Jordan Love has gone from one of the NFL’s biggest question marks to one of its most respected quarterbacks.
That became official this week when PFF released its quarterback rankings entering the 2026 season and slotted the Packers’ franchise passer at 6th overall. Love landed behind only Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, and Matthew Stafford, while finishing ahead of quarterbacks like Justin Herbert, Dak Prescott, Brock Purdy, and C.J. Stroud.
Predictably, Jordan Love’s ranking has sparked plenty of debate. Was sixth too aggressive? Or is Jordan Love still somehow being underrated? We’ll go over why his ranking is so high, and what it means for fantasy football in 2026.
Why PFF is So High on Jordan Love
PFF’s reasoning is pretty difficult to argue with. According to their data, Love was the most efficient quarterback in football last season. Love paced all qualified QBs in EPA per dropback (0.222), while finishing near the top of the NFL in both PFF passing grade (88.7) and Wins Above Replacement (2.97).
The advanced numbers paint the picture of a quarterback who wasn’t simply putting up stats. He was consistently making winning plays.
Even more impressive was how well Love performed when his offensive line kept him protected. PFF credited him with a 94.2 passing grade when he had a clean pocket; one of the best marks in the NFL. He also paired explosive downfield passing with excellent ball security, posting a 5.9% big-time throw rate while limiting turnover-worthy plays to just 2.6%.
Love has his flaws like any other quarterback, but his PFF ranking is justified when you look at his full body of work.
The Case Against Jordan Love’s PFF Ranking
Of course, not everyone will agree with Jordan Love’s ranking. He still doesn’t have the playoff résumé of Mahomes, Burrow, or Stafford.
Some fans would argue Justin Herbert’s arm talent deserves a higher ranking. Others will point toward Brock Purdy’s efficiency or C.J. Stroud’s ceiling.
That’s always the challenge with quarterback rankings. Are you rewarding career accomplishments, projecting future performance, or simply grading how well someone played last season?
And even when you do that, are you rewarding one year too much, and ignoring how things might change going forward? There is risk to it all, but PFF leaned heavily on recent performance and advanced metrics, and by that standard, Love earned every bit of this ranking.
Is Jordan Love Ready to Join the Elite Tier?
This season feels like the true proving ground. Nobody questions Love’s arm anymore. Nobody questions whether he can make every throw. In fact, his last performance of 2026 – a gutsy effort in a playoff loss to the Chicago Bears – may have been his best yet.
Green Bay didn’t get the job done, but it wasn’t due to Love failing. The next step, of course, is Love leading his Packers on a deep playoff run and consistently delivering against the league’s best defenses in January.
If he does that, this conversation changes from whether he’s a top-six quarterback to whether he belongs in the top three.
Fantasy Football Impact for 2026
This ranking should only reinforce what fantasy managers already suspected: Jordan Love deserves to be drafted as a low-end QB1 with legitimate top-five upside.
We’ve seen him do it before. Love finished as the QB5 overall just three years ago, and last year he cracked the top-15 despite missing two games.
The Packers continue to surround him with one of the league’s youngest and more dynamic groups of pass catchers, and Love has shown he doesn’t need one superstar receiver to produce elite numbers. His willingness to spread the ball around makes Green Bay’s offense difficult to defend and keeps his weekly ceiling high.
The biggest takeaway for fantasy managers is value. Love is often drafted well after Allen, Burrow, Lamar Jackson, and Mahomes, but his statistical profile suggests the gap may not be nearly as large. If he repeats last year’s efficiency while adding a few more passing touchdowns, he has every opportunity to finish among fantasy football’s highest-scoring quarterbacks.
For drafters looking to wait on quarterback without sacrificing upside, Jordan Love continues to look like one of the smartest bets on the board. Have a look at where he lands in this year’s fantasy football quarterback rankings.
Noah Simpson is a New England-based DFS writer who has spent the better part of a decade obsessing over MLB DFS. He got his start playing DFS recreationally before realizing he was spending more time building spreadsheets than actually watching games, and decided to make it official. At DFSBuild, Noah covers MLB DFS strategy with a focus on finding edges that casual players overlook. When he’s not staring at Statcast data, he’s somewhere on a hiking trail in Maine with his two dogs, Sandboy and Johnner, who are undefeated at ignoring his lineup advice, because they are dogs. They don’t have the cognitive or motor skills required to operate a computer, let alone process complex theories and information.
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