Shutdown Corner's Overrated and Underrated: All-time quarterbacks

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OVERRATED

Eric Edholm: Donovan McNabb

I realize what I am getting into. Saying that McNabb is overrated, cloaked by the Rush Limbaugh comments of yore, is touchy subject matter. It means you have to dismiss race right away, because that’s what the argument has become.

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If you equate those players’ statistics from their 98 NFL starts over a 161-game template, which is how many games McNabb started in his career, you find that there’s little separating them.

McNabb had a career 59 percent completion rate; the other 11 were at 58.3. McNabb’s yards per attempt were 6.94; the other guys were at 6.93. McNabb won more games and scrambled for more yards than the other 11, but he also lost more fumbles and took more sacks.

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Frank Schwab: Joe Namath

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UNDERRATED

EE: Kurt Warner

I had planned to go with the Cincinnati Bengals’ Ken Anderson here, and there’s little doubting it: he’s underrated. But some quick research showed me that I would be about the 419th NFL writer (apparently none of whom are Hall of Fame voters) who feels the same way. So Ken gets his due again — he’s underrated, folks! — but will have to play second fiddle in this piece.

Instead, we’ll go with Warner, who is eligible for the Hall of Fame for the first time next year. And sadly, I think he’ll get passed up for at least the first year. We’ll truly find out if he’s underrated in the grand scope if he never makes it to Canton, because that would be the crime of the century.

Simply put, Warner is one of the best quarterbacks of the past 25 years. The only ones who have had better careers at the position since Warner entered the league in 1998 have been Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Drew Brees (I am not quite ready to put Aaron Rodgers at that level). And that includes several years of Warner basically wasting away on the bench — he started a total of 31 games over five seasons in between three brilliant ones each with the St. Louis Rams and Arizona Cardinals.

Warner’s 1999 to 2001 production — 98 touchdown passes, 67.2 percent completions and 12,612 and 9.1 yards per attempt — were unheard of at the time. He and Mike Martz helped open up the NFL to a new generation of passers with their wide-open, stress-the-defense style. It was Warner’s ability to read, think and react quickly that put a leaguewide emphasis on quarterbacks being able to handle mass amounts of information in tiny windows of time.

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FS: Drew Brees

Brees is clearly a top 10 all-time quarterback, perhaps top 5. But how often is he really mentioned in that echelon?

Brees has three of the top seven greatest NFL seasons in terms of passing yards. He has three of the top 11 seasons for passing touchdowns. Four of the top 22 seasons in regards to completion percentage, including the top two. Feel free to believe this pass-happy era helped prop up Brees, but that doesn't explain why he has been so much better than most of his peers.

Say that Brees is in a great system, and that's true, but it was true of Joe Montana and Dan Fouts too. Bring up that Brees has had great teammates, but is that really true? Some of the best skill position players around him in New Orleans through the years were Jimmy Graham, Marques Colston, Lance Moore, Darren Sproles and Pierre Thomas ... who were taken in the third round, seventh round, undrafted, fourth round and undrafted, respectively. They were all talented players, but they also benefited from catching passes from Brees.

And, winning a Super Bowl with the Saints allows Brees to remove the "Yeah, but ... " that most critics like to employ when they want to downgrade a quarterback. That should be a tiebreaker, if one is needed, when he's compared to quarterbacks like Dan Marino or Fouts. Brees has it all except an MVP award, and he should have won one in 2009.

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