All-time NFL passing leaders going into 2022 season

Over the last few decades, the NFL has continually made it easier for quarterbacks while passing offenses have grown more sophisticated and the season has gotten longer. All that means that records are going to continue to be broken as we move forward.

Going into the 2022 NFL season we still firmly have the spotlight trained on recently un-retired Tom Brady. Brady heads into his 23rd season overall and third season as the Buccaneers starting QB at the age of 45.

At this point in time, there’s nobody you can say is truly on track to surpass Brady as the all-time yardage leader, but we know the pace is going to be high moving forward. Here are the all-time leaders heading into the 2022 season.

Brady is only going to increase his lead during the 2022 season and when you look at the active players on this list, it’s hard to imagine anyone surpassing him over the next five to ten years or so. There are plenty of young guns who are going to have better per year numbers than Brady, so let’s take a look at just the active quarterbacks and how they fare.

What’s truly amazing is that Brady is still the yardage leader over the last two seasons combined. He hasn’t slowed down at all statistically going into his 23rd season.

As for the younger quarterbacks, Derek Carr is higher on the list than some might imagine with 31,700 passing yards (3,962 per year) through eight seasons. But, Matthew Stafford is probably the most poised to make a run on cracking the Top 5 all-time passing leaders. He’s not young anymore, but he is on a good team with plenty of opportunity to keep adding to his 12th place ranking of 49,995 passing yards at the age of 34. He’s also currently fourth all-time in yards passing per game at 274.7.

Josh Allen is at just four seasons played, but got off to a slow start in his career. He is currently averaging 3,528 yards per season, but over the last two season he’s averaging 4,475 yards.

Justin Herbert is off to an impressive start, as he put up a big rookie season of 4,336 yards and then backed it up with 5,014 yards in year two. At 292.2 yards passing per game, Herbert ranks only behind Patrick Mahomes in his per game stats.

Mahomes is currently at 18,991 yards (4,748 per year) through four seasons and is solidly in the lead for most yards passing per game at 301.4. Even in a down year last season, he averaged over 284 yards per game. It’s still way too early to give any kind of odds on if Mahomes can keep up his torrid pace and have anywhere near the longevity of Brady, but right now he’s the best hope to topple the king some day.