Photo by Stan Szeto, USA Today
Cal Football: Where Does Chase Garbers Fit Into CBS Quarterback Rankings?
CBS Sports assembled an interesting ratings table of 2020 college quarterbacks that utilizes a different set of criteria but lands Cal junior Chase Garbers pretty much where most of these types of exercises do.
Ben Kercheval, the author of the story, places the QBs into five tiers, with Garbers winding up as the 10th-ranked player in Tier IV, No. 37 overall among 52 players who were listed.
Garbers is fourth among Pac-12 quarterbacks, behind USC’s Kedon Slovis (Tier II), ASU’s Jayden Daniels (Tier III) and Stanford’s Davis Mills (Tier IV).
Garbers threw 14 touchdowns and just three interceptions in his nine games last season while passing for 1,772 yards. Among those yards, 1,035 represent the yardage the ball traveled through the air (meaning that 737 yards were produced by receivers after the catch).
Garbers’ 4.81 yards per attempt (again, a measurement of the distance the ball is in the air) is greater than ASU’s Daniels (3.69) and Stanford’s Davis (3.97) but short of USC’s Slovis (5.02).
Garbers’ 60.9 completion percentage ranks 28th among the 52 players on the chart, but the numbers show that he was on target 71.2 percent of the time, meaning that those passes were deemed catchable.
Here is the full CBS Sports story.
Here’s what Kercheval wrote to explain the origins of his system:
For the past few years, I've eschewed traditional quarterback rankings in favor of tiers. Putting quarterbacks in similar groups makes more sense because they can be better compared to their counterparts. As you'll see, players like Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields are in a different stratosphere than just about everyone else. How they rank relative to each other is more applicable than how they rank compared to your average starter.
There are two quarterbacks listed in the elite Tier I category — Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence and Ohio State’s Justin Fields — both of them with All-America or Heisman Trophy aspirations.
Kercheval’s comments on Lawrence and Fields:
These are college football's two biggest names. They can do everything asked of the modern-day quarterback at a high level, throwing and running. Their overall production numbers -- Lawrence averaged 281.9 yards of total offense last year vs. Fields' 268.4 -- are comparable enough.
His statistical ratings of the two:
CBS Sports
Slovis is the highest-rated of the Pac-12 quarterbacks, checking in at No. 6 in Tier II (or No. 8 overall).
Kercheval on the Trojans’ sophomore-to-be:
Slovis at his peak was as good as any pure passer in the country with an 81.6% on-target rate.
Daniels is ranked No. 5 in Tier III after his freshman season. Kercheval’s take:
Daniels has a lot of razzle-dazzle but he also looked comfortable commanding a college football offense. His ball placement is ahead of where a lot of freshmen are at his stage.
Here are top-10 Tier IV rankings:
CBS Sports
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Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo
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