Tua Tagovailoa > Justin Herbert -- 2023 Fantasy Football QB Rankings
Top 26 QB Rankings for 2023 Redraft
Welcome to the 2023 fantasy football season! I am in multiple drafts occurring now and next week. I had the chance to see where players are being drafted and think through my draft strategy. Here are my QB rankings.
Patrick Mahomes
Mahomes silenced the doubters who thought he would decline—or at least not improve—without his top receiving weapon Tyreek Hill. Instead, Mahomes set a new career high for passing yards—5,250—and led the league in touchdown passes (41). Lots of people want to take a running quarterback first because running QBs are exciting, but 120 rushing yards don’t count for any more points than 300 passing yards. Mahomes was the QB1 last season and the QB4 in 2021. Mahomes, Hurts, or Allen would all be perfectly rational choices for QB1. It’s a dart’s throw which will finish as QB1 this year. But Mahomes is the most consistent, and Hurts and Allen are bigger injury risks. (That said, I usually don’t take any QB in the first two rounds of a standard fantasy draft. There’s too much value at RB and WR you could be missing.)
Jalen Hurts
Hurts had shown flashes of his passing ability last season, and now we saw it with A.J. Brown giving him an elite receiver to throw to. Hurts is so close to Allen that you could flip them. But I like Hurts more, and he has better weapons than Allen, who has a worse offensive line in front of him, a worse WR2, and a WR1 who has expressed his displeasure with the team.
Josh Allen
Allen is in the three-player tier of potential season-long QB1s. But the Bills have still not found a solid WR2. Gabe Davis is a boom-or-bust deep threat. The Bills’ slot receivers changed multiple times throughout the season. The Bills’ offensive line ranked in the bottom third of the league. And what’s up with Stefon Diggs?
Joe Burrow
Burrow’s QB4 finish last season was his best yet (QB8 in 2021). He is a better real-life quarterback than Hurts and Allen. But he lacks their rushing ability, and his stats are capped out by how often the Bengals need to throw the ball to win. Theirs is a more balanced offense than the Chiefs, and if they do run, Burrow doesn’t take designed carries. It would be difficult for him to challenge for QB1 overall for a season, but he does have those boom weeks when the Bengals get into a shootout. He had three QB1 finishes last season, more than Hurts and Mahomes and as many as Allen. In those games, he attempted 37, 42, and 37 passes, respectively.
Justin Fields
Justin Fields has shown arm strength and accuracy in clean pockets. He has skills in the passing game he can build on. Now he has wide receivers, too, after the Bears traded for D.J. Moore. He did finish as QB5 last season—if you didn’t pay attention to the second half of the season. It would be difficult for him to match his rushing total of 1,143 yards (especially when a majority of his rushes came on scrambles, not designed run plays; see the analysis I wrote for RotoBaller), but he will almost certainly throw for more than 2,200 passing yards. Will he compensate enough in passing to make up for a decline of a couple of hundred yards in rushing? (20 fewer rushing yards per game means 50 more passing yards per game will be needed.) I think Fields finishes pretty close to where he did last year, with more passing yards and fewer rushing yards.
Tua Tagovailoa
Tua has elite wide receivers in Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle to throw to. In 12 full games last season, he threw for over 290 yards in six games. The concern here is about his injury history. He’s a small guy, and he suffered approximately two concussions that caused him to completely miss a total of four games last season. Was it just bad luck, or is it something that might happen again? Another (lesser) concern is a seeming drop-off in his fantasy production as the year went along. From Week 10 on, Tua had just one more 300-yard game and no top 12 QB finishes (but two QB13 finishes) from Week 12 until the end of the season. Was Mike McDaniels’ offense figured out?
Justin Herbert
The Chargers had an offensive coordinator change for the better. When Kenny Moore was OC in Dallas, Dak Prescott had his highest depth of target and yardage per attempt in his career. Herbert has a strong arm and good deep-threat WRs to throw to. Herbert could finish higher than this. But I also feel he has been hyped above his production for multiple seasons and consistently fails to live up to it.
Lamar Jackson
Some people have Jackson much higher. They put him as Justin Fields rushing threat. But I have questions about Jackson. He won the MVP in 2019 under a special offense designed by Greg Roman to utilize his unique skill set. Now there is a new coordinator, Todd Monken, coming in, who is said to be designing an offense to facilitate the passing game. There’s a lot of offseason hype, like Mark Andrews saying, “The sky is the limit!” But if you change from one offense that helps Jackson finish as a top-five QB in fantasy points per game to a new one, what are the chances that it will be better for him? Change can go both ways. Jackson has not been a great passer, and his passing ability has declined in recent seasons. Let’s see it before we bet on it.
Trevor Lawrence
Dak Prescott
Kirk Cousins
Aaron Rodgers
Danny
“Dimes”“Dollar Sign” JonesJared Goff
Brock Purdy
RB Anthony Richardson
He is no Josh Allen. Even Allen had a higher completion percentage than Richardson in college. And Josh Allen had a very bad rookie season throwing the ball, anyway. Allen did run for 631 yards and eight touchdowns as a rookie. That’s the only comparison. It would not be surprising if Richardson does that, and for that reason, I’m putting Richardson here for his rushing ability in redraft. I would rank him lower in dynasty, since I don’t think he will stay around as the starter for too long.
Geno Smith
Not a great quarterback, hasn’t been productive for most of his career and was declining towards the end of last season. There is a whole bunch of guys ahead of him in various positions who could fall. Spots 12-17 could all finish within one point or so in terms of fantasy points per game. I wouldn’t be surprised if Smith finishes as QB12, but he won’t come close to being a top-six fantasy QB.
Jordan Love
Russell Wilson
Kenny Pickett
Middling talent as a QB and a terrible offensive scheme coming from Matt Canada. If he had a better coordinator calling plays, he could be closer to a low-end QB1 with the receivers he has to work with.
Matt Stafford
The old guy has accumulated so many injuries over the years, his back and wrist are not going to ever be 100% healthy again.
Derek Carr
Sam Howell
Jimmy Garoppolo
Baker Mayfield
Bryce Young
If you want to go with DeShaun Watson, you can throw him somewhere in between QB10 and QB20. I don’t care. He’s not going to suddenly remember how to play the QB position at the level he did with D-Hop in Houston. And I don’t want to roster him and root for him.