Nineteen quarterbacks have won the college football national championship since the start of the BCS era. Here is a look at the profile of champion passers.
Many ingredients go into a championship team. But at any level, whether talking about a conference title or a national championship, a key part of any successful run is solid quarterback play. No two quarterbacks get things done quite the same way, but there are some relevant benchmarks that most title-winning passers seem to reach.
What are those benchmarks, though? That’s what this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback looks to identify with a deeper dive into both the type of per-game numbers put up by championship passers and where they rank on average in the recruiting picture.
Over the past two decades since the Bowl Championship Series came online and gave us a more definitive national championship game on an annual basis, there have been 19 quarterbacks that earned title rings. (Alabama’s A.J. McCarron won back-to-back BCS national championship crowns in 2011 and 2012.)
So those are the 19 players whose numbers concern us most. However, accessible composite recruiting rankings go back only as far as 2004. That leaves the first six years of the BCS of somewhat limited value, give that they offer no chance to provide further data points for evaluating recruiting history.
Yet the cases of Tee Martin, Chris Weinke, Josh Heupel, Ken Dorsey, Craig Krenzel, and Matt Mauck offer some definite value in terms of looking at statistical output of these players. This list of a half-dozen national champions will be included in that evaluation, though they are excluded from the recruiting evaluation due to a lack of data.
What is the purpose of understanding these benchmarks and baselines?
Quite simply, the goal here is to look at the starting quarterbacks on those teams currently among the favorites to participate in this year’s College Football Playoff and see which best fit the qualifications of potential national championship winners.
One, of course, is already included in the study. Top-ranked Alabama is led by Tua Tagovailoa, who stepped in to rally the Crimson Tide to victory over Georgia in the contentious all-SEC national championship game. This year, Tagovailoa will hope to join fellow Tide quarterback McCarron as the only back-to-back national championship quarterbacks of the modern era.
But he is hardly the only possible contender in the mix, and we cannot say with certitude that Tagovailoa is even the most likely quarterback to do it this year even though he plays on the top-ranked team and has the experience of accomplishing the feat successfully in the past.
So with the mission laid bare, let’s dive into the numbers themselves.
Per-Game Averages for Each National Championship Quarterback
The type of quarterback that takes their team to a title shot and earns the national championship is obviously going to be an efficient leader, driving his team downfield and generating points consistently. (In the chart, each player’s passing numbers are in green; rushing numbers are displayed in the red section of the chart.)
The prototypical championship quarterback averages between 63 and 65 percent completion rate, with only four of the 19 finishing their title seasons with a completion percentage under 60 percent. Of those four, three were among the first five BCS winners between 1998 and 2002 and the fourth was the beneficiary of the most chaotic season yet in the 21st century.
So the baseline rating is a 63 percent completion rate, with the average game a 16-of-25 affair where the quarterback throws for between 206 and 210 yards per game. The benchmark figure is 250 yards, a mark that only five championship quarterbacks have surpassed in the two decades since the start of the BCS.
Important to note is that the national championship quarterback is rarely perfect, nor does he need to be. On average, the champion gunslinger throws two touchdowns and an interception in the average game, displaying a propensity not just to rack up big numbers but also to take chances pushing the ball downfield that can result in giveaways on occasion.
Only two players — Tagovailoa last year and Cardale Jones in 2014 — were not the primary starter on the depth chart for most of the season. Tagovailoa, of course, spent most of 2017 as the backup to Jalen Hurts. Prior to his national title heroics, Tagovailoa had performed mop-up duty in seven games and gone 35-of-53 for 470 yards with eight touchdowns and one interception.
Jones got his shot after injuries to Braxton Miller and J.T. Barrett opened the door for the sophomore to get his first and only three starts of the season in the Big Ten championship win over Wisconsin, the Sugar Bowl upset of Alabama, and the national championship takedown of Oregon.
Recruiting Rankings for National Championship Quarterbacks
Most of the quarterbacks for which we have reliable recruiting composites came in at least over .9500, putting them among high four-star recruits. Out of the 13 quarterbacks included in this section of the study, only three ranked below this .9500 baseline score.
Two of those four came in the first years of the College Football Playoff, as Cardale Jones and Jake Coker respectively guided Ohio State and Alabama respectively to the 2014 and 2015 national championship.
The third, Greg McElroy in 2009, had the advantage of playing against a Texas team whose starting quarterback, Colt McCoy, was knocked out of the title game early in the contest. And the fourth, Matt Flynn, won his national championship in the chaos of 2007.
With a median recruiting composite of .9792, that sets a benchmark for potential national championship quarterbacks coming out of high school.
Who might meet this standard among 2018 quarterbacks?
We have already talked about Tagovailoa, who is the only current starting quarterback who has previously won the national championship. He definitely meets all the benchmarks this season, with a passer efficiency rating north of 200 and 72.5 percent completion rate. He also checks off the recruiting box.
Another SEC quarterback, Jake Fromm, certainly fits the bill as a highly-touted four-star recruit. He has a passing efficiency rating that is nearly 25 points higher than the benchmark median, while leading in passer rating and a recruiting conposite of 0.9794.
Trevor Lawrence, whose injury could derail defending ACC champion Clemson from repeating as league champion and College Football Playoff representative, also fit right in among the benchmark figures. His 0.9999 recruiting ranking made him the top-ranked prospect of the Class of 2018.
Dwayne Haskins, the Ohio State star, hits the baseline figure for recruiting with a 0.9561 rating as part of the Class of 2016. Haskins, like Tagovailoa, is posting a season passer efficiency rating over 200 points, and he completes more than 75 percent of his passes.
Ian Book, were he to lead Notre Dame to the national championship this year, would make him the second-lowest rated recruit to go on and win the title. Book rated out at 0.8691 as a high school player. Only Jake Coker has a lower recruiting composite ranking among quarterbacks who hold a national championship.
What does this all mean?
There is no rule that says a national championship quarterback has to hit these numbers. This could be the year that proves the exception to the rule. In general, though, national champions tend to rank above 0.9500 composite as a high school recruit, throw for around 210 yards per game on a 65 percent completion rate, and post a passer efficiency rating somewhere around 150.
Not every successful national championship quarterback hit all of these numbers. And plenty of football players who hit all of these numbers have failed to even reach a national title game, much less play for and win one. They merely serve as the benchmarks by which to see who might emerge as the next title winner.
The best bets for emerging as national championship passers this year are Tagovailoa, Fromm, Lawrence, and Haskins. Tagovailoa has the experience, and Fromm was in the national title game as well last year. Lawrence’s status leaves his ability to take over at starter for Clemson in doubt at least in the short term, and Haskins just helped Ohio State take charge of the Big Ten East race this weekend against Penn State.
From this we can also see that Ian Book looks more pretender than contender, far less likely to lead the Fighting Irish to a national title than other players on other teams such as Auburn’s Jarrett Stidham.
So while this can serve as a baseline by which to evaluate the relative merits of various championship contenders, there is no guarantee that meeting these figures will cause the desired result, or that they are prerequisite before the championship falls into place. It merely offers some food for thought by which to evaluate quarterbacks down the line as we get further into the season.