Quarterback is the most important position in football, and as the league turns more towards a dominant passing attack, the QB has risen up the list of priorities of fantasy managers as well.

In part two of this series, I described what I called “death knell stats.” These are characteristics that if a quarterback fails to measure up to, they are nearly sure to be doomed as a professional. In part three, the inverse of the “death knell” is discussed, that being the “success standard.” A success standard is a threshold that can be shown in college that reflects an incredibly high likelihood of success in the NFL.

This is where we butter our bread in this model.  In short, you want players like these on your team. Let's dive into the stats to see what a successful NFL (and fantasy football) quarterback is made of.

Success Standards for Quarterbacks

3.0 TD/INT Ratio

Many people have pointed to characteristics that are cause for QBs to fail in the NFL, but on the other hand, it is incredibly rare to find someone talking about characteristics inherently tied to success.  After combing through my analysis of 81 modern QBs, I found something that almost certainly predicted a competent starter on the next level.  Nearly every QB in my sample that had a higher than 3:1 TD/INT ratio was a long-term starter/ “successful QB”.

Throwing three touchdowns for every interception often shows a QB has a strong propensity towards good decision making.  This is not as much a team statistic as wins or games played, but something that is often internal to the QB.  A skill position player can bat down a poorly thrown pass, but the players that consistently make great decisions will have this tendency burned into their numbers at this 3:1 level.

Players who showed this dominance in college who are now in the NFL are as followed: Carson Wentz, Dak Prescott, Derek Carr, Teddy Bridgewater, Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, Alex Smith, Andrew Luck, Sam Bradford, Marcus Mariota, Cam Newton, Colin Kaepernick, Mitch Trubisky, and Pat Mahomes.  The strong presence of perennial Pro-Bowlers in this list indicates the strong predictive quality of the standard year in and year out.

Unfortunately, this is not a fool-proof statistic, it’s simply the strongest single indicator I’ve found.  There have been notable flat performances by players that logged these numbers in college. Thankfully, my same model shows that there were serious problems with many of these players as well.  Here’s a list of the players that didn’t live up to the hype: RG3, Geno Smith, Bryce Petty, Tim Tebow, Case Keenum, and Connor Cook.  Each of these players are accounted for in the model as higher risk than their TD/INT ratio would suggest. Each of these players (accept for Tebow), forecasted their failure in other substantial ways.

The list of success is much longer than failure, and some of the best QBs in the league fall into the former. We’re building towards our complete picture of how one should draft with confidence.

Games Started and Won Combination

Once again, no characteristic is full proof, but the other major standard of success the model suggests is a combination of a QB who started at least three years of games, and won a vast majority of them.  If a QB stars more than 32 games and wins more than 70% of them, they frequently succeed in the NFL.  John Paulsen at Scoresreport did a bit of this work back in 2010 and the stats have maintained their consistency since then. You can see his correlation below.

Here’s another list of successful QBs who fit this model: Kirk Cousins, Derek Carr, Matt Stafford, Dak Prescott, Phillip Rivers, Matt Ryan, Eli Manning, Russell Wilson, Big Ben, Andrew Luck, and the list goes on.  There are only a few QBs that have failed under these conditions, only Case Keenum, Tim Tebow, Pat White, and EJ Manual fit into this rare company.  Clearly you want someone that sticks with you and wins for you.  If they do that in college. They’re likely to do it in the NFL.

These characteristics mesh with the standard logic of the NFL, but now you are armed with a refined understanding of what is clearly designated as success.  A quarterback does not have to show these elite characteristics on the next level as Tom Brady only had a 1.8 TD/INT ratio, and Aaron Rodgers started 22 games, but this threshold makes your life easy as a dynasty drafter.  The more of these characteristics a player demonstrated in college, the more likely they are to succeed as professionals.

QB Success/Failure Analysis Series