Over the past month or so, I have been devising a way to measure QB performance outside of the norm that accounts for opponent strength instead of just the stats amassed. This basically all stemmed from an argument from the Student Union Slack group on who the best QB in the Big Ten was. I’m here to tell you that it is not JT Barrett like some people thought.

My methodology was to take QB stats from every individual game for the 120 QBs with the most pass attempts this season and then adding in some notable backups I thought of, bringing my total sample to 125 players. I used passing stats from every college football team since 2012 to come up with a correlation factor between each of these factors and winning percentage. This then devised a formula to measure each quarterback’s contribution to that win. I then plugged in the defensive stats for every team to measure by how much or how little each QB outperformed the average of these. The final numbers left me a little bit puzzled in some places, but I will stand by them until something better comes along. Keep in mind that these rankings also don’t account for QB running ability, something I hope to add in the future. It seems to me as if this method really values efficiency, which seems to be one of the most important things for a college QB to have.

Over the next week, I will be releasing a top 10 QBs in every conference, the bottom QBs in the country, the biggest surprises, and finally, the culmination of it all will be a top ten ranking of all the quarterbacks. Since it takes hours of work to update the numbers, these figures are only going to be go through November 14th and then I will update them once the season comes to a close. Please tell me what you think about these rankings on Twitter (@CodyGoggin) or in the comments section on here. I’d love to hear from you.