Is C.J. Stroud really only the 13th best quarterback in the NFL?!

Is C.J. Stroud a Top 10 quarterback? A top 5 quarterback? A top 15 quarterback? Well, it really all depends on who you ask. Some outlets have him in the Top 10, others in the top five. We currently have him as the Top 8 quarterback in the NFL. Our selection, though, has to do with how he produced in 2023, not necessarily in terms of raw talent.

Pro Football Focus has opted to weigh in on Stroud and unlike other outlets who use their gut, they opted to list the Top 20 quarterbacks by their Pro Football Focus (PFF) scores. For Stroud, that means he comes in at 13th with a PFF score of 83.1.

He's behind one of the most up-and-down, all-over-the-place quarterbacks in Jordan Love, Jalen Hurts, Kirk Cousins, and Jared Goff, all guys we think Stroud is as good as, if not better than then. Obviously, PFF really wants to sell their score as a meaningful stat, it's why they sold themselves to Chris Collinsworth back in the day so that he could get them featured on broadcasts where he's announcing.

But just because PFF takes themselves as the gospel of pro football stat, doesn't mean we or very many people do. They're a nice baseline for a conversation, but anyone who cites them as the core theology for their football arguments is missing a lot of the conversation.

PFF simply truncates the conversation, attempting to boil down everything to a statistic, and trying to quantify said statistic. Not everyone can be measured that way in football. It's not baseball and there isn't a catch-all stat in football (or any sport) that properly highlights the effectiveness of one player over the other.

Stroud may be just 13there here, but he's far from a middle-of-the-road quarterback as his placement would suggest