Dumb Football Questions: Does Jalen Hurts deserve more RESPECT?; QB Tiers deep dive

“I sleep like a baby if I got to play him every week,” one anonymous NFL executive said about Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders. That quote, pulled from Mike Sando’s annual quarterback tiers project in The Athletic, captures the brutal honesty of 50 league insiders who anonymously graded every starting quarterback in the NFL. The result is a tiered ranking system that separates the true franchise carriers from the system-dependent starters—and it sparked a lively debate on this episode of The O-Line Committee about whether Jalen Hurts deserves more respect than the executives gave him.

How the QB Tiers Work

Mike Sando has conducted this survey every year since 2014. He asks 50 NFL executives and coaches to place every quarterback into one of five tiers, each with a specific definition. Tier one is reserved for quarterbacks who “carry their team each week” and “expertly handle pure passing situations”—third-and-eight, down by ten, no play action, the defense knows you’re throwing. Only four quarterbacks made tier one this year: Patrick Mahomes at number one, Josh Allen and Matthew Stafford tied at number two, and Joe Burrow at number four. The hosts noted that Burrow’s placement felt high given his injury history, since availability matters for a tier-one designation.