Which quarterbacks are best in the red zone

Which NFL quarterback is the best in the red zone? That is often a difficult question to answer because there is a multitude of metrics available to attempt to answer that question. Furthermore, the game of football is a team sport. A quarterback could get credit for a pass behind the line of scrimmage when the running back who made that catch and evaded defenders to score did all the work. Sometimes isolating specific types of plays can shed light on how good or bad a quarterback can be in the red zone.

First let’s establish some criteria to isolate quarterback driven plays. Then we can rank the 2024 passers to see who came out on top last year.  The red zone is from the opponent’s 20 yard line to the end zone. It is a difficult place to make plays because of the short distance. It is also the area that separates good quarterbacks from average quarterbacks.

Next we can isolate quarterback driven plays by selecting only plays in the red zone where the air yards (distance the ball is passed from the line of scrimmage to where it is caught, minus end zone yards) are greater than or equal to the yards to go. The impact of doing this will remove the plays where a teammate made the quarterback look better than they actually were on that play.

The ultimate judge of success would be if the pass was a touchdown. The name of the game is to score a touchdown in the red zone and the best quarterbacks come away with six points instead of three in those situations. The metric to judge is the number of touchdown passes divided by the number of attempted passes.

Finally, any quarterback with less than 20 passes with this criteria are removed from the analysis.

How did the 2024 quarterbacks stack up? Feast your eyes on the touchdown rate percentages in the chart below.

The only two that seem to stand out are Cooper Rush having a very high ranking while Josh Allen is near the bottom. Another point of interest is that two rookies had a higher success rate than Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow, two passers who have been given the “elite” moniker.  

To add another point, ten quarterbacks did not throw an interception within this same criteria. Geno Smith and Jameis Winston had the worst interception rate. Although Jalen Hurts had a top ranking touchdown rate, his interception rate was high. Here is the chart with the interception rate added for more clarity.

There are many stats that can be analyzed to understand a quarterback’s impact. Furthermore, a better team around a quarterback will likely help said quarterback to perform better in many metrics. The above charts put emphasis on quarterbacks who came through in the red zone with their arm and that is meaningful.