Dallas Cowboys Why All-time QB lists are Ridiculous

Here’s why it’s ridiculously impossible to compare different generations of Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks and what we should be doing instead.

Maybe you have the best all-time Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks ranked like this: Roger Staubach, Troy Aikman, Tony Romo, Don Meredith, and Dak Prescott . Maybe your list is Staubach, Aikman, Prescott, Romo, and Danny White. Maybe it’s something different altogether.  However you rank your favorite all-time QBs, it’s seeping with a multitude of problems and serves little purpose.

All-time lists come out a few times a year. And for good reason. It’s fun to compare players today to the greats of old. It’s also nice to put things in perspective when caught up with the inevitable excitement of the moment. But for as fun as all-time lists are to discuss, they’re inherently stupid. That’s because it’s impossible to fairly compare different generations.

The game has changed immensely since the dawn of the forward pass. Just in the past few years we’ve seen rules change, schemes change, overall strategy changes, etc… that the game of today is hardly the same we saw yesteryear.

Once upon a time quarterbacks were lucky to eclipse 2000 yards for the season. Now we see nearly a dozen push the 4k mark. Troy Aikman averaged less than 200 yards per game over his career. Last season, 32 NFL QBs surpassed Aikman’s average.

Does this mean guys like Daniel Jones, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Sam Darnold are somehow better than the Dallas Cowboys Hall of Famer? Of course not! It’s an entirely different environment they’re playing in nowadays. That’s why all-time lists are generally an act of absurdity.

Want to compare Dallas Cowboys QBs?

The best way to compare Roger Staubach to say…Dak Prescott, is by ranking each of them within his own generation and comparing the two by that ranking. The reasoning is simple: It allows us to compare apple to apples.

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How they compare with their own generation shows us the advantage they had over the competition in a given year. That’s most in line with illustrating who was the better QB. Now, even that presents its own issues.

Look around the NFL and you’ll see a wide range of views regarding QB rankings. Dak Prescott is perhaps the most varying in his ranking. Some have him in the top-5 while others only place him in the middle of the pack. Looking back to the days of Danny White and Don Meredith you have a lot of the same arguments you see now. Tony Romo was a pretty polarizing figure.

Frankly, anyone who didn’t bring home the Lombardi seems to earn the ire of Cowboys Nation. And there are those in different fanbases who swear our beloved Aikman is nothing but a pedestrian QB with an all-star team around him. Basically, ranking players in the same season is hard enough, why on earth do we think we can do it across different generations?

At the end of the day it comes down to edge over the competition. That’s what’s universally key to winning. So let’s cool it with those all-time lists because unless you’re doing it by the way I just proposed, it’s a pretty absurd endeavor.

Here’s what we should be discussing: Was Roger Stauback a top-2 QB of his generation? How would we honestly rank Troy in his best season? Was Romo really the second best QB of the 2014 season? How did Dak rank last season? Who remembers White and Meredith’s best seasons?

• Published on 02/21/2020 at 12:01 PM
• Last updated at 02/20/2020 at 12:41 PM