I like to watch the show "Football Night in America" on NBC. This year they added Tony Dungy to their staff and he has a great way of explaining football (which might explain a lot of his success as a coach). This week he did a feature on Quarterbacks attempting to characterize what makes a Starter or Elite QB. He used Matt Ryan as an example. Here is how he broke it down:

Starter Characteristics
Intelligence – Ability to read a defense and find exploitable weakness, pick the hot route, manage the game, deceive the defense. Most of this takes place before the snap.
Poise Under Pressure – Ability to sense pressure, keep eyes down field even when hurried, not to panic.
Accuracy – Ability to put the ball on target where it can give the receiver the best play on the ball (either short or long)

Elite Characteristics
Mobility – Ability to use his legs to buy time in or out of the pocket.
Arm Strength – As this gets better the field gets longer and the vertical game becomes more of a threat.
Touch – Ability to either loft the ball over a defender’s head on the run or drill it 15 yards between defenders as the situation demands.

I think it is interesting how he divided these up as if to say you need the first three to even have a chance in the NFL. Add one or more of the next three and you could achieve greatness and really make an impact for your team.
It is also interesting to take those characteristics and attempt to rank our QBs against them…

Intelligence – it doesn’t seem that either of our QBs have exhibited this so far this year. Though Quinn seems to have an edge here based on what you hear from pundits, I can’t say that I’ve seen a lot of evidence for it. Can this one be taught or is it in-born? I’d say Anderson has made progress in this area since he first started but in the last 18 months I’m not too sure.
Poise Under Pressure – Quinn seemed better at this last year than this year. Anderson has exhibited more poise this year.
Accuracy – This is a tough one as we haven’t seen a lot of Quinn… I don’t think he has played enough to develop communication with his receivers and learn where they are supposed to be. I think this is an area which we can mark with a big ? for Quinn. Anderson doesn’t put the ball in the exact ideal place but we have seen a lot of balls bounce off of hands, knees and chests this year. Do you think interceptions by Anderson have been the result of inaccuracy or just plain bad decisions?

Mobility – I’d give the nod to Quinn here but I’m not so sure that Quinn knows when to be mobile. He doesn’t use mobility to buy him time at this point. I think this is another thing that will end up improving with experience. For Anderson, he uses small movement to buy time but he isn’t going to streak around the end for big yards like Quinn might.
Arm Strength – Quinn is thought to be weaker here though some might argue this. I’d put it more like Anderson has the stronger arm and leave it at that. The question instead may be: is Quinn’s arm strong enough to make all the throws?
Touch – Anderson used to be terrible at this but there has been some improvement. Quinn exhibits good touch as much as we’ve seen but again, more play for Quinn could end up showing more of a difference here.

So I’m interested in other’s opinions here. The other side of this whole thing might be looking at potential QB draft picks next year in this light… though I’d have no idea having only seen highlights of most of them. Bradford seems to be accurate, poised, mobile… not sure about the rest. Maybe others can fill in here. I thought this was an interesting way to look at QBs.

Chris... I posted this under the "Shoulder Injury" fanpost.  Someone suggested I make it a fan post because of the length.  Can you delete it there?