2026 Quarterback Rankings: What the Numbers Actually Say - 8/3/2026
We built our QB rankings the same way we build everything else — start with the real Vegas number, add every category the market actually prices, and let the math sort out who's actually valuable instead of who's just famous. A few names moved a lot once we did that. Here's the full list, and why it looks the way it does.
The Biggest Surprise: Josh Allen Is #1, and It's Not Close
If you ranked quarterbacks by passing yards alone, Josh Allen doesn't crack the top eight. His 3,629 projected passing yards trail Joe Burrow, Matthew Stafford, Dak Prescott, Jared Goff, and four others. But add in his 9
bile QB — and he jumps to the top of the board entirely. In a scoring system that pays 6 points a touchdown regardless of how it happens, a quarterback who can add 50-plus points purely from his legs has a real, quantifiable advantage that pure passing stats hide completely.
This is exactly the kind of gap we built this site to find. Allen isn't the QB1 because he's the most talked-about. He's QB1 because the math says so once you stop ignoring half his value.
The Mobile QB Tier Overperforms Across the Board
Allen isn't alone. Lamar Jackson, Drake Maye, and Jalen Hurts all land in the top four, ahead of pure pocket passers with far bigger passing yardage totals. Jaxson Dart cracks the top nine. Jayden Daniels — who has the single highest rushing yardage projection in the entire league at 780 yards — still lands outside the top six, which tells you something too: rushing yards alone don't move the needle nearly as much as rushing touchdowns do in a 6-point system. Volume matters less than scoring.
The Elite Passers Still Matter — They're Just Not Automatically #1 Anymore
Joe Burrow (5th), Matthew Stafford (6th), and Dak Prescott (8th) all still land comfortably in the top tier. These are the highest pure passing-volume projections in the league, and in a system that pays real points for yardage, that volume still counts for a lot. What's changed isn't that these quarterbacks got worse — it's that rushing production, when it's real, closes the gap faster than most rankings give it credit for.
The Quiet Middle Class: 10 Through 18
This is where things flatten out. Jared Goff, Brock Purdy, Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, Jordan Love, Sam Darnold, Bo Nix, Caleb Williams, and Baker Mayfield all sit within about 40 points of each other. None of these are bad quarterbacks — they're just pocket passers without a rushing floor, which caps their upside in this scoring format compared to the names above them. If you're building a roster and need a reliable QB2 or a streaming option, this tier is deep and interchangeable.
Where the Real Risk Sits: 19 Through 25
C.J. Stroud, Tyler Shough, Aaron Rodgers, Cam Ward, Bryce Young, Malik Willis, and Fernando Mendoza round out the list. A few of these are lower-volume situations by design (Mendoza in a slow-developing Raiders offense, Willis in a new system in Miami), and a couple are simply talent or opportunity questions that the market hasn't resolved yet. Worth watching, not worth relying on.
The Full Rankings
(See the complete table with exact passing yards, passing TDs, rushing yards, rushing TDs, and total projected points on our Rankings page.)
One Honest Caveat
This table doesn't yet include interceptions or rushing touchdowns for pocket passers, because there's no real Vegas market pricing those categories for most quarterbacks. That means guys like Burrow, Stafford, and Prescott are being scored purely on their upside here, with no downside risk factored in yet. Once that data becomes available — usually closer to final roster cuts — expect these rankings to tighten. We'll update this table the moment real numbers exist. We won't fill the gap with a guess in the meantime.
