12 win seasons even with a declining Rodgers, some six-win meltdowns when his Achilles tendon or brain turns to pudding. If Derek Carr were their quarterback, the Jets defense would win nine games for them. A creaky Rodgers should be at least as good. 

The Dolphins are also hovering on the fringe of an LOL Field. It’s cute how sweaty and desperate they are to keep their overpriced/overrated Wild Card powerhouse intact. The Dolphins are projected by the Almanac to have more wins than the Bills. I don’t see it: the Dolphins are built to daisy-stomp inferior opponents, but their schedule is almost as hard as the Bills’ schedule. The Bills visit Miami in September, however, where it might be 200 degrees. (It’s a night game, but that only means it will be more like a double boiler than a broiler.) 

(The LOL Field, which emanates from the Dallas Cowboys, should not be confused with the Browns’ Don’t Make Me Say Nice Things about the Scuzzball Quarterback Field, despite some surface similarities.)

The Patriots have a surprising 7.1-win projection because of their defensive talent. Exactly 7-10 sounds right for them. They face the Bills in Weeks 16 and 18, which means icy nonsense might be a factor in both games, which favors randomness, which can work in favor of the weaker team.

It’s reasonable to project a 4-2 division record for the Bills: splits with the Jets and Dolphins, a hard-earned sweep of the Patriots. The Chiefs, meanwhile, should go 6-0 in the Wayward Coaching Savior Division. The Ravens have a tough divisional slate but face the NFC East and AFC West: their schedule starts off like a nightmare (at Dallas in Week 1, at Kansas City in Week 3, Bills in Week 4) but has lots of Easter Eggs scattered about. 

The Bills, in short, have no margin for error as well as no #1 wide receiver. A Super Bowl contender would generally benefit from having either one or the other.

“Kumbaya,” sing the 49ers, eyeing each other’s paychecks. 

The 49ers’ Super Bowl projection in the Almanac is high. Holy-shmow, check-for-typos high. They have a 31.9% chance to win the NFC, per DVOA analysis. That equates to a +215 moneyline. The house is at +250. The 49ers have better odds to reach the Super Bowl, per the Almanac, than the Falcons have to reach the playoffs. They are more than seven times more likely to reach the Super Bowl than the Eagles are. It’s staggering. 

The 49ers deserve to be NFC favorites, but I don’t see the prohibitive juggernaut DVOA sees. The 49ers face two interconnected challenges, one tangible, one ethereal.

Bryan Knowles pointed out the first challenge in his Almanac 49ers chapter: the team finished fourth in Adjusted Games Lost last year – they enjoyed enviable health, in other words – and even that number feels high because they were at more-or-less full strength down the stretch. Their one period of relative misfortune coincided with a three-game losing streak. The fully-optimized 49ers are better than any team in the NFL. But we barely know what they might look like when coping with a league-average midseason injury report.

The ethereal challenge will be bouncing back from their second heartbreaking Super Bowl in four years. As fans/bettors/prognosticators, we have no problem pricing dysfunction into Eagles projection, placing a Jerrah Tax on Cowboys predictions or assuming that the Rodgers Jets will once again explode on the launch pad, but we expect touchy personalities and undercompensated individuals like Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk and George Kittle to not only hold hands around the campfire but place their unguarded trust once again in Brock Purdy and Kyle Shanahan. 

I’m no Purdy basher (see the final segment), but we just watched Jalen Hurts fail to pull the Eagles out of a late-season skid which had as much to do with self-doubt as coverage lapses or coaching blunders. If the 49ers start pointing fingers or slumping, is Purdy ready to carry the team on his shoulders? Even if you adore Purdy, you must admit that he will have to climb down from theirs first. 

(And don’t try to sell me about Kittle, Trent Williams or Nick Bosa as “locker room leaders.” The Eagles had a dozen of them last year.)

I’m borrowing all this 49ers trouble just a few days after the Aiyuk trade demand, which won’t amount to much. The 49ers will sprinkle some new money onto this year’s deal and offer a no-tag promise for 2025 in a few weeks; Aiyuk will tire of daily fines and report to camp. He’ll then play for his next contract, which will make him ultra-motivated, which in turn could make him ultra-testy if Purdy isn’t getting him the ball enough. 

I am also writing a few days after Jerry Rice threw a snit fit on a reporter asking an innocuous question about whether the Chiefs receiving corps is good enough to win another Super Bowl. Rice thought the reporter was “smirking” and interpreted the question as 49ers disrespect.

Rice left the 49ers 24 years ago; if he has a hair-trigger temper about even a wisp of snark or slander, how do you think the ever-aggrieved Deebo is feeling?

Meanwhile, former kicker Robbie Gould told longtime 49ers reporter Matt Maiocco that financial negotiations with the team “take a toll on your relationships.” If that’s how 40-year old kickers feel, what about a 26-year old receiver like Aiyuk? 

Kyle Juszczyk told Maiocco earlier in the summer that being asked to take a pay cut “hurts your ego and hurts your heart a little bit." Face it, Niners fans: if Cowboys players were talking like this, you’d be laughing and penciling in a seven-win catastrophe.

All of this is academic: if the 49ers projection was at 23.9% instead of 31.9% I would not have blinked. Furthermore, any team could also have injuries that snowball into a confidence crisis. From a narrative standpoint, it just feels like the 49ers are given immunity from such a problem simply because it has not happened yet, even though the tremors are audible. From an analytics standpoint, last year’s excellent health contributes to this year’s maximum-strength projection. 

With everyone at full strength, the 49ers are the best team in the NFL. And if any little thing goes wrong, the 49ers, their fans and even their legends will be sure to let us all know. 

If you’re assembling a 2019 All-Pro squad, why not keep Derrick Henry?

The Tennessee Titans signed Jamal Adams earlier in July, and seriously, what the f**k are the Titans doing?

Adams has not been relevant since 2020. Tyler Boyd has been in slow decline since 2019, with his receiving yardage total dropping every single year in that span. Deandre Hopkins’ last great year was 2020, though he produced some fine bulk fantasy numbers last year. Calvin Ridley also had solid high-volume fantasy stats for a Jaguars team that fell apart down the stretch in 2023; before that, he lost most of two seasons to a gambling suspension and personal issues. Sure, the L’Jarius Sneed trade looks pretty good in a vacuum. But otherwise, Ran Carthon is building the Titans roster as if he were a ChatGPT program that has no access to the post-pandemic Internet.

Oh, Carthon has a plan, and it’s not that foolish. He’s building veteran scaffolding around Will Levis. If Levis develops into a franchise quarterback thanks to a veteran receiving corps, no one will quibble about the short-term costs. If Levis does what he’s likely to do – turn into this year’s version of Sam Howell, Desmond Ridder or Kenny Pickett – it won’t be for want of trying. Adams himself doesn’t fit this hypothesis, but an edge rusher the size of a high school small forward doesn’t really fit any hypothesis.

Going back to the “#1 receiver” theory at the top of this treatise, the Titans lack a true #1 receiver from this decade, but many of their receiving options have one (and only one) elite trait:

• Hopkins can still outjump defenders and make contested catches. He just needs a golf cart to get down the field.

• Ridley has elite deep speed and acceleration, to go with the attention span of a guppy.

• Boyd knows Brian Callahan’s offense inside and out, which is almost as good as knowing it in the normal way.

• Tony Pollard should be a cautionary tale about how the fantasy community overrates change-up running backs and drives the conversation about them, but it’s not like he’s going to blow assignments or anything.

• Treylon Burks ………………..

Gosh, ran out of even remotely positive things to say when I got to Burks. But he’s likely to be nothing more than a WR4! If he even makes the team!

The Titans receiver corps is better than the Bills receiver corps: Ridley at his flightiest is better than anyone the Bills have, Coleman may be another Burks, and you’d pencil in a dozen jump-ball touchdowns for Nuk if Allen was the one throwing to him. No other Titans unit comes close to Bills quality, but of course the Titans hope to transform Levis into Allen, because that’s the mirage every team with a big/fast/accurate-as-a-boardwalk-Tarot-reading quarterback chases. If the once-per-generation alchemy works a second time, the Titans can figure out the rest. 

The biggest question surrounding the 2024 Titans is not whether they will be interesting (no), relevant (no) or anything but cannon fodder for stronger teams (no), but whether they can scratch out more than 6.5 wins at a +120 moneyline. The Almanac gives them an encouraging 7.6-win projection which speaks to the awesome power of central tendency: overpay for a below-average roster in a below-average division and you have a great chance of coming away with below-average results! Over 8.5 wins at +330 is within range of the Titans’ projection, and it’s not hard to find nine wins on their schedule if Anthony Richardson goes Full Justin Fields and Doug Pederson starts hitting the midday ice cream discounts in August.

This year’s Titans remind me of the Mike Maccagnan/Todd Bowles 2015 Jets, who went 10-6 because they built their offense out of aging Ryan Fitzpatrick, Brandon Marshall and Eric Decker. This experiment is not nearly as silly, because there’s a 5% chance it catapults Levis to stardom. The most likely end result, however, is a potential rebuilding year wasted on overspending on a guy with a 3rd-and-20 chance of becoming a franchise quarterback.

Ranking the quarterback ranking rankings

Something Bryan Knowles wrote in the 49ers chapter of the Almanac (which we discussed earlier) resonated with something which has bothered me since the Justin Herbert Wars of late 2022:

Even if Purdy was solely a product of the system and the talent around him, he was still playing in that system with all that talent there—and he’ll be doing it again in 2024. It will remain irrelevant for about eight months, until it becomes exceptionally relevant when Purdy is finally eligible for a contract extension. San Francisco will have another year’s worth of data on just how good Purdy is before making that decision, but that means we’ll all have to suffer through another season of Discourse. Joy of joys.

The same can be said, in reverse, about Herbert. Even if his incalculable greatness is somehow limited by circumstances, those circumstances are still there. In fact, they have gotten worse. It doesn’t matter what we think of a quarterback isolated from his great (or awful) playmakers, blockers, coaches and other circumstances when that quarterback is not going to be isolated from those circumstances for the foreseeable future. 

ESPN’s quarterback rankings, based on a poll of coaches/players/executives, came out at about the same time as the Almanac. Here is the much-disseminated-and-discussed top ten:

1. Patrick Mahomes, Kansas City Chiefs 

2. Joe Burrow, Cincinnati Bengals

3. Josh Allen, Buffalo Bills

4. Lamar Jackson, Baltimore Ravens

5. Matthew Stafford, Los Angeles Rams

6. Justin Herbert, Los Angeles Chargers

7. C.J. Stroud, Houston Texans

8. Aaron Rodgers, New York Jets

9. Jared Goff, Detroit Lions

10. Dak Prescott, Dallas Cowboys

I could quibble with the list in a dozen different ways – Herbert over Dak Prescott is looney toons, and Stroud next to Rodgers illustrates the perils of vague, context-free criteria – but the main issue with the list is that it serves no purpose except to drive web traffic in mid-July. A quarterback’s “ability,” untethered to any actual goal and placed along a single continuum, is just some abstract theoretical construct. Rankings based on such abstractions are just itemized counts of the angels on the head of a pin.

Super Bowls are not won by having the greatest quarterback, but by having a quarterback good enough to lead a particular team to victory in the Super Bowl. For the 2023 49ers, that was Purdy, who left the field with the lead in overtime. For the 2024 Chargers, that almost certainly does not mean Herbert; even Herbert’s biggest boosters would admit that he’s the least likely quarterback on the list above to still be playing in late January.

Fantasy leagues are not won by having the greatest quarterback, either, but by having the quarterback who provides enough statistics to carry you past your rivals, assuming that you guessed right and picked the running backs who did not get hurt or decline. Jalen Hurts is a top fantasy quarterback, as well as one who has demonstrated the ability to lead a team to the Super Bowl. Projecting whether Hurts will run as many goal-line sneaks this year as last is useful for fantasy gamers. Projecting whether Hurts will fit in the new Eagles offense and shake off last December’s team-wide mega-slump is useful for wagerers. Debating whether Hurts should rank 5th or 15th according to some lumpy definition of quality is just midnight-in-the-dorms philosophizing.

The MVP award is not won by the best quarterback, but the quarterback who accomplishes the most in a given set of circumstances. Purdy led the NFL in DVOA, DYAR and lots of rate categories but was never given serious consideration. (An awful game against the Ravens torpedoed him, but he was a fringe candidate even before that.) Nor was Mahomes, undoubtedly the best quarterback of his generation and an obvious victim of his wide receicers. Perceived “quality” is certainly one of the factors in winning the MVP award, but it ranks behind team results, individual statistics, and things like “big-game/moment performances” which some analysts despise but are reasonable criteria for an award for what a player did (as opposed to a prediction of what he might do).

Everything is about context and results. Everything SHOULD be about context and results. Opinions about the NFL should be actionable: this team will win the Super Bowl, reach the playoffs, win on Sunday; that player will lead the NFL in yards, win Rookie of the Year, throw for 30 touchdowns and run for 10 more. If we can’t express our assessments in terms of tangible expectations, then they lack value.

That’s not to say film study is useless, only that it too often is siloed in an observations-for-their-own-sake echo chamber. Bryan points out in the Almanac that CBSSports.com ranked Purdy second in its quarterback power rankings after the draft, while The Ringer ranked him 22nd. ESPN listed Purdy among the honorable mentions. CBS’ ranking of Purdy ahead of Allen and Jackson looks silly, but CBS’ rankings are more likely to jibe with what we see on the field in 2024: a guy throwing tons of touchdown passes for a powerhouse. The Ringer’s rankings, fueled by their popular film grinders, may have more long-term value – by 2025, Herbert could be producing much better results than Purdy because of his superior traits – but what happens two years from now is totally speculative and only of specialized, marginal interest. 

The Chargers were +110 to reach the playoffs at DraftKings on July 16th. The Almanac’s projection translates to a +470 moneyline. It’s a shocking disparity, and it’s the direct result of both the Herbert Hive and Jim Harbaugh’s reputation. Herbert has the NFL’s worst receiving corps, and Harbaugh is clearly in rebuilding/culture change mode. It doesn’t matter if you think Herbert is the sixth-best or 12th-best quarterback (even I could not justify placing him any lower) quarterback in the NFL, nor if you worship at Harbaugh’s khaki altar: the Chargers +110 is a horrendous bet.

In fact, I wagered the Chargers UNDER +8.5 wins at +130. I was tempted to go under 6.5 wins at +370 – their Almanac projection is way down at 6.7 wins – but I don’t trust the Raiders or Broncos enough. I was tempted to take some Herbert-skeptical props as well, but Herbert’s touchdown over-under is just 22.5, lower than those of Purdy (28.5) and others like Tua Tagovailoa (25.5) and Caleb Williams (23.5). The house may be bullish on the Chargers, but it still believes that Herbert’s brilliance, like modern classical music, is best appreciated by the purists.

Arif Hasan posted a feature titled “Is Jared Goff Good?” at his Wide Left Substack last week. Arif is being ironic in the headline, of course: the feature is largely about perceptions-versus-expectations-versus-results at a position where, in his words, “average is generally not considered good enough.” But the fact that Arif can elicit laughs and reactions from such a title illustrates the issue. Goff led one team to a Super Bowl, then a second team to within some dropped fourth-down passes of getting there, yet still gets the “nyuk, nyuk, he sux” treatment from not just trolls but tastemakers who then wax rhapsodically about the notes of grapefruit and lemongrass in Herbert’s Triple IPA (and are polishing Stroud’s Canton bust based on a small sample).

Quarterback evaluation has become increasingly divorced from anything remotely quantifiable, hence the beer-tasting and music appreciation metaphors. Goff and Purdy may compete for another NFC Championship, but neither had a chance to win the coveted Critics Choice Award.

We’re all out here trying to infotain you, whether through stats, film study, inside access, jokes, big-picture analysis or some combination thereof. Quarterback arguments are the drivetrain of our poor, collapsing industry: a problem in and of itself, but one that cannot be solved by shouting at clouds. They can also be fun! All I ask of anyone making any evaluation of a player or team is to focus less on what they are than on what they will do. Place a benchmark or goal on your observations, a value in terms of wins-stats-awards on your opinions. Tell me what would validate your judgment or make you go back to the drawing board. Otherwise, forgive me for just lumping your opinion atop a colossal mountain of them and focusing on content with a little more food value.