Fantasy's QB1 was passing's QB10: across all 45 qualified passers, Josh Allen's edge was 14 rushing touchdowns

We pulled the complete 2025 regular-season player log from nflverse and isolated every quarterback who threw at least 100 passes: 45 players. We then scored each one twice from the same standard-scoring formula the file stores — once on his whole line (output) and once on his passing line alone (0.04 × passing yards + 4 × passing touchdowns + 2 × passing two-point conversions − 2 × interceptions − 2 × sack fumbles lost); the whole-line score adds rushing on the same standard scale (0.1 × rushing yards + 6 × rushing touchdowns + 2 × rushing two-point conversions − 2 × fumbles lost), plus receiving on the identical scale (0.1 × receiving yards + 6 × receiving touchdowns) for the few quarterbacks with receiving fantasy points. The formula reproduces Josh Allen's stored total exactly (226.7 passing + 137.9 rushing = 364.6, matching the file to the tenth); the quarterbacks with receiving lines reconcile once that term is included. Josh Allen (Buffalo) finished first of the 45 in total fantasy points, 364.6. On passing alone he ranks 10th — 226.7 points, behind pocket passers including Matthew Stafford (352.3), Jared Goff (296.6) and Dak Prescott (286.1). The 137.9 points that separate his two ranks are all rushing: 57.9 from 579 yards, 84.0 from 14 touchdowns, less 4.0 for two lost fumbles. Rushing supplied 37.8% of his fantasy season; across the 45 quarterbacks the median is 17.5%, and the figure runs from roughly zero for the pure pocket passers to 44% at the top. The rushing scores are concentrated. The 45 quarterbacks ran for 101 touchdowns in the group; the four who reached 8 or more — Allen (14), Trevor Lawrence (9), Jaxson Dart (9) and Jalen Hurts (8) — accounted for 40 of them (40%) on 385 of the group's 1,992 carries (19%). Read across the pool, the yardage a quarterback gains scales with how often he runs; the touchdowns do not scale the same way. Among the 21 quarterbacks with 40 or more carries, yards per carry ran a tight 2.7 to 6.9, while touchdowns per carry ran 0.0% to 12.5% around a 3.9% median. Carries correlate with rushing yards at r = 0.87 and with rushing touchdowns at r = 0.75; touchdown rate per carry disperses about three times as widely as yardage rate (coefficient of variation 0.70 versus 0.22). The clearest single pair sits at the top of the board. Allen and Drake Maye (New England), the two highest-scoring quarterbacks of 2025, ran almost identically — 112 carries to 103 — yet Allen reached the end zone 14 times on the ground to Maye's 4. That gap is worth 66.9 rushing fantasy points (137.9 to 71.0), and 60 of those points are the touchdown column alone; the fantasy points from rushing yardage differed by less than 13 (57.9 to 45.0), even though Allen out-gained Maye on the ground, 579 yards to 450. Maye got to QB2 on his arm — 279.8 passing points, 4th of the 45; Allen got to QB1 on his legs.

The following is analysis, not fact. A quarterback's fantasy line is a noisy number stacked on a repeatable one, same as any skill position — but the split lands in an unusual place here. The repeatable part is volume: how often a quarterback runs, and how far he gets when he does. The nflverse log counts total carries — designed runs, scrambles, and kneel-downs together, which it does not separate — so this is run volume, not designed-run volume specifically. Within 2025, yards per carry sat in a tight band — 16 of the 21 busiest runners between 4.0 and 6.0 — though one season shows the cross-sectional spread, not that any quarterback's rate is stable year to year ^mmodeled. The part that separates the very top of the position is narrower still: touchdowns taken in on the quarterback keeper, a play that lives inside the five-yard line and shows up in small integer counts. Forty percent of the group's rushing scores came from four players running one-fifth of its carries. That is why the QB1 next to Josh Allen's name and the QB10 next to it on passing are describing the same season from two angles. Allen led all 45 passers on the ground and finished 10th through the air; the 138 points between his two ranks are an input almost no one else in the pool has in that volume. Drake Maye ran nearly as often and finished second overall on the strength of his arm instead — the mirror image, built from the layer that scales with volume rather than the one that concentrates at the goal line. What a single manager cannot see from one roster is that the league's top fantasy quarterback and its second sit one slot apart on totals while being built from opposite halves of the position.

This is a read of where 2025's points came from, not a forecast, and emphatically not a regression call ^mmodeled. The opposite, in fact: among the 15 quarterbacks who cleared 40 carries in both 2024 and 2025, rushing touchdowns persisted year-over-year at r = 0.71 — stronger than carries (0.37) or rushing yards (0.23) in that small sample. Elite quarterback rushing scores concentrate in goal-line carries — usage the aggregate totals register as concentration, though they do not observe whether it is schemed ^sspeculative — unlike the coin-flip that receiving touchdowns look like across a receiver pool. So the concentration described here is a real, partly durable feature of a few offenses (rushing touchdowns persisted at r = 0.71 across the 2024–2025 pair), not evidence that any of it is about to vanish. The 100-attempt and 40-carry cutoffs are choices; a different line would reshuffle the pool's edges, though Allen and Maye sit far from any boundary. Standard scoring is one system — a six-point passing-touchdown league narrows every gap between arm and legs described above. And none of this is a call on which quarterback to draft; it is a map of how two seasons that finished one slot apart were assembled from different parts of the game.

A manager who rostered Josh Allen in 2025 saw the No. 1 quarterback and a season-long edge, and was right to. The pool read is the part a single roster cannot show: that the edge was built almost entirely from the one fantasy input concentrated in four quarterbacks — goal-line runs — while the man who finished directly behind him got there from the opposite direction, on volume any starter can accumulate.