I don’t think the Bengals have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet…
That is so not “football nerd” as I know it. “Football nerd”, to me, is much more analytics, play by play grading, weird stats, and game predictive percentages. That article is just fluff, dressed up stuff to try and reach a certain results.
It literally says that’s what it’s doing: “Since the goal of this list is to match public opinion, it’s okay (maybe necessary) to cook the books until the formula spits out the result I’m looking for.” The entire goal of the article is to work back from public opinion, not to actually analyze QB play or offer anything objective.
All right. What about this, then? It is the preferred “stat for QBs” by one of the “football nerds” that I’ve mentioned to you.
Much more nerdy. Uses a lot of the stuff (total adjusted yards per play, value above replacement) that try to find objective measures to judge QB play. It’s interesting to be sure.
I’m generally not a fan of some of the adjustments made to try and compare QB’s across time periods, just because it’s so difficult and the “inflation” used is so hard to quantify. Old timers like Sid Luckman certainly gets a boost in some of those stats (because they were so much better than their contemporaries, but they were not what I would consider great), but, by and large, it’s a pretty good list. When the top 10 QB’s it lists are Peyton Manning, Dan Marino, Otto Graham, Joe Montana, Tom Brady, Fran Tarkington, Drew Brees, Steve Young, Johnny Unitas, and Sammy Baugh, it’s pretty good (I’ll note I’ve always thought Tarkington was overrated and Steve Young was underrated).
And, for the record, Eli comes in at 93, around guys like Marc Bulger, Jeff Hostetler, Michael Vick, and Brad Johnson. Seems about right.
I’m a little young to remember much about Fran as a football player but I’m pretty sure I read something, once, about Fran Tarkenton retiring with several N.F.L. records in hand (much as Steve Largent did 11 years later). Oh - right here is where I read that.
I think a huge chunk of my thoughts on him were solely about just how often he was bad in the playoffs when I was but a wee little Hamlet. Those purple people eater defenses were amazing, but (again from my kid’s memory) he’d always find a way to fuck them over in the Super Bowl and the playoffs in general. Maybe I’ll waste some time this weekend actually looking at his body of work. Probably not though. No one gives a shit what I think about Fran Tarkenton.
In fairness to Fran my feelings are that in S.B. IV they ran up against a team with a stellar defense of its own (in their 3 playoff games that year the Chiefs gave up 6 points to the defending world champions, 7 points to the highest-scoring A.F.L. team [the Raiders], and then only 7 points to the highest-scoring N.F.L. team) that was still stinging from the loss to the Packers 3 years earlier and was eager to redeem itself; I’ve seen opinions that both Miami and Pittsburgh were simply better teams (although Jack Patera - then on Bud Grant’s staff - opined that had the Vikings’ game plan been executed properly in S.B. IX that the Vikings could have beaten the Steelers), and the loss to the Raiders? The Vikings probably sensed that that was probably going to be the last chance for their core of star players to win a post-merger league title while the Raiders had waited YEARS to get past the juggernaut that was Pittsburgh and probably went into that game not wanting to ruin the accomplishment of having actually beaten the Steelers in a playoff game by losing the S.B. I know that in the book “The Super '70s” by Tom Danyluk Raiders LB Phil Villapiano, when asked how he could’ve been so sure that his team would beat the Vikings in S.B. XI when the Vikings had lost only 2 games all season by a total of something like 5 points, responded: “I knew we could beat them handily. . .We were the best team in the league. . .We feared Chuck Foreman a little bit but nobody else. Fran Tarkenton? We thought he was okay. We weren’t worried about him. . .We knew we weren’t going to lose to those guys. We had played teams that were a lot better than the Vikings that year.” So there ya have it.
Russell Wilson was compared very favorably to Fran Tarkenton early in his career. That shows what kind of a lasting influence he had.
Of course these days young QBs are sometimes compared favorably to Wilson now that he has established himself well in the league. 
My wife’s a Seahawks fan but she grew up in North Dakota and was a fan of the Vikings back then. I have often made Chris Berman-like “whoop, whoop!” sounds when Russell Wilson scrambles around and the player I always compare him to is Fran Tarkenton.
I was in Panama recently and there I met a guy from Ohio. His dad was a Browns fan and he’s a Bengals fan. He told me that as long as Mike Brown runs the Bengals that team isn’t going to do anything.