Career ANY/A

Brock Purdy leads the all-time list in Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt with 8.00, and his margin of 0.61 over Patrick Mahomes is almost as large as the entire gap between Mahomes in second place and Russell Wilson in 16th (0.64). In early October Purdy even stood at 8.04, before two games at his normal level of around 7.0 pulled him back down a little. Anyone who hastily concludes from this that the last pick of the 2022 draft is the most efficient quarterback in NFL history should first take a look at what this number actually captures and, just as importantly, what it deliberately leaves out.

It is also remarkable that Purdy now leads the all-time list in classic passer rating as well: at 105.6 he is ahead of Lamar Jackson (102.7), Aaron Rodgers (101.8), Joe Burrow (101.3) and Patrick Mahomes (100.8). As additional evidence, however, this is of limited value, because both metrics draw on the same box-score ingredients (completions, yards, touchdowns and interceptions), with passer rating even ignoring sacks completely. Whoever leads in one formula is therefore almost bound to rank high in the other as well.

The formula Pro Football Reference uses for the table is:

At its core, ANY/A builds on simple yards per attempt but corrects it in three places that are decisive for evaluating a quarterback:

1. Sacks are treated like a pass attempt that ends in negative yardage: the lost yards are subtracted and the sack itself goes into the denominator. A quarterback who holds the ball too long is noticeably punished, one with a quick release correspondingly rewarded.
2. Touchdowns earn a bonus of 20 yards, because a pass that ends in the end zone is worth more than the raw yards it covers; after all, a 5-yard touchdown is more valuable than a 5-yard pass at your own 30.
3. Interceptions cost a flat 45 yards, which is meant to roughly reflect the value of a turnover including the change in field position. A single interception thus outweighs more than two touchdown bonuses.

The basic idea behind this weighting goes back to the 1988 book The Hidden Game of Football by Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer and John Thorn; the variant that includes sacks became established mainly in the analytics community around Chase Stuart (Football Perspective) and at Pro Football Reference. The reason for its popularity is quickly explained: among the metrics that can be computed from the box score alone, ANY/A correlates markedly more strongly with points and wins than the classic passer rating, completion percentage or passing yards.

Two details are also important for understanding the table. First, Pro Football Reference requires at least 1,500 pass attempts for the career list, a mark Purdy only passed this October: after six games of the 2026 season he stands at 1,524 attempts and 86 sacks, that is, 1,610 dropbacks. Second, sack data is only available from the early 1960s on, which is why Otto Graham or Sammy Baugh cannot appear at all, while Johnny Unitas (5.64) or Bart Starr (5.41) are listed but far down. All in all, the metric thus measures one thing above all: how much value a quarterback creates per dropback in the passing game, no more, but no less either.

Anyone who only skims the top 25 will probably notice first that the list is firmly in the hands of the present: twelve of the 25 names are active players, while from the time before the turn of the millennium only three quarterbacks, Steve Young, Joe Montana and Dan Marino, make it into the top 25, and Kurt Warner, whose career began in 1998, is best seen as a link between the eras. At this point at the latest, the question arises whether today’s quarterbacks are really that much better, or whether the league has simply become a different one.

The answer comes from a look at the league average, which has shifted massively over the past decades: while the average ANY/A was still 4.9 in 1985, it stands at 6.1 in the current 2026 season, an inflation of roughly one and a quarter yards per dropback. Essentially three developments are responsible for this:

1. Interceptions have become rarer. The league’s interception rate has more than halved, from 4.2% (1985) to 2.1%, and since every interception costs 45 yards in the formula, hardly any factor affects ANY/A more strongly.
2. Sacks have become rarer. The sack rate fell from 8.3% to 6.4% over the same period, which is related to faster release times, shorter drops and the triumph of the quick game.
3. The rules protect the passing game. From the stricter enforcement of illegal contact in 2004 to the protections for defenseless receivers and quarterbacks in the pocket, the passing game has been made systematically more attractive for years.

But what happens when you strip out this era effect? If you compare every quarterback with the league average of his own seasons, the picture shifts noticeably: Peyton Manning, Steve Young and Joe Montana move up clearly, Lamar Jackson and Aaron Rodgers drop somewhat. At the top, however, nothing changes.

That Purdy still leads by exactly two yards over the league average after this era adjustment is remarkable, because it removes the most obvious counterargument, modern passing inflation, as an explanation. At the same time, the chart shows why Steve Young has been regarded among analytics people for years as one of the most efficient passers in history, even though he sits only at No. 14 in the raw table.

It is also striking who is missing or lands surprisingly far back: Brett Favre, at 5.93, is only No. 46, and John Elway, at 5.60, No. 80, both weighed down by high interception numbers or many sacks. Conversely, Tony Romo (No. 9) and Jimmy Garoppolo (No. 10) stand ahead of Joe Montana, while Tua Tagovailoa is level with him (both 6.60), which already hints that ANY/A rewards a very specific kind of quality. On top of that, the table is a moving target: in the two weeks since October 5 alone, Purdy fell from 8.04 to 8.00, Jordan Love passed Tony Romo for No. 8 at 7.05, and C.J. Stroud climbed into the top 25 for the first time at 6.57. All in all, the raw table is above all a snapshot of the current passing era, and quarterbacks of different generations can only be compared meaningfully with their respective surroundings in mind.

A second look: how to cleanly strip out the era

How reliable is this era comparison really, and does Purdy’s lead hold up when you look more closely at the method? To test that, the league average for 28 quarterbacks, the top 26 of the table as of early October plus Brett Favre and John Elway, was not computed as a simple average of the career years but weighted by the actual dropbacks of each season, with the league ANY/A derived directly from the league totals. A backup year with 20 passes thus no longer counts as much as a full season as a starter, which mainly affects quarterbacks with long apprenticeships such as Aaron Rodgers, Steve Young or Kirk Cousins.

The result is remarkably stable: Purdy stays in front at +2.00 yards, followed by Steve Young (+1.68), Peyton Manning (+1.61), Joe Montana (+1.55) and Dan Marino (+1.42), while Patrick Mahomes, at +1.29, only lands at No. 6, level with Kurt Warner. The big shift thus concerns the rest of the list rather than the top, as the quarterbacks of the 80s and 90s move up en bloc, while many current names such as Josh Allen (+0.62), Joe Burrow (+0.65) or Deshaun Watson (+0.32) drop markedly.

However, the outcome depends on how you measure the distance to the league average, and three possible approaches deserve a closer look here, the first two of which can be toggled in the chart above:

1. Difference in yards. Purdy leads Young by 0.32 yards.
2. Ratio to the league average. If you divide career ANY/A by the league average, the lead almost completely melts away: at 1.334, Purdy is only just ahead of Young (1.326) and Montana (1.307). One yard above average was simply a bigger relative jump in a league where the average was just under 5 than it is today at a good 6.
3. Standard deviations. In its ANY/A+ index, Pro Football Reference works with the spread within a season, that is, with the question of how far a value lay above the rest of the league. Since the differences between good and bad quarterbacks tended to be larger in earlier decades, this method would probably put older peak values into perspective somewhat, but without the season-by-season spreads this cannot be quantified reliably.

Yet even the best era adjustment only answers the question of efficiency per dropback and ignores how long a quarterback sustained that efficiency. If you multiply the lead by the number of dropbacks, you get a kind of total value over the career, and here the picture turns completely.

Peyton Manning and Tom Brady each brought their teams roughly 15,500 yards above the league average, just under five times as much as Purdy with his good 3,200 yards. The case of Brett Favre is also telling: he was only a modest +0.59 yards above average per dropback, yet through his nearly 11,000 dropbacks still created more total value than Tony Romo or Kurt Warner. All in all, the deeper era analysis thus shows two things: Purdy’s efficiency withstands any comparison across eras and is clearly on the level of Young and Montana, but his place in history will only be decided by longevity, and there he is still at the very beginning.

That of all people Mr. Irrelevant of the 2022 draft tops the all-time list is of course a celebration for every Niners fan, but precisely for that reason it is worth taking the 8.00 apart rather than simply celebrating it. So how reliable is this number really? The answer is more complex than it first appears, and it is best answered along three questions.

First: how big is the sample? After six games of the 2026 season, Purdy stands at 1,524 pass attempts and 86 sacks, that is, 1,610 dropbacks. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or Drew Brees each accumulated well over 10,000 dropbacks for their career numbers, including all the weak years, injury seasons and phases of aging. Purdy’s number, by contrast, describes only the years between ages 23 and 27, exactly the phase in which a quarterback is ideally on his way to his peak and does not yet carry any decline years with him.

Second: how evenly is the performance distributed? This is where it gets interesting, because the record rests on two outliers: the 2023 season at 9.01, in which Purdy led the league in yards per attempt (9.6), ANY/A and passer rating (113.0) and finished fourth in the MVP vote, and the current year 2026 at 9.21 so far from just 176 dropbacks: six wins in six games, 14 touchdowns, two interceptions and only five sacks. The past two weeks show how quickly such a small sample moves: after four sack-free games Purdy still stood at 10.46, but the two games that followed came in at around 7.0, right at the level of his “normal” years.

If you take out the strong start to 2026, Purdy’s career value would be 7.85; if you also remove 2023, a value of about 7.28 would remain for 2022, 2024 and 2025. That initially sounds like a debunking, but one should keep the proportions in view: even these “normal” Purdy years would still be above Peyton Manning’s career mark of 7.17 and were at least one yard above the league average in every single season. Purdy has thus not yet played a below-average season in his career; he simply had two extraordinary ones.

Third: where is the number likely headed? If Purdy plays the next 1,000 dropbacks at the level of his 2024 and 2025 years (around 7.0), his career value would drop to about 7.61, still clearly ahead of Mahomes. Only with a fall to 6.5 over 2,000 dropbacks would he land at roughly 7.17, on Peyton Manning’s level. You can play through your own scenarios with the sliders.

No. 1 is thus probably fairly stable in the short term, even if an 8 before the decimal point would likely remain rather unlikely in the medium term.

That leaves perhaps the most important question, which sooner or later comes up in every Purdy discussion: is all of this just the product of a system in which Christian McCaffrey, George Kittle, Deebo Samuel, and since this year Mike Evans as well, do the real work after the catch? It is not quite that simple. Purdy’s completions average 7.0 air yards per catch over his career, and in 2024 his YAC per completion of 5.5 was even below the figures of Jared Goff (6.8) or Lamar Jackson (6.6). A pure dink-and-dunk quarterback whose numbers are inflated solely by his pass catchers looks different. At the same time, it would be naive to deny that Shanahan’s scheme opens up passing windows for him through play-action, motion and consistently created leverage advantages that elsewhere have to be earned first, and it is exactly this question that the next quarter addresses.

Anyone who reads the table through the lens of the coaching tree runs into a pattern that can hardly be dismissed as coincidence anymore: besides Purdy, five more quarterbacks in the top 25, Jordan Love (No. 8), Jimmy Garoppolo (No. 10), Jared Goff (No. 11), Kirk Cousins (No. 15) and Matt Ryan (No. 23), spent a large part of their careers in an offense from the Shanahan or McVay orbit.

But what exactly makes this system so ANY/A-friendly? The answer can essentially be boiled down to three building blocks that reach directly into the components of the formula:

1. Play-action as the foundation. Because the outside zone forces the linebackers into a quick read on every snap, exactly the passing windows open up behind them in which dig, over and crosser routes work. For Purdy, play-action makes up a good fifth of all pass attempts (311 of 1,436 through Week 3 of 2026), and these very passes generate above-average yards per attempt.
2. Motion and leverage before the snap. Jet motion, shifts and bunch formations reveal the coverage structure early and create leverage advantages for the receivers, which lets the quarterback get the ball out faster and with less risk, which in turn pushes down sacks and interceptions, exactly the two quantities the formula punishes hardest.
3. Space after the catch. The routes are designed so that receivers catch the ball in motion and with room in front of them, which makes yards after catch not just chance but part of the plan.

One could thus argue that ANY/A is a metric that structurally measures exactly what these offenses were built for. The clearest evidence is probably provided by Matt Ryan, who was voted MVP in 2016 under Shanahan as offensive coordinator with an ANY/A of around 9.0, a value he never came close to again before or after. With Garoppolo and Cousins as well, their most efficient years were clearly tied to the system, while the numbers outside of it dropped noticeably.

However, it would be too simple to attribute Purdy’s No. 1 entirely to the playbook. For one, Nick Mullens, C.J. Beathard or Trey Lance did not produce anything even remotely comparable over a longer period under the same head coach and with partly the same weapons. For another, Purdy at 8.00 is also clearly ahead of Garoppolo, who played in the exact same scheme for years. The system thus evidently raises the floor on which a quarterback stands; how high he jumps from there, however, still depends on anticipation, accuracy and decision-making, and it is precisely there that Purdy apparently has a real edge over his predecessors in San Francisco. All in all, one can probably conclude that the question “system or player?” is the wrong one: in this case, the answer is quite clearly “system and player.”

As informative as ANY/A may be for passing efficiency, the metric is just as blind to everything that happens outside its formula, and this explains some of the puzzles the table raises at first glance. Four blind spots deserve particular attention.

The quarterback’s running game. Designed runs, scrambles and quarterback sneaks are not included at all, which systematically disadvantages mobile quarterbacks. Josh Allen stands at only No. 17 with 6.72, although hardly any player in the league creates as much value with his legs; his numerous rushing touchdowns, which do not earn 20-yard bonuses in the passing game, simply do not show up here. That Lamar Jackson still stands at No. 3 despite this disadvantage speaks, conversely, more for the idea that his passing was underestimated for a long time. Purdy hardly benefits on this point, by the way, because with a good 700 rushing yards and twelve rushing scores in his career he is more of a situational scrambler.

Game context. ANY/A treats an 8-yard pass on 3rd & 12 the same as one on 3rd & 6, does not distinguish between garbage time and the two-minute drill, and ignores whether a drive starts at your own 20 or at the opponent’s 30 after a turnover. More modern metrics such as EPA per play or CPOE try to close exactly this gap by taking down, distance and field position into account. Moreover, the table counts only the regular season: Purdy’s playoff ANY/A is 6.9 over eight games, noticeably below his career value, while Tom Brady’s postseason résumé is not reflected at all in his career value of 7.06.

The career phase. A career value is always also a question of timing. Peyton Manning carries along his last, injury-ridden season of 2015, Brady his years past 40, and Rodgers is still playing at 42, while Purdy, Love or Burrow have so far collected only years before or at their peak. One is thus comparing completed résumés with open chapters, which structurally favors active players, an effect that should only even out again in a few years.

The assignment of responsibility. Sacks are blamed entirely on the quarterback, although the offensive line, pass protection calls and receivers who fail to get open are at least equally involved. Interceptions off deflected balls count the same as outright bad throws, while fumbles a quarterback loses under pass rush do not enter the formula at all. Purdy’s 16 regular-season fumbles (as of early October), for example, do not show up in his 8.00.

All in all, it turns out that ANY/A is an excellent but narrowly defined metric: it answers very precisely how efficiently a quarterback threw the ball, but not how valuable he was to his team overall.

If ANY/A ignores game context, the obvious question is: what happens when you cross-check the ranking against a metric that takes exactly that context into account? Expected Points Added (EPA) rates every play by how much it changes the expected points of the drive, depending on down, distance and field position. An 8-yard pass on 3rd & 6 is thus worth considerably more than the same pass on 3rd & 12, and the quarterback’s scrambles and designed runs count as well. In addition, success rate measures the share of plays with positive EPA, while CPOE (completion percentage over expected) indicates by how many percentage points a quarterback beats the completion rate you would expect given pass depth, throwing position and coverage.

The basis for this section is an export of 48 quarterbacks (as of October 20, 2026) that covers the 2020 to 2026 seasons, includes every quarterback with at least 1,000 plays and, just like ANY/A, counts only the regular season. To keep the comparison with the ANY/A table fair, however, only the 39 quarterbacks who appear in both lists are considered here: Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye, Bo Nix, Caleb Williams, Drew Lock, Taylor Heinicke, Kenny Pickett, Davis Mills and Zach Wilson are not in the ANY/A career list because they apparently have not yet reached the minimum number of pass attempts, and therefore drop out. New compared with the first version is Jameis Winston, who was missing from the earlier export. All ranks in this section refer to these 39 players. The comparison still has a catch, because the export covers only the seasons since 2020, while ANY/A reflects the entire career; for quarterbacks whose best years came before that, one is therefore comparing different career phases.

The first and perhaps most important result: Purdy is at the very top here as well, and in fact twice over. With an adjusted EPA of 0.279 per play he is ahead of Josh Allen (0.248) and Patrick Mahomes (0.231), and with a success rate of 53.9% he also has the highest value of the 39 quarterbacks, again ahead of Allen (52.7%) and Mahomes (52.0%).

Success rate in particular deserves at least as much attention as CPOE, because it measures something that neither ANY/A nor EPA alone captures: consistency. While a high EPA value can also come from a handful of big plays, success rate shows how often the offense stays on schedule with its quarterback, that is, second & short instead of second & long, third & 3 instead of third & 9. For a scheme like Shanahan’s, which lives on manageable downs and the interplay of outside zone and play-action, that is exactly the decisive value. Statistically, too, success rate offers an independent perspective: among the 39 quarterbacks, the ANY/A ranking aligns strongly with EPA (rank correlation 0.84), much more weakly with success rate (0.64) and least with CPOE (0.47).

The fourth metric is ESPN’s Total QBR, which is also built on EPA but attributes the value of a play more strongly to the quarterback (it takes into account, for example, how much of a gain is down to yards after catch), adjusts for the strength of opponents and converts everything to a scale from 0 to 100 on which 50 corresponds to the league average. Since ESPN does not publish an official career value, a dropback-weighted average of the 2020 to 2026 season values was formed for each of the 39 quarterbacks, now based on the complete Excel overview, which also includes non-qualified seasons. Here too Purdy leads at 71.4, though only by a hair over Allen (71.3) and just ahead of Mahomes (70.3): his strong 85.8 from the 2026 start lifts the average, while his 2022 rookie year at 67.5, which is now included as well, pulls it back down a little. This No. 1, however, depends on the time window: calculated over the entire career, Mahomes would be narrowly ahead at 72.2, because his two strongest years, 2018 (80.3) and 2019 (77.7), would then count, while Allen, with his weak early years, would fall back to 67.2. This section nevertheless deliberately sticks to the period from 2020, so that QBR covers the same seasons as EPA, success rate and CPOE. The gap to Lamar Jackson in fourth (65.8), by contrast, is already considerably larger. As expected, QBR aligns very strongly with EPA (rank correlation 0.92) but also noticeably with success rate (0.83), which makes the metric a kind of bridge between efficiency and consistency.

Finally, the ranking can be cross-checked against FTN’s DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average), which compares every pass with the league average in exactly the same situation, that is, at the same down, distance and field position, and additionally adjusts the result for the strength of the opposing defense. A value of +20% therefore means that a quarterback created 20% more value per pass than an average quarterback in the same situations. The basis is the FTN Football Almanac 2026, which lists the 2023 to 2025 seasons for every active quarterback; a pass-attempt-weighted average was formed from that. Here too Purdy is in front at +28.9%, ahead of Lamar Jackson (+26.6%), Jared Goff (+24.9%) and Jordan Love (+22.2%), while Patrick Mahomes at +9.4% lands only at No. 11, which suggests that a noticeable part of his value comes from scrambles and running, which DVOA does not capture for passes. No values are available for Tom Brady, Jimmy Garoppolo, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Ryan, Derek Carr and Ryan Tannehill because the Almanac lists only active quarterbacks, and Teddy Bridgewater drops out with 15 passes, so the DVOA rank refers to 32 quarterbacks. Within these 32, DVOA aligns closely with EPA (rank correlation 0.84), success rate (0.83) and QBR (0.84).

Even more revealing, however, is the direct comparison with Jimmy Garoppolo, because it answers the question from the third quarter almost as a lab experiment: both collected their numbers largely in the same scheme, under the same head coach and with partly the same weapons. Yet Purdy is clearly ahead in all four metrics: in adjusted EPA with 0.279 versus 0.173 (rank 1 versus rank 9), in success rate with 53.9% versus 50.0% (rank 1 versus rank 10), in CPOE with +4.0 versus +0.4 (rank 2 versus rank 26) and in QBR with 71.4 versus 53.4 (rank 1 versus rank 23), where Garoppolo’s weak 2023 Raiders season is now included as well; limited to his 49ers years from 2020 to 2022, he would come in at 57.4. Remarkably, Garoppolo’s nominal completion rate of 68.4% is even higher than Purdy’s 66.5%. The difference lies in pass depth, as Purdy averages 8.0 air yards per pass and Garoppolo only 7.3: Garoppolo completed the easier passes, Purdy the harder ones, and still keeps the offense on schedule more often.

At the same time, the adjusted rank comparison shows where ANY/A rates the quarterbacks differently than EPA and success rate, and in both directions:

1. Up: Josh Allen jumps from rank 12 in ANY/A to rank 2 in EPA and in success rate, because his rushing production now counts. Similarly, if less extremely, Matthew Stafford improves (rank 18 in ANY/A, rank 11 in EPA, rank 8 in success rate), and above all Ryan Tannehill, who is only at rank 26 in ANY/A but lands at rank 4 in success rate, the classic profile of a quarterback who reliably keeps his offense on schedule without producing many big plays.
2. Down: Russell Wilson (rank 11 in ANY/A, rank 25 in EPA, rank 33 in success rate), Ben Roethlisberger (15, 26, 35), Matt Ryan (16, 27, 23) and Aaron Rodgers as well (4, 13, 18) fall back markedly. The time window probably matters most here, since their career values include the best years before 2020, while the export mainly covers the late career phase.
3. Explosive instead of consistent: Jordan Love is at rank 4 in EPA but only rank 16 in success rate. His value thus comes more from big gains than from consistent progress, which clearly distinguishes him from Purdy, who combines both.

What would an overall rating look like that does not just compare ranks? A pure rank average has two weaknesses: it throws away the gaps, so a razor-thin lead counts as much as a huge one, and it counts the same thing several times, since EPA, QBR and DVOA all essentially measure value per play (rank correlations between 0.84 and 0.92). For the overall index, each metric was therefore first converted into standard deviations above or below the average of the 39 quarterbacks (z-score) and then combined into three equally weighted pillars:

1. Value: mean of the z-scores for EPA, QBR and DVOA (without DVOA, the mean of EPA and QBR).
2. Consistency: z-score of success rate.
3. Precision: z-score of CPOE.

The overall index is the average of these three pillars; a value of +1.0 therefore means that a quarterback is on average one standard deviation above the field. With the sliders you can shift the weighting of the pillars, and for comparison you can switch to the old rank average.

At the top, the new method changes little but makes the gaps visible for the first time: Purdy is at +2.05, clearly ahead of Allen (+1.64), Mahomes (+1.28) and Burrow (+1.26), and reaches more than two standard deviations in both the value (+2.07) and consistency (+2.41) pillars; no other quarterback manages that in even one of the two. In precision only Burrow (+1.90) is ahead of him, and Geno Smith draws level (both +1.68). Further down, quite a lot shifts, because CPOE makes up a full third of the index: Burrow jumps to rank 4, Ryan Tannehill and Teddy Bridgewater land in the top 9, while Jordan Love, who gets his value mainly through big gains, falls back to rank 12. Garoppolo comes in at +0.25 and rank 17: his consistency (+0.85) is decent, but his slightly below-average CPOE (−0.37) and his QBR, lowered by the Raiders season, pull him down.

All in all, the cross-check thus confirms what the era adjustment already suggested: Purdy’s efficiency is not the whim of a single formula but shows up in every metric you apply to him, and the comparison with Garoppolo supplies probably the strongest argument against the thesis of the pure system quarterback.

So what remains of this table once you have examined it from every side? First, the insight that it answers a very specific question, namely who has so far created the most value in the passing game per dropback, and that precisely for this reason it should not be confused with the question of who the greatest quarterback of all time is. A list in which Tony Romo stands ahead of Joe Montana and Jimmy Garoppolo ahead of Steve Young is not a ranking of careers but an efficiency mirror of their respective eras, systems and career timing.

For Brock Purdy, the verdict is nonetheless remarkably positive. The three most obvious objections, modern passing inflation, a small sample and the Shanahan system, do explain why the 8.00 is so high, but none of them fully explains away his lead. Even era-adjusted he is in front, even without his two best seasons he would still be ahead of Peyton Manning, and even in the exact same scheme nobody in San Francisco has so far played anywhere near as efficiently.

The cross-check with EPA, success rate, QBR and DVOA confirms this picture, because there too Purdy leads among today’s quarterbacks, and the direct comparison with Garoppolo makes clear that in the same scheme he delivers harder passes more accurately.

However, one should also be honest about the other side of the ledger: the sample is so small that the top spot, for a quarterback with just 54 regular-season games, is more a snapshot than a legacy. His playoff numbers are clearly below his regular-season level, his running and his fumbles do not appear in the metric at all, and the real test is still to come, namely whether he can hold this level when Kittle, McCaffrey and company have passed their peak due to age and Shanahan’s offense has to reinvent itself once more.

All in all, one can say that Purdy’s No. 1 is less a historical verdict than an interim score, though an interim score that finally puts the discussion about the “system quarterback” on a new footing. Anyone who is at least one yard above the league average in every season after three and a half years as a starter is not a product of chance. Whether an 8 before the decimal point will actually stand at the end of his career (at exactly 8.00 it is already hanging by a thread) only the coming years will show, but the odds that he stays in the top 5 of this list for good look quite good.

I hope this analysis helps you argue the next discussion among friends or in the comment sections with a few more arguments, whichever side you are on.

Chris Pracher

• Pro Football Reference: NFL Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt Career Leaders
• Pro Football Reference: Brock Purdy – Stats, Advanced Passing, Rushing
• Pro Football Reference: NFL Season by Season Passing – League Averages
• Pro Football Reference: 2024 NFL Advanced Passing
• Pro Football Reference, player pages for the season values of the 28 quarterbacks in the era comparison, e.g. Peyton Manning, Steve Young, Joe Montana
• ESPN: 49ers 24-14 Broncos (Oct 4, 2026) Game Recap
• NBC Sports / ProFootballTalk: 49ers beat Broncos 24-14 to move to 4-0
• EPA/play, success rate, CPOE and air yards: provided export quarterbacks-2026-10-20.csv (48 quarterbacks, regular season 2020–2026); earlier version: quarterbacks-2026-10-05.csv
• QBR, passer rating and career ANY/A (as of October 20, 2026): provided Excel file QB_Passing_QBR_2016-2026.xlsx (Pro Football Reference passing data with ESPN Total QBR, seasons 2006–2026); earlier version: QBR_2020-2026
• DVOA: Aaron Schatz (ed.), FTN Football Almanac 2026, FTN Network Group 2026, player commentary on the quarterbacks (seasons 2023–2025)

Era comparison: own calculation from the league totals of Pro Football Reference, weighted by the dropbacks of each season. Season and scenario values for Purdy: own calculation using the ANY/A formula.