Sam Darnold has a championship ring, back-to-back Pro Bowl nods and two straight 14-win seasons on his résumé. That still wasn’t enough to keep him from landing at No. 14 in Pro Football Focus’ quarterback rankings for the 2026 season.
That placement is the kind of number that jumps off the page, especially when the list is built around a league where only 32 teams exist. PFF has Darnold and Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts, the last two quarterbacks to win the Super Bowl, sitting at 14 and 15. In other words, both are graded as slightly above-average starters.
The bigger question is whether that makes sense for Darnold. He has done plenty to build a case that he belongs among the league’s best, yet the early part of his career with lesser teams seems to keep dragging him down in the eyes of some evaluators.
The names ahead of him are where the debate really starts to get loud. Nobody is blinking at the top group - Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes and Matthew Stafford. And even with Darnold’s title, few people are seriously taking him over Allen, Burrow or Jackson, quarterbacks who still haven’t won a championship.
But the eight passers ranked between Stafford and Darnold are a different story: Jordan Love, Justin Herbert, Dak Prescott, Drake Maye, Brock Purdy, Trevor Lawrence, Jayden Daniels and Caleb Wilson. Really?
The argument for any of them can be built with statistics, depending on what someone values. But on the numbers that matter most to winning games, Darnold has the edge.
Over the last two seasons, none of those quarterbacks has won as many games as a starter. Darnold has 28 wins against just six losses. Herbert is the closest at 22 wins.
The touchdown gap is just as stark. None of the eight has thrown as many as Darnold’s 60. Herbert again is the nearest challenger with 49.
One stat that stands out even more is adjusted net yards per attempt, or AY/A. It measures how much a quarterback generates per pass attempt while accounting for touchdowns and interceptions. Darnold owns the best mark of the group over the last two years, posting an 8.2 in both 2024 and 2025.
He also has the highest average rating over that span, just ahead of Maye after Maye’s huge 2025 season.
Critics can point to Darnold’s rough finish to 2024, and that’s fair game. But the same scrutiny could be aimed at others on the list.
Love’s 2024 playoff run ended with three interceptions and a 41.5 rating. Herbert followed an even worse 2024 postseason with another poor showing in 2025.
Purdy offers another useful comparison. He had a 100.5 regular-season rating in 2024, just above Darnold’s 99.1, but his playoff number fell to 68.3 and he threw three interceptions in two games. Darnold, by contrast, lifted his 99.1 regular-season rating to 102.4 across three playoff games and did not throw a pick.
Interceptions remain the biggest knock on Darnold, and that criticism isn’t going away. But the case in his favor is simple: if a quarterback is producing a lot of scoring, the turnover issue doesn’t erase everything else.
That’s been Darnold’s story over the last two seasons. Whether people see it as real or a fluke is another matter. The same question could be asked about Jayden Daniels and Caleb Williams, both of whom have only one strong season so far and neither of whom has matched what Darnold has already done.
At the end of the day, the rankings can be argued any way someone wants. But based on the production cited here, Darnold has a real case over Herbert, Purdy and Lawrence.
Prescott is harder to judge because of his team’s struggles. And if you’re looking at Love and Maye, there’s at least an argument to put them ahead of Seattle’s quarterback.
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