Yeah, I think what’s going on here is three things. Having 4 all time great QBs play at once in Brady/Manning/Brees/Rodgers skews the perception of the overall level of play in those years. Second, there’s some truly awful QB play at the bottom levels.

Lastly, rule change shave made it so that you need an elite passing game to win, so a lot of guys who are good but not great can’t contend the way they could in the past. I think if you transplanted the current crop of QBs back 10-15 years ago you’d have half the league passing the Dalton line - it’s just that now the Dalton line is the cutoff for making the playoffs, not contending.