How Well Will Aaron Rodgers Play in the 2024 Season?
Think About Your Answer Carefully!
A lot is expected of the New York Jets now that future Hall-of-Famer Aaron Rodgers returns as a healthy starting quarterback. What are reasonable performance expectations for a 40-year old (turning 41 in early December) returning from an Achilles tendon rupture?
Let’s quickly review his last five full campaigns…
Aaron Rodgers
2018: 58.0 QBR (25 TD, 2 INT, but 49 sacks)
2019: 52.5 QBR (26 TD, 4 INT, but 36 sacks)
2020: 79.8 QBR (48 TD, 5 INT, 20 sacks, fantastic!)
2021: 74.1 QBR (37 TD, 4 INT, 30 sacks, excellent)
2022: 41.3 QBR (26 TD, 12 INT, 32 sacks, age catching up?)
2023: only played a few seconds
I like QBR at ESPN because it tries to capture everything a QB does passing and running. Many of us old-timers got in the habit of trusting “Passer Rating,” because it did correspond very well to performance quality. You really didn’t need to study other passing stats if you had THAT. But, “Passer Rating” left out running. Making big plays with your legs is also important. To me, QBR is an improvement on Passer Rating…and sums up what could have been an hour of research work at a glance. (Thanks to analytics for inventing that stat!)
With that backdrop, for a sack-prone, aging quarterback…what should we pencil in for 2024? Maybe extenuating circumstances in 2022 created an illusion of decline that overstates what’s happening on the age curve. That said, we obviously can’t assume that the monster numbers from three and four years ago are in the offing.
*A QBR in the 70’s? is extremely unlikely
*A QBR in the 60’s is probably unlikely
*A QBR in the mid-to-high 50’s has a shot. Median of those five seasons up above is 58.0. Average is 61.2.
*A QBR in the low-to-mid 50’s is probably a good guess when you factor in the aging curve…but could still be optimistic
*A QBR in the 40’s would be seen as a disappointment…but is entirely possible