2025 CFB Season QB Advanced Stats Preview
Previewing the most important position in the game!
IT IS TIMEEEEEEEEE!
The 2025 College Football Season is just around the corner as we are officially in the preseason. I hope you all had a fantastic summer and are ready to dive into this brand new season. Before we get to overall team previews, I want to look at the most important position on the field, the Quarterback.
There is much debate on how to judge Quarterback performances with numbers, as it is extremely hard to separate their individual abilities from the team around them. Add in the fact that the opponents in college football can be everything from a death machine in Georgia to a FCS opponent, and you get a really hard task in ranking the nations QBs.
We’re going to try and do just that in this article, as well as look at some other numbers from the returning and potentially new starters in the CFB world (QB battles are going on at the time of this writing, so if I have someone on here that lost their QB battle I apologize for jinxing them).
Expected Points Added and Completion Pct Over Expectation
I wanted to start off looking at Expected Points Added Play play and Completion Percentage over Expectation (CPOE) as just a general overview of the potential 2025 starters. The goal is always to be top right in these graphs, where in this instance it means the QB is able to complete passes adjusted primarily for distance (X-axis) and is overall efficient on their passes and rushes (Y-Axis).
While is sample size was on the smaller side, Demond Williams Jr. flashed his potential for Washington last season. His 78.1% completion percentage was 5 percentage points higher than any other QB in the FBS last season (min 100+ attempts). Incoming Duke transfer QB Darian Mensah takes the crown for EPA/Play + CPOE, which makes Manny Diaz portal addition all that more impressive. You’ll see later on this article, I am a big fan of what Mensah can do on the field.
QBs close to breaking school EPA record
This is a different look at QB expected points added, this time coming from ESPN’s model that goes back all the way to the 2004 season. These are the QBs that are close to becoming their programs all time (since 2004) leader in EPA. I also included what type of season the QB needs to have via percentiles. So for example, Illinois Luke Altmyer needs to gain 11.6 Expected points in the year in order to become the schools all time leader in EPA. Based on individual seasons since 2004, a 11.6 EPA season would rank in the 29.4 percentile (which would be pretty awful for him). All the way at the bottom, we can see Kyron Drones needs to have a heisman finalist type season in order to pass Tyrod Taylor.
Expected Points Added is one of the better stats we have on the market in order to gauge QB play, but it of course has its limitations that I mentioned earlier (individual vs. team performance, strength of opponent). In this next section, I attempt the difficult task of ranking the potential 2025 QBs keeping in mind these limitations.
How many points does this QB add to their team?
To answer this question, I built myself a linear mixed effect model that attempts to predict how many points a QB adds to his team. Using ESPN’s points above average metric as the dependent variable, I set QB plays (in a single game) and game number (what game number it is for the QB in the course of his career) as the fixed effects, while I set the QB themselves and the opponent they are playing as the random effects.
The reason I do this is we know QBs have varying skill levels and we also know opponents have varying levels of skill so this allows us to capture a baseline performance for those individual QBs/Defenses. I have also added a weight to the model so that more recent performances have more of an effect on the QBs baseline performance.
Once that runs, we can look at the QBs point estimate which will tell us how many points the QB adds to their team, while accounting for their in game usage, overall career experience, adjusted for who they have played throughout their career.
Here are the top 30 QBs heading into the 2025 season. Carson Beck was one of the nations top QBs in 2023, with the expectation being it would carry over to 2024 and he would ride off into the sunset as a top draft pick. While his play did regress in 2024, his overall metrics were still solid. His 80.2 PFF Pass Grade ranked 23rd in the FBS last season, while his 80.9 ESPN QBR ranked 12th.
Experience matters with this model, and Beck has plenty of experience operating efficient offenses. While I don’t think I would put him as my number 1 QB if i used my gut, I believe the numbers check out here.
If you were curious on how his 3.83 stacks up against other CFB careers, most of the recent elite QBs you can think of (Joe Burrow, Justin Fields, CJ Stroud, Baker Mayfield etc.) ended their careers in the 5-6 range (Joe Burrow leads with a massive 7.90). The cusp of “Great college QB” is 4 so Beck is knocking on that door with an impressive season.
Here is the entire FBS in all of its glory. These QBs are all projected to start in 2025 (If I am off on some I apologize, some teams might not announce until the day of their first game). The black lines represent standard deviations from the average of ~0.4. I like to think of them as little tiers. Carson Beck, Cade Klubnik and Sam Leavitt make up the first tier, while a big group of QBs are knocking on the door and looking to make that big jump.
You will notice popular QBs to put in the top 25 (Arch Manning, DJ Lagway, Dylan Raiola) are lower down and closer to 0 with this point rating. As I said before, experience is weighted in the model and we know more about a QB the more he has played. DJ Lagway had some big time throws (his 8.8% PFF Big time throw rate ranked 2nd in the FBS last season) but we are still less than 300 dropbacks into his career. Arch Manning didn’t even make the graph above because he has less than 100 passes and rushes in his young career. This is also a good indicator that we have a descriptive metric, rather than a metric that predicts into the future.
We can also look at a QBs point rating and what their 247 composite high school recruit rating was when they were coming into college. Its awesome to see QBs like Jalon Daniels, Parker Navarro, Devon Dampier, Maddux Madsen, and Kevin Jennings rise above their lower recruit ratings to become some of the better CFB QBs in the game today.
Jackson Arnold and Dante Moore were both highly rated out of high school, but have since moved on to other teams after struggling to start their careers. As mentioned before with Manning/Lagway/Raiola, they too have smaller sample sizes to their careers, which means its far from over for them. Both have landed in much better offensive situations which will hopefully help them develop as players.
QB Play by Conference
The Big 12 leads the way in top 30 QBs this season, with 10 of the top 30 hailing from that conference. Tied for 2nd is the ACC and SEC with 6, with the Big Ten coming in 4th with 4.
While the Big 12 and ACC have some proven QB talents, I would argue the Big Ten and SEC have more talents we hope will step up this season. Drew Allar, Garrett Nussmeier, and LaNorris Sellers are three names (to go along with Manning/Lagway/Raiola) that many have projected to take big steps forward in hopes of improving their draft stock.
Over in the Group of 5 world, we can see Ohio’s Parker Navarro as the clear leader in the MAC clubhouse (but don’t count out Dequan Finn!) with Maddux Madsen as the leader in the Mountain West. Owen McCown (son of Josh McCown, yes people we are getting older) might be a surprise to see that high, but he ranked 39th in PFF Grade last season, as well as 25th in Rush EPA (right behind LaNorris Sellers). He also had a low 1.9% PFF turnover worthy play rate, good for a T-15th in the FBS last season. If we are looking for an under the radar QB, McCown might be the guy you’re looking for this season.
Before we wrap on our QB point rating system, I wanted to see how well it correlated with one of the best individual metrics out there, PFF Wins Above Average. As you can see, this point rating system has a pretty decent correlation with PFF WAA. This makes me fell more confident on this metric, and its interesting to see where each metric differs the most from each other. The point rating appears to favor QBs with more rushing abilities (Service academy QBs like Bryson Daily, or guys like Haynes King), while PFF WAA captures more of the volume of snaps than the point rating does (Sam Hartmans, Dillon Gabriels etc.).
My Personal NFL Draft QB Rankings
I put this out on my twitter feed a couple months ago, so I thought it would be good to bring it back before the start of the season. These rankings are my own personal rankings based off of what I have seen from them on film. I included some short notes on each QB, as well as what I believe they need to show in 2025. As I said before I am a big Darian Mensah fan, and I think if he continues to develop he can be a strong draft prospect. I am also higher on Aidan Chiles than the point rating system is, as I believe he has a chance to put everything together with one final year with Jonathan Smith.
QB is the most important position on the field and I am excited to see which of the dozen plus potentials rises to the top and becomes the next great college QB. Now that we have QBs down, we can move on to teams next week. I hope to see you there!
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I bought plenty of coffees! I’m loving the fact Bama is flying under the radar this year which is honestly not something I’ve been used to lately. Ty Simpson was the number one or two dual threat when he came out 3 years ago. He sat and did something no kid with talent does anymore which is to say he waited his turn even behind Milroe. I believe he’s in an even better situation than he was when Saban was at Bama. Deboer has to win this year. I doubt he needs the Natty but it’s playoffs or his head probably rolls unless somehow the same crap happens again this year that happened last year. I’m not going to be a crazy Bama fan here and say they deserved to be in but there were others that did over SMU or Clemson. DeBoer had a fractured team last year and won’t this year. The other thing he has is Grubb. Grubb stayed up in Seattle for a year in the NFL and followed this year to complete DeBoer’s coaching team. Grubb has been his O. Coordinator for years and it showed how much he was missed last year because it looked at times he was coaching blind. I expect Simpson to take the SEC by storm. He has a great arm and has some wheels plus don’t forget Ryan Williams is arguably the best WR in the SEC. I’m excited to see this kid. I’ll also predict right now the Big 10 will not win a third Natty this year.