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TSL Quarterback Rankings – Pre-Season Review

Welcome back to the TSL Quarterback Power Rankings!  If you read the article last year (and there must have been at least a few of you) then you’re familiar with the concept – every week we share our rankings for the Top Ten QBs in the League, and discuss who’s trending up and who's trending down.  We on the QB Power Rankings Committee are not what you'd call "great writers" (or even "very good" writers... check out the Godfather and the Sentinel if you want better writing) so we lean heavily on graphs and stats instead.  For our pre-season article each session, we like to make a few predictions and re-print an explanation of how these Power Rankings work, which we've copied and pasted almost verbatim from the last two sessions' pre-season reviews  (See?  Lazy writing...)  

So a little Q&A to refresh your memories:

“Are you going to show rankings for all 44 starting QB’s every week?”

No, just the Top Ten will be shown EVERY week, but the write-up will have commentary on other rising and falling QBs throughout the League as well.  We often expand to a Top 15 or Top 20 as the season goes on, whenever we're feeling ambitious.  Stay tuned.

“Is this going to be heavily biased towards the higher divisions?”

The top ten probably will be, sure, and we have no issue with that.  The purpose of a Power Ranking is to highlight the best in the League, and for the most part the best are competing AGAINST the best.  But we will absolutely be acknowledging the performance (good and bad) of Quarterbacks in the lower divisions as well.  Last year we said "we doubt a pure D5 quarterback will ever crack the Top Ten, but we will try our best to cover all divisions in the write-up, every week", and then Larry Chruscial of D5 shocked the world taking the #10 spot for a couple of weeks.  So anything is possible, but generally speaking if you don't like your ranking, our advice is to try moving up a division next session.  The better your competition, the more credibility you earn for beating it.

“So you’re only ranking QB’s… what about the rest of us?”

Oh, we didn’t forget about the rest of you.  In addition to the QB Rankings, we will do our best to put out other rankings that the rest of you can enjoy – best team offenses, best team defenses, best referees, best at bar …  ranking anything is always fun.  Unless we rank you last, of course.

“You keep saying ‘we’.  Who is writing this?  Who determines these rankings?”

Don’t worry about who’s writing this.  Let’s be honest: If you knew, you would incessantly whine to that person or persons about why you or your QB should be ranked higher every week.  Anonymity is key for journalism THIS important.  

Last year's pre-season article predicted a big rise in the rankings from Dean Thompson (we were right! he finished the year 6th in the League) and a big drop in the rankings from old man Topper (we were wrong! he actually fought his way back into the top ten and finished the year ranked 5th).  Our big predictions for this year:  Matty Ice PLUMMETS in the rankings (okay, that was an easy one); Joey Batts cracks the Top Five once again (it's good to see some people aren't afraid of D1...); Blase LaDuca cracks the Top Ten (fortune favors the bold, and the Power Rankings favor ambitious QBs that move up two divisions); Darryl Carr remains undefeated at #1 on the Quarterback Hair Rankings; Lucas Kramer from Vaspian, with a year of experience under his belt, has a break-out season to flirt with Top Ten status.  But what do we know?  

So there you go.  We don’t have any new “pre-season rankings” for you, because there are new teams and new faces and we don't know all the contenders yet. But here are the final “Top 20” rankings from the end of Fall 2019’s regular season (which might have looked different if we had re-ranked them after playoffs…): 

For all you TSL history buffs out there that want to know QB Power Rankings data stretching back before the chart shown above, here is the entire history of the Top Ten going back the past two seasons that we've been Power Ranking:

Chris Cole, Matty Ice and Joey Batts are the only three QBs to be ranked in the Top Ten every week since the Power Rankings began.  Mark Dalfonso missed out in the first ever week of Power Rankings (a shameful omission on our part, but we can't correct it now), Bobby McConnell missed the beginning of the Spring 2019 season and wasn't ranked for four weeks (though his backup consistently made the Top Five in his place... maybe anyone could succeed surrounded by that much talent?) and Matt Newman missed one week as well (don't blame us, he should have played better).

Excluding the week he should have been ranked but wasn't, Mark Dalfonso has never left the Top Five (average rank: 3.13).  Matty Ice has never left the Top Five period (average rank: 3.06).  Excluding the injury weeks he wasn't ranked, Bobby has never left the Top FOUR (average rank: 2.58), and is your current #1 QB in the League.  Chris Cole has never left the Top THREE (average rank: 1.56) and has a TSL record 10 consecutive weeks at #1.  This is your Top Tier of TSL Quarterbacks ladies and gentlemen, the gold standard you have to beat if you want to be considered the best of the best.  Good luck with that!

One final note on Power Rankings: Rameer always insisted in "the Rant" that he wasn't on the Power Ranking committee.  That was true, he wasn't.  But we loved fiercely debating these Rankings with Rameer at the bar every week.  He often disagreed with our QB assessments and was never one to be shy about his opinions.  He will 100% be missed, as he was such a big part of the fabric that made the TSL great.  If you want to know a little about Rameer's thoughts and rankings though, we recommend you go back to Week 7's QB Power Rankings from last Fall (you can still find it on the website if you do a little digging) and scroll down to the "Top 21 Impact Players of the TSL".  Rameer didn't fully write that list, but he fought hard for the inclusion of most of those people (he also fought for several others that we did NOT include, so if your name isn't there, it's probably not Rameer's fault!).  We will miss you Rameer.

As always, if you have any thoughts on why you hate this article (your team’s QB should be ranked higher?  not enough attention devoted to the Quarterback Hair Rankings?  our gross abuse of parentheses as a literary crutch for writing thoughts within thoughts?) please send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..   

What’s YOUR ranking?

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