Quarterbacks Under Pressure 2024: More Jackson and Allen Accolades

The 2024 MVP race between Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson will go down as one of the more shocking ones in NFL history. It was nearly unprecedented for a quarterback to win the MVP award and not be named first-team All-Pro, and yet All-Pro Jackson and MVP Allen dramatically split the awards between them.

It’s hard to argue that either player wasn’t worthy. There were endless stats where Allen and Jackson, in some order, finished 1-2, or at least both near the top of the league. Today, we’re going to add another one to that list, as Jackson and Allen finished 1-2 in DVOA while under pressure.

It’s time for our annual dive into our data as we rev up for this year’s FTN Football Almanac. (Pre-sale is live here!) This month, we’re focusing on pressure, starting with quarterbacks. Who faced pressure the most often, who failed or succeeded from clean pocket, and who played best and worst under pressure?

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The Best Quarterback(s) in the League

Jackson and Allen stand alone as the only two passers to have a positive DVOA under pressure in 2024. That is a tough mark to hit, and usually one reserved for quarterbacks in relatively small sample sizes. To be better than league average even with blitzers in your face over the course of an entire season? That’s more or less unheard of. Your leader in 2023 was Brock Purdy at -23.7%; the performances Jackson and Allen put up are historic outliers. We have DVOA under pressure going back through 2010, although it’s a little apples-to-oranges before 2022 because of different charting providers. But with that data, Jackson just had the best performance under pressure since 2010, with Allen also cracking the top 10.

What makes this even more impressive is that DVOA under pressure is much more volatile than DVOA in clean pockets, with much bigger year-to-year swings being the norm. That’s how you get a small-sample size Josh McCown poking into the top 10, or the one Case Keenum Miracle Year popping up. Having an unsustainably high year in your pressure DVOA is a great way to have a career season. Just under the bottom of this top-10 list we see names such as 2010 Josh Freeman, 2014 Drew Stanton or 2018 Mitchell Trubisky, who had one surprising outlier year and then tumbled back to Earth.

Not true for Jackson or Allen. Jackson has two years in this top 10 and Allen’s 2020 just misses cracking the bottom of the list. That’s arguably the difference between a Tier 1 and a Tier 2 quarterback – the ability to consistently and reliably make plays and to produce value when your offensive line has lost the rep. Deal with pressure like this and, well, awards will come your way. The truth of the matter is that both Jackson and Allen had MVP-caliber seasons in 2024; it’s just there was only one trophy to go around.

While better quarterbacks do usually finish higher on this list, 2024 is notable for just how well all the great quarterbacks did. It’s generally agreed that the top four passers in the league are, in some order, Jackson, Allen, Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow All four finished in the top five in DVOA under pressure, and they’d be your top four if you moved the cutoff to 500 pressure plays. The gatecrasher? None other than the newly retired Derek Carr, setting a career-high pressure DVOA on his way out the door. Those first two weeks really were something special, weren’t they? Carr’s numbers have the limited sample size caveat, but it’s nice to see him near the top of one more list as his career goes out. Carr’s status as the Raiders’ all-time leading passer and the best quarterback of the 2014 class may say more about the way the passing game has evolved and the state of that 2014 class than anything else, but a decade of being the prototypical model of the Just Above-Average Guy is far from a terrible career.

All 2024 Quarterbacks and Pressure

The following table shows pressure numbers for all quarterbacks with at least 200 pass plays in 2023. Quarterbacks are ranked from best to worst DVOA under pressure.