by Vincent Verhei

I'm going to give you three quarterback statlines from Week 5 in the NFL. Can you guess which passers put up these numbers?

Quarterback A: 23-of-35 for 262 yards with two touchdowns, two sacks, and no interceptions.

23-of-35 for 262 yards with two touchdowns, two sacks, and no interceptions. Quarterback B: 13-of-19 for 209 yards with one touchdown, two sacks, and no interceptions.

13-of-19 for 209 yards with one touchdown, two sacks, and no interceptions. Quarterback C: 22-of-35 for 266 yards with no touchdowns, two sacks, and two interceptions.

I can also give you some hints. One of these quarterbacks is a record-setting Super Bowl champion on the downside of his career. One turns 28 in a month and should be entering his peak. And one is a first-year player who sometimes struggled with ball security in college.

If you haven't figured it out yet, Quarterback A is Colin Kaepernick, Quarterback B is Jameis Winston, and Quarterback C is Peyton Manning. Sunday's game against Oakland was only the second time Manning has thrown two or more interceptions in a game without a touchdown since joining the Broncos in 2012, and just the ninth time (including the playoffs) he has done so since the Colts took him with the first overall draft pick in 1998. Meanwhile, Kaepernick and Winston threw three touchdowns and no picks between them.

The significance of all this is that Winston and Kaepernick, who entered Week 5 last and next-to-last in the NFL in total passing DYAR, both surpassed Manning in the season-long rankings, leaving Manning at the bottom of the pile. Let me state this clearly, because it's a remarkable thing to consider: through five weeks of the 2015 season, Peyton Manning has been, statistically, the worst starting quarterback in the NFL. This is insane to consider. Manning was 12th in DYAR in his rookie season in Indianapolis, and he missed the 2011 campaign with a neck injury. Otherwise, Manning has never finished worse than sixth in DYAR, placing in the top three 13 times (including each of his last 11 healthy seasons), and leading the league in DYAR six times.

Given that absurdly strong track record, it would be tempting to view Manning's horrible start to 2015 as a fluke of small sample size, and assume that he'll turn things around eventually. (If you've actually watched him throw a football lately, it would not be tempting to do this at all, but this column is about statistics, not film study.) Manning still has more than two-thirds of a season to go. How unusual would it be to see him bounce back to being an elite passer, or even an average one?

We went back and looked at the worst five quarterbacks in passing DYAR through five weeks of each of the last five seasons. We limited this to players who threw at least 75 passes in those five weeks. This was important, because it weeded out names like Matt McGloin and Jeff Tuel and Max Hall who were never meant to be starters anyway. We then looked at how those players fared in DYAR in Weeks 6 through 17, along with their final tallies and rankings in the DYAR standings.

Only seven of these 25 quarterbacks (28 percent) played above replacement level from Week 6 onwards. I've marked them in blue to make them easy to spot. The others either continued to struggle throughout the year, lost their jobs (quite literally, in some cases), suffered an injury, or some combination of the three.