There has definitely been some disrespect placed upon the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this off-season. It started with saying the Falcons would win this division, but has quickly gotten to specific players.
There is the usual Mike Evans disrespect, nothing too out of the ordinary. But there have also been some questionable quarterback ranking lists and have included some QBs that I think are worse than Baker Mayfield above him. Hell, even in NFC top ten lists, he wasn’t making it. So, I wanted to determine if Baker could be top ten in the league. Just for funsies.
Now, the first piece to figure out is what top ten actually means. There are a ton of quarterback metrics, like the obvious passing yards, touchdowns, passing TD-INT ratio. However, passer rating is probably the best way of doing this.
For those of you that don’t know, Wikipedia comes in clutch “The NFL passer rating formula includes five variables: pass attempts, completions, passing yards, touchdown passes, and interceptions. Each of those variables is scaled to a value between 0 and 2.375, with 1.0 being statistically average (based on league data between 1960 and 1970). When the formula was first created, a 66.7 rating indicated an average performance, and a 100+ rating indicated an excellent performance.
However, passing performance has improved steadily since then and in 2017 the league average rating was 88.6, and by 2020 it was 93.6.” Now, I want to make it clear, this is not a perfect way of grading a quarterback. But I would argue no way is. I think this is one of the better ways. It doesn’t take into account rushing yards, but Baker is a QB, not like Lamar Jackson (God, that is such a lame joke).
Thankfully, I do not have to do these calculations on my own. Last year, Mayfield had a 94.6 passer rating, which was good for 12th in the league. And before anyone says anything, this is where the stats do indeed lie. Baker had a worse rating than guys like Jake Browning and Derek Carr, who are worse than him, and better than Patrick Mahomes, who is better. I want to make it clear that I am talking about next season. Mayfield can have the best season next year and he wouldn’t be considered a better quarterback than Mahomes.
That being said, if Mayfield improves on last season, he can easily reach top ten in QBR and be considered a top ten quarterback next season. While he won’t have a returning OC, again, he will be playing in the same scheme with nearly the same players. And the players he won’t be playing with have arguably been upgraded. Graham Barton should be a better center than Robert Hainsey and hopefully they get an upgrade at LG (no idea who that will be) and Jalen McMillan should be a solid number 3 receiver. And while people will always disagree on who the best quarterback is, Baker by all accounts should be solid. At the bare minimum, he’s better than Caleb Williams.
