Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen have been two of the league’s most talked-about players as the NFL season has reached the playoffs. The leading MVP candidates have accelerated the league’s progression from an era littered with passing QBs like Tom Brady to one largely dominated by dual-threat quarterbacks.
This season, NFL quarterbacks ran for 11,015 yards, smashing the record of 10,231 from 2022 by 8%. This season’s total represents an increase of 35% over 2019 and 56% over 2014 (adjusted for 17-game versus 16-game schedules). Quarterbacks produced more than twice as many rushing yards in 2024 as they did in 2009, and their gains on the ground now account for 6% of all yards from scrimmage.
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“7 of the 8 QBs in the NFL Divisional Round of the Playoffs are mobile QBs,” former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III, a godfather of sorts to the movement, posted on X on Monday. “The New Prototypical NFL QB is mobile and it’s never going back.”
The 2024 rookie class no doubt contributed to the spike. The four full-time first-year starters—Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams, Bo Nix and Drake Maye—finished second, seventh, eighth and ninth among all QBs in rushing yards.
Daniels, who led the Washington Commanders to their first playoff win in 19 years, is among a quartet of signal-callers in the divisional round running at a history-making rate.
Daniels’ 52.4 career rushing yards per game after just one season is the second highest in NFL history, trailing only Jackson (59.9 YPG) in the record books. Jackson is also suiting up this weekend, facing the Buffalo Bills on Sunday night.
As far as running styles, if Jackson and Daniels are speedsters, then Philadelphia Eagles’ Jalen Hurts and the Bills’ Josh Allen are bruisers. They are outliers in touchdowns per game, averaging 0.71 and 0.59, respectively, good for the top two marks among all QBs since 1970 who have made a full season’s worth of appearances. Hurts, a 6-foot-1 cannon ball, is nearly 20 pounds heavier than the 6-foot-2 Jackson, while Allen at 6-foot-5 and 237 pounds can be more aptly described as a wrecking ball.
The Ravens-Bills divisional-round game this Sunday night is a dream matchup for fans of dual-threat quarterbacks and contrasts in style. Jackson and Allen have put up historic career numbers at just 28 years old. Jackson is the all-time QB leader in total rushing yards, while Allen is on pace to eclipse the touchdown mark next season. They are already the top two all-time at the position in postseason rushing yards.
Then there’s Patrick Mahomes, the three-time Super Bowl MVP, who makes clutch plays with his legs time and time again. No quarterback had ever won a Super Bowl game in which he ran the ball more than seven times until Mahomes did so in each of the Kansas City Chiefs’ wins over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowls 54 and 58.
Mahomes, though, is still primarily a passer. Most true dual-threat quarterbacks have fallen just short of winning it all. Of the 71 individual regular seasons in which a quarterback ran for at least 500 yards, only one of those players went on to win the Super Bowl: Russell Wilson in 2013. Colin Kaepernick, Cam Newton and Hurts have all lost in the championship game; Allen and Jackson, meanwhile, have so far been on the outside looking in with Mahomes and the Chiefs reaching the Super Bowl in four of the last five seasons.
Super Bowl win or not, these rushing quarterbacks have ushered in a new era of NFL offense. Griffin, however, may have exaggerated when he grouped seven of the eight quarterbacks still standing in the playoffs together under the “mobile” label. He later clarified that he was including Matthew Stafford, who rushed for just 41 yards with the Rams this season.
“The most yards I rushed for in a season was 304,” former NFL quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick wrote in a repost of Griffin’s post. “If you haven’t rushed for more than that in a season we can’t classify you as a ‘mobile QB.’”
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