There are fewer “elite” QBs in the NFL than you’ve been told

We’ve become surprisingly casual with the word “elite.” One of the most common shortcuts for “elite QBs” in the NFL is counting Super Bowl rings. That may have worked forty years ago.

The problem is that rings have become a remarkably poor way of separating truly elite quarterbacks from everyone else.

When nearly one-quarter of the NFL’s starting quarterbacks own a Super Bowl ring, winning one can no longer be the benchmark for elite quarterback play.

Think about it. Elite literally means rare. If almost one fourth of starting quarterbacks satisfy your definition… your definition is wrong.

But that hasn’t always been the case. Somewhere during the early stages of the Super Bowl era (Super Bowl I was played after the 1966 season) the idea of the elite QB must have been born, and with it the notion that an elite QB had to have won a Super Bowl ring. And that notion held true throughout the 70s and 80s when only a select few QBs in the league were actual Super Bowl winners.

• Up until 1991, there were never more than four or five active QBs in the league with a Super Bowl ring to their name.
• From 1992 to 2006, the NFL averaged 5.3 active Super Bowl-winning QBs, with the total never exceeding six in any single season.
• In the 12 years from 2007-2018, the average climbed to 7.3, and six seasons had eight active Super Bowl-winning QBs playing at the same time.
• In 2019 the number of QBs with a ring peaked at nine, and the average through 2025 stayed high at seven.
• In 2026, there will be six QBs with a Super Bowl ring playing in the NFL.

Whether the increase is driven by player longevity, free agency, the salary cap, or simple chance doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a Super Bowl ring no longer separates the truly exceptional from the merely accomplished.

If we’re looking for “elite,” we need a better definition.

One way of doing that is by quantifying how much better a given quarterback was versus his peers who were playing at the same time. ProFootballReference.com provides such a metric which they call Passer Rating Index (or Rate+) and which calculates a QB’s passer rating relative to his NFL peers playing at the same time.

body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 4px 6px !important; } **Passer Rating Index (Rate+)**For each NFL season, PFR.com compute two things:

1. The league average passer rating for the three-year period with the given year in the middle.

2. The standard deviation of the stat for all individuals who had 14 or more pass attempts per scheduled game during the three-year period.

Next, they compute how many standard deviations away from the league average each player was in each of his seasons. Then they multiply that number by 15 and add...