Fantasy football owners were wringing their hands over the dearth of good quarterbacks in the NFL not long ago, but now we're in the midst of a boom period for fantasy QBs. I count 15 quarterbacks with a reasonably decent chance of getting you 300 yards and/or three TD passes in any given week, even against good defenses. The league also has a lot of bad QBs right now. There are 12 quarterbacks who are starting for NFL teams but aren't good enough to regularly start for fantasy teams. The list includes young QBs Chad Henne, Mark Sanchez and Matthew Stafford, who all have reasonable odds of developing into reliable fantasy contributors but still have a long way to go. The middle class of quarterbacks mirrors the middle class of American society in that they're both shrinking. There are five quarterbacks occupying the no-man's-land between quality fantasy starter and non-starter, and one of those five got his starting job less than two weeks ago. Let's take a look at the Not Quite Fab Five:

1. Eli Manning — His defenders will point to the championship ring on his finger, but let's face it: The youngest of the Manning brothers is overrated as a fantasy quarterback, and the numbers suggest that he might be overrated in the non-fantasy sense, too. (And let's not forget that if David Tyree doesn't make perhaps the greatest catch in NFL history, Eli doesn't have that ring.) In four full seasons as a starter, Eli has never thrown more than 24 TD passes in a season. By comparison, older brother Peyton has never thrown fewer than 26 TD passes in a year over 11 full seasons as a starter. Eli's career TD-INT ratio of 111-82 isn't particularly impressive. He hadn't completed 60 percent of his passes for a full season before last year, when he barely cleared the bar at 60.3 percent. Eli also tends to start fast and then hit the wall. In 2007, he didn't have a 300-yard game after Week Six, and only once in his last nine starts that season did he throw more than one TD pass in a game (and his four-TD outing in Week 17 came too late to benefit most of his fantasy owners). In 2008, Manning threw for fewer than 200 yards in 10 of his last 12 games. Now, Manning appears to be slowing down after a hot start, with a TD-INT ratio of 3-6 in his last three games after a 10-2 ratio over his first five games. It would be tough to make the case that Manning is anything more than the 16th-best fantasy QB in the league.

2. Matt Hasselbeck — His family ties to shrill TV talk-show host Elizabeth Hasselbeck, his sister-in-law, will not be held against him here. But the 11-year veteran is now 34 and perhaps nearing the end. Back and knee injuries limited him to seven games last season, and he's already missed a pair of games this year due to a rib injury. Hasselbeck has gone 18 starts and nearly two years since his last 300-yard game, which occurred on Nov. 18, 2007. He's thrown nine TD passes this season against only three interceptions, but two of his five starts this season have been washouts (the Week Two game against the 49ers in which he got hurt and a miserable Week Six performance against the Cardinals). His seven starts in 2008 were mostly bad, resulting in five TD passes, 10 interceptions and the worst yards-per-attempt average (5.8) since his days as Brett Favre's backup in Green Bay. But there have been problems with the supporting cast lately. Injuries decimated the Seattle WR corps in 2008. Hasselbeck now has a healthy and capable group of pass catchers, but the Seahawks have had little continuity along the offensive line the last couple of years. Erstwhile stud OLT Walter Jones can't stay healthy anymore. And, frankly, the Seattle O-line hasn't been very effective since the team let star OLG Steve Hutchinson walk in free agency a few years ago. Hasselbeck still has some nice games, but it's hard to count on an injury-riddled quarterback who's getting poor protection from his offensive line.