Aaron Rodgers sat on the bench for the first three seasons of his career as Brett Favre kept pushing off retirement. Once Favre left, Rodgers took off. In 2008, his first year starting, he was the #2 fantasy QB and had 97 points of VBD. Last season, Rodgers led all quarterbacks with 418 fantasy points and 124 points of VBD. This got me wondering: had Rodgers earned more points of VBD in his first two years starting than any other quarterback since 1970? It turns out he's #4 on the list. I defined a "season as a starting QB" as one where the player started at least half of his team's games.

Rodgers is in pretty good company; most of the quarterbacks who produced big numbers early on remained good fantasy players for awhile. Rodgers, like Staubach, Warner, Garcia, and others, didn't start at a young age, giving him a leg up in this sort of statistic. I don't think it's controversial to recognize that if Rodgers' first two seasons starting came at ages 22 and 23, he wouldn't have 221 points of VBD in those years. On the above list, only Marino, Steve Grogan and both Mannings were their team's main starter at those ages. Only Daunte Culpepper and Bert Jones were starters at 23 and 24; everyone else on the list had their first season starting come at age 24 or later. So we should recognize that in this piece of trivia, Rodgers does look very good. But he had an advantage most quarterbacks don't have: he didn't have to play when he had no idea what he was doing.

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