Who's the 6th-best QB in the NFL?
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2025
⏱️ 97 minutes
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Summary
Everyone—literally everyone—people would place Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow among the top-five quarterbacks in the NFL. An overwhelming majority would round out that list with Justin Herbert. Ask 10 people who the sixth-best QB is, though, and you could get 10 different answers. Robert Mays, Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman try to pin who that sixth-best QB is on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Hosts: Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen
With: Dave Helman
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Two Titans of Silicon Valley, one prize, dominance in the world of artificial intelligence. |
| 0:07.0 | Supremacy is the real story behind the struggle to own our digital future and potentially the very nature of human experience. |
| 0:16.0 | Supremacy by Parmy Olson, described as a riveting tale by the new scientist, winner of the Financial |
| 0:22.6 | Times Business Book of the Year, and now the Waterstone's nonfiction book of the month. |
| 0:27.5 | Listen to the audiobook of Supremacy Now. |
| 0:35.6 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. We had a fun one on tap for you guys today. |
| 0:41.1 | We had a little bit of news at the top of the show today, a couple contract extensions that we wanted to hit. |
| 0:44.8 | Garrett Wilson, sauce gardener, Trey Smith, some young guys cashing in. We chatted about that with me, Derek |
| 0:51.5 | Klasson, and our buddy, David Hellman, but the meat of the show today |
| 0:55.0 | is a discussion that is adjacent to a lot of the conversations that have been going on in the |
| 0:59.6 | football media sphere over the last few weeks. It's list time for everybody as they try to feed |
| 1:05.5 | the content beast. We're not doing a quarterback ranking or a quarterback draft this year for a lot of different reasons. I think the discussion is kind of wrote in a lot of ways right now. We've had the discussion about a lot of the top guys in a similar way consistently over the last few off seasons. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to spend all this time hemming and hauling between who's better between Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen because I think for the most part, those top four guys at the top, they're the top four guys at the top. I think that Justin Herbert, in my opinion, probably deserves to be number five. You can disagree with that, but a lot of those lists have had that ranking in some order. So instead of spending an hour talking about who the best four to five quarterbacks in the league are, |
| 1:45.3 | we're going to spend 90 minutes talking about who the sixth best quarterback in the league is. |
| 1:49.9 | And the reason that I feel like this is worth it is that this group from like six to 15, |
| 1:54.7 | 16, 10 guys or so is fascinating. |
| 1:57.8 | I think you can make real cases for five to six of them. |
| 2:00.5 | I think that you could hint at cases for to six of them. I think that you could |
| 2:01.4 | hint at cases for another few of them. So that's what we did today. We talked about what the |
| 2:07.1 | second and third tier of quarterbacks in the NFL look like. Who deserves a case made for them? |
| 2:13.0 | Who do you have to squint a little bit more with? And who will we be having this discussion about |
| 2:17.2 | in a |
| 2:17.5 | slightly different way a year from now. So let's get to that discussion with me, Derek Klesson, |
... |
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