What Happens to Good Quarterbacks?

the best QBs of a generation, destroyed by capitalism...

Now that we’re roughly ¼ of the way through the NFL season,¹ let’s take a look at how the last three quarterbacks drafted first overall are fairing so far:

• Caleb Williams, the consensus #1 overall pick in this year’s draft, who had been coveted for years, struggled early in the season for the Chicago Bears, and has already been passed in Rookie of the Year odds by Jayden Daniels in Washington, the #2 overall pick who is off to an electric start.

• The Carolina Panthers benched Bryce Young, last year’s #1 overall pick, who they traded up to take in 2023, and replaced him with Andy Dalton, a 36-year-old veteran on his fifth team since 2019. Dalton immediately threw for over 300 yards and 3 TDs, leading the Panthers to just their third win since the start of LAST SEASON. And while he hasn’t been as good since, it seems unlikely that Young will start again this season.

• Trevor Lawrence, the #1 overall pick in 2021, who signed a $275 million extension in June, has gotten his team off to a 1-4 start, ranks in the bottom of the league in most passing categories, and has people wondering whether he will ever live up to the hype that surrounded him when he was in college.

This is not just cherry-picking. Jameis Winston is a backup. Kyler Murray has doubters. And this is to say nothing of quarterbacks taken after the #1 pick, but still higher than anyone would think based on how their NFL careers have gone so far: Zach Wilson, Trey Lance, Josh Rosen, Daniel Jones, etc.

If you were to judge NFL scouts based on the number of quarterback “busts,” you’d have to conclude that they have no idea what they’re doing. And yet, if you look at some other stories from this season, you see that a lot of these highly drafted QBs DO actually demonstrate the talent that scouts saw in them when they were drafted. Baker Mayfield has been great in Tampa Bay after Cleveland, the team that drafted him #1 in 2018, and two other teams gave up on him. Sam Darnold, who was considered a bust after his stint with the Jets, has led the Vikings to a 5-0 start. Jarod Goff just led the Lions to the NFC Championship game. Even Justin Fields has had some success in Pittsburgh now.

In other words, it doesn’t actually seem like teams are misevaluating the potential of these young quarterbacks. Instead, it seems like they are giving up on them too early, or that bad teams are failing to develop these quarterbacks properly. And both of these are the result of labor exploitation…

First, there’s the Giving Up Too Early thing. That’s an extension of the rookie wage scale, which gives teams less than five years to make up their mind about a newly drafted quarterback: Rookies are under contract for four years, and teams have a fifth-year option on first-round picks, but they have to pick up that option at the end of the third year. Given how reluctant teams are to let a young QB reach free agency, this means that teams have to decide within four years whether they want to sign their quarterback to a long-term deal.

So if a team’s not sold on a guy after a few seasons, they’re written off and considered a bust. Sam Darnold was traded after just three seasons with the Jets; Baker Mayfield got four in Cleveland; Trey Lance got just two in San Francisco; etc. Some quarterbacks DO get long-term deals, only for the team to regret it and try to get out of it almost immediately: Jared Goff was the #1 pick, led the Rams to the Super Bowl, signed a record-setting contract, and then lost the faith of his coach and got shipped off to Detroit — all in just five years! (For some context, five years into Peyton Manning’s Hall of Fame career, he had not yet won a playoff game.)

The shortened development time means that not only do teams give up young guys too quickly — they often rush them onto the field too soon. It’s rare for teams to let rookie QBs sit out the first year, even though the track record of success for quarterbacks who sit out a year or two is generally better than those who are rushed onto the field. But if a team has to make a sizable financial commitment to a player within three or four years, then they cannot wait too long to see if the player is worth it. They need to know NOW.

This is especially bad for developing young talent when you combine it with the OTHER piece of labor exploitation sabotaging quarterbacks: the Draft. See, it’s hard to feel too bad for quarterbacks for reaching free agency too soon. After all, the reason teams have to make these quick decisions is that the market for QBs is so lucrative. Is Jared Goff a victim because the Rams gave him $110 million in guaranteed money?

But Goff is a success story, relatively, and the Draft does not set most quarterbacks up for success, by prioritizing bad teams and giving players no agency in where they end up playing. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes a generational talent ends up getting drafted by a team with an offensive guru head coach and a future Hall of Famer at tight end, plus the fastest receiver in the league, and he gets to sit for a year while he acclimates to the pro game.

But most of the times you end up going to a bad team with an inexperienced coach and get rushed onto the field behind a porous offensive line.

Bryce Young is a particularly painful example. He was a Heisman Trophy winner and national champion in college, but he’s small — listed (generously) at just 5’10” at 205 pounds. That meant he had little margin for error if he was going to be successful in the NFL. But instead of going somewhere that would really be conducive to that success, he was stuck with the Carolina Panthers, a rudderless organization that traded up to draft him (reportedly against the wishes of the newly hired coach), and then played him right away, behind a porous offensive line. The result was an abysmal rookie season — only five QBs in history were sacked more times than Young was sacked in his rookie season.² Rather than getting developed, he actually seemed to get worse as the season went along.

Some people will say that Bryce Young was simply never destined to be an NFL quarterback, as if there’s just nothing that could have been done. But the point is that we can never know for sure, because the Draft forces QBs to play for inept teams. This is not good for the league and, as I’ve said before, there’s no reason it has to be this way. But owners would rather destroy the careers of a few potential franchise quarterbacks than grant players the freedom to pick their employer.

A few months ago, Tom Brady made some comments about the decline in quarterback play around the league:

“It used to be thought of at a higher level. We used to spend hours and hours in the offseason, in training camp, trying to be a little bit better the next year. But I think what happens is it discourages the coaches from going to deep levels, because they realize the players don't have the opportunity to go to a deep level. So they're just going to teach them where they're at.”

He got some pushback for this, because Brady is not a historical materialist and so it came off like he was calling modern quarterbacks dumb, but he was basically correct. Quarterbacks are not being developed — they’re being thrown in the deep-end, to sink or swim on their own. If they swim, then that’s good for them and great for the owners. If they sink, then that’s bad for them, and the owners just move on to someone else, the way the Bears moved from Justin Fields to Caleb Williams.

And yet every few weeks, some pundit complains about the state of quarterback play in the NFL. Offense is down! Where are all the great QBs? Well, they’re being thrown to the wolves and run out of the league before their rookie contracts are up! You’d think the fact that guys like Mayfield and Darnold manage to find success in better situations would convince people that the problem isn’t the quarterbacks themselves, but the system the NFL has for developing them. But capitalism would rather reward owners for their failures than set players up to succeed…

1. It’s so annoying that the 17-game schedule means you can no longer divide the season neatly into halves, quarters, or even thirds. Yet another reason that was a mistake…

2. Lest you think this is just a by-product of the expanded schedule, Young only played in 16 games last year…