Top 15 Super Bowl Winning Quarterbacks by College Football Success

Feb 2, 2014; East Rutherford, NJ, USA; Michael Strahan, left, looks on as Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson (3) celebrates with the Lombardi Trophy after winning Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports

You know how it goes. The Robert Horry rule with quarterbacks is completely ignored. All we do with them is judge them by rings.

We look at rings in college and rings in the NFL. Everything comes down to the Super Bowl, but if there is any proof that we shouldn’t do that, it’s the disparity between winners in college and winners in the NFL.

In college, Tommy Frazier, Danny Wuerffel, Tim Tebow, Vince Young, Charlie Ward, Chris Weinke, and Matt Leinart are all on the list of greatest quarterbacks ever.

Unfortunately, nobody puts Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Dan Marino, John Elway, or Johnny Unitas on there despite the fact that all those guys are Top 10 NFL quarterbacks. And the only reason all of those guys except Unitas are left off the list is because they didn’t win national championships as starters.

So what?

Did you know that only four quarterbacks started on a national championship team in college and a Super Bowl in the NFL? One of them, Troy Aikman, was injured in his fourth game in college and didn’t even get to carry the team to the national championship, and Ken Stabler, another, split time at Alabama.

Shouldn’t that alone show you that championships are a stupid metric? Apologists will say that some guys are just better in college than in the NFL. But that’s not the whole truth.

The truth is that football is a team sport, and those guys in the conversation for greatest college quarterback ever were simply blessed to be surrounded by amazing teams and coaches, and their weaknesses got exposed at the next level.

So, we are taking the next step in showing the stupidity of judging quarterbacks by championships, particularly in college. This list will rank the Top 15 Super Bowl winning quarterbacks by their college performance. Let’s see how many of them won championships.

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