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NFL QB stock report: Josh Allen reigns supreme; Aaron Rodgers plummets in final rankings
Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen closed out the best season of his career with six consecutive weeks at No. 1 in The Athletic’s QB stock report, maintaining his lead over Baltimore Ravens QB Lamar Jackson after his own six-week run up top.
As we entered the season with a maiden voyage in this quarterback project, the most daunting question was obvious while the answer remained wildly unclear: How was anyone going to leapfrog Patrick Mahomes?
Every week, these rankings focused on a confluence of primary factors — current performance, career résumé, future potential and the situations around the QBs. So with Mahomes winning three of the last four Super Bowls, it was going to take something extraordinary for his demotion.
Of course, some extraordinary things happened. Mahomes and the Chiefs kept winning despite their uncharacteristic struggles, while Allen and Jackson duked it out in the MVP race for the final three months of the season. And while Joe Burrow played at a higher level than Mahomes, the Bengals missed the playoffs, thereby invoking the situational parameter within his ranking.
On the flip side, Aaron Rodgers is a Super Bowl champion and four-time MVP. Mahomes is the only active QB with a superior résumé, but Rodgers finished in the bottom-10 of the rankings and has been in the 20’s since Week 11. His individual performances, with a few exceptions, were to blame along with the Jets’ circumstances and a cap on the 41-year-old’s potential.
The Athletic’s Final 2024-25 QB rankings
Along the way, we dove deeper into certain quarterbacks, tapping into valued insight from a host of coaches and executives around the league. Their viewpoints also carried weight in the rankings. Among the topics hit this season: We examined Allen’s MVP surge, Rodgers’ downfall with the Jets, Bryce Young’s midseason revival, Jordan Love’s contract validation, Caleb Williams’ resurfacing flaws and C.J. Stroud’s regression.
We hope you enjoyed the first season of rankings as much as we enjoyed putting them together. Let’s close it out by recognizing some of the biggest trends of the year.
Biggest preseason riser
Sam Darnold, on his fourth team in five years, opened training camp as the likely backup to rookie J.J. McCarthy, so expectations ranged from nonexistent to minimal.
Sure, Darnold’s pedigree as the No. 3 pick out of USC couldn’t be ignored, nor could coach Kevin O’Connell’s QB-friendly system. But no one could’ve predicted this.
Darnold finished fifth in the league in both passing yards (4,319) and touchdowns (35) and finished sixth among qualified QBs with a 102.5 passer rating.
Darnold opened the season as the 28th-ranked quarterback, and he rose 19 spots. He’s been a mostly steadying presence for the team that was tied for the third-most wins in the NFL. Star receivers Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison never missed a beat.
Despite the meteoric rise, Darnold did dip for a bit, going No. 11 in Week 10 to No. 18 in Week 12. He still finished the season with his only three weeks in the top 10. Darnold will enter the offseason with the potential to become the crown jewel of the free agent market.
Biggest preseason faller
Aaron Rodgers was still viewed by many around the league as one of the NFL’s premier quarterbacks at the start of the season, even coming off the torn Achilles, so the New York Jets QB debuted at No. 5.
He remained in the top six for the first five weeks of the season before the evidence became too great to ignore, and he plummeted to No. 15 in Week 6. Rodgers fell to No. 20 in Week 11 and never improved his standing. He finished the season ranked ahead of only two quarterbacks who were expected to open the season as their team’s starter.
Rodgers’ 63.0 completion percentage was his lowest since 2019, but he actually finished with more yards (3,897) and touchdowns (28) and fewer interceptions (11) than in his final season with the Packers.
Rodgers’ future is very much up in the air. Whether he wants to continue playing and if the Jets would want him back remain open questions. He may still be an asset for a veteran team that believes it’s a QB shy of the playoffs, but Rodgers will have to play much better than he did amid the Jets’ chaos.
Biggest midseason riser
Carolina Panthers QB Bryce Young’s turnaround was one of the most spectacularly unexpected stories of the season.
The 2023 No. 1 pick was benched after coach Dave Canales’ second game. And although Young’s performance justified the demotion, it raised significant questions about Young’s future with an organization that has made more than its recent share of impulse decisions.
It’s not like the Panthers benched Young with a definitive timeline for his return to the field, either. Young only got his job back after Andy Dalton injured his hand in a car accident.
And yet, Young played well down the stretch with 15 touchdown passes, five touchdown runs and six interceptions over his final 10 starts. They were also 4-6 during that stretch, which is no small feat for a team that had lost 22 of its previous 25 games.
Canales has had a nice history with his quarterbacks, so it was surprising to see it start so poorly. But now that Young is entering the offseason playing his best football, the Panthers will be an intriguing team entering 2025.
GO DEEPER
‘We got our guy’: Bryce Young and the Panthers go into the offseason on high note
Biggest midseason faller
It was supposed to be C.J. Stroud’s year. It never played out that way.
The Houston Texans QB debuted at No. 7 and soared to No. 3 just a week later. That’s where he remained for most of the first half, including as late as Week 9, but Stroud steadily fell the rest of the way. His ranking worsened in eight of the final 10 weeks, all the way down to No. 15.
Stroud’s numbers were down across the board. He completed 63.2 percent of his passes for 3,727 yards, 20 touchdowns, 12 interceptions and an 87.0 passer rating. His rookie numbers were superior in every category, which is even more noteworthy considering he played two fewer games in 2023.
The Texans need to build a better offensive line because the pressure was the main deterrent to Stroud’s success. The injuries didn’t help, either.
And yet, Stroud and the Texans are back in the playoffs. There are plenty of reasons to remain bullish on Stroud.
Best rookie
This wasn’t difficult.
Jayden Daniels opened the season at No. 22, jumped to No. 13 by Week 6 and into the top 10 in Week 9. The Washington Commanders QB closed the season with three consecutive weeks at No. 8.
Daniels completed 69 percent of his passes for 3,568 yards, 25 touchdowns, nine interceptions and a 100.1 passer rating; he added 891 rushing yards and six touchdowns.
He was so composed in tense moments, highlighted by four game-winning drives. Daniels’ Hail Mary against the Bears was an all-time moment, but the late drives against the Eagles and Falcons were more meaningful and should provide optimism the rookie is capable of repeating the feat in the playoffs.
Caleb Williams had a rocky season, but the Chicago Bears QB still put up some numbers for a team that went through a ton of adversity. Bo Nix wasn’t asked to carry the Denver Broncos, but he carried his weight to end their playoff drought. Drake Maye was often lost in the chaos in New England, but the young Patriots QB showed evidence of being a special player. Finally, Atlanta Falcons QB Michael Penix Jr. created momentum for next season with his solid play in three starts.
It’s shaping up to be a great draft class.
Incomplete …
And then there was one.
J.J. McCarthy missed his rookie season with a torn meniscus, leading to teams around the league wondering what the Vikings plan to do at quarterback. Conventional thinking suggests they’ll let Darnold hit free agency and turn toward their first-round pick in 2025. It’s just practical asset management.
But what if Darnold leads the Vikings to the Super Bowl or even the NFC Championship Game? The Vikings will have $75 million in cap space, according to Over The Cap, so they can pay Darnold to keep everything intact.
There’s an even bigger factor at play, though. McCarthy would rank as the No. 1 quarterback if he were in the 2025 draft class, according to several executives and coaches who have evaluated Miami’s Cam Ward and Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders. The Vikings would certainly have a market if they decided to move McCarthy.
Who’s next?
On a related note, there was a major shakeup in the draft order over the final two weeks, and that should have a significant impact on the quarterback class.
For so long, the QB draft discussion focused on the Giants and Raiders. After all, they were viewed as the two most quarterback-desperate teams in the league, and they built what seemed to be an indestructible residence atop the draft order.
So much for that. The Giants will pick third after a Week 17 victory against the Colts, while the Raiders’ late wins against the Jaguars and Saints dropped them to No. 6.
Even until Sunday, when the Patriots had a temporary hold of No. 1 until they beat the Bills, QB-needy teams knew the pick was likely up for auction. Anyone willing to pay could get their guy.
Then the Titans and Browns entered the chat.
The Titans, who hold the top pick, aren’t going to build around Will Levis if this season was any indication. And the Browns know they have to get younger to find Deshaun Watson’s successor, whether that’s in Week 1 of 2025 or sometime thereafter. Watson’s setback from his Achilles injury could accelerate his to-be-determined successor’s timeline.
The Titans are in a great spot if they love Ward or Sanders — or McCarthy, which could open up a new range of options. As for the Browns, they’ve made moves in the past to ensure Watson would have an unobstructed path to the starting job, so they’re slightly more of a wild card. Maybe the star attraction of Colorado’s Travis Hunter shifts their focus to a QB in a later round.
Any way you look at it, the draft just got a lot more interesting.
Dropped out: Mason Rudolph (No. 31 last week), Dorian Thompson-Robinson (No. 32 last week).
(Photo of Josh Allen: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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