The NFL Has a Different Kind of Gambling Problem Now
The NFL’s universal truth is that winning the Super Bowl demands otherworldly quarterback play. In the old days of roughly five or 10 years ago, merely “very good” quarterbacking might have done the job. But now Patrick Mahomes exists. The best team in the NFL is whichever one he is on, which means the Kansas City Chiefs are doing great. The teams that get the next best quarterback play are the ones that get to lose to the Chiefs in the playoffs, and they are the ones who will occasionally get to win Super Bowls of their own when something goes awry for KC.
This reality leads to some rationally irrational decisions. No, you’re almost certainly not going to win a Super Bowl with Kirk Cousins, but you definitely will not win one with Desmond Ridder, so what’s $100 million guaranteed to Cousins, the sport’s flannel-clad Netflix dad? No, the New York Giants’ Daniel Jones will never be very good for any extended period of time, but what’s $92 million when the alternative is the deeper reaches of the wilderness? Or, no, that pretty good college player likely won’t pan out, but what’s a mid- or late-first-round pick to see if he might?
Thursday was the night that a few NFL teams ceased to be hopeless optimists and became incorrigible addicts. The plights of the Atlanta Falcons and Denver Broncos will be cautionary tales for everyone else, but they will not exactly be lessons; that would imply that others will learn something rather than blow past this. The first round of the 2024 NFL Draft feels a lot like an overcorrection in the pursuit of a holy grail.
The first handful of picks passed with no surprise. The Chicago Bears coronated USC signal-caller Caleb Williams first. LSU’s Jayden Daniels went to the Washington Commanders, and North Carolina’s Drake Maye rounded out an all-QB top three by heading to the New England Patriots. Surefire Pro Bowl receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. joined the Arizona Cardinals. That was all chalk. Williams is a talent that cannot be missed, and Daniels and Maye have a lot going for them, too. These are the sorts of bets NFL teams make, and taking an amazing wideout like Harrison who can elevate a decent QB is, too. But then the Falcons, as they do, made things weird.
Michael Penix Jr. was an awesome college football player. He was somehow productive at Indiana, a football program that historically devours anything good at an alarming rate. He later transferred to Washington, where he became one of the best players in the country and got the Huskies to within one win of a national championship this past January. He’ll also be 24 years old as a rookie, the result of a lengthy, multistop college career. He’s taken lots of injury lumps. And brilliant as he was, Penix is very much on the spectrum of QBs whose college exploits were inflated by the presence of several future NFL receivers and a coaching staff of savants. (Penix’s head coach at Washington just got the same job at Alabama, and Penix’s offensive coordinator is now doing that job for the Seattle Seahawks.)
The Falcons took Penix eighth. They were not supposed to do that. The consensus of the draft industrial complex was that he would go in the late first or second round. Very few people thought he’d go anywhere near the top of the first round, though kudos to CBS Sports reporter Jonathan Jones, who projected it a week ahead of time while most did not take the possibility seriously. Part of what happened here is that the predraft reporting and rumor-milling cycle is just not reliable. Everyone who has real information about what teams will do has a direct incentive not to share it but to misdirect wherever it might help them.
The same thing was at play when the Broncos took Oregon’s Bo Nix 12th. Not a single mock draft of any note had Nix going that high, and his consensus player ranking was 35th. The people making NFL draft picks and the people seeking to project NFL draft picks have disparate information. Nix is also 24. He started a record 61 college games over five full seasons, something only possible because of COVID-adjusted eligibility rules. His outputs at Oregon also looked attributable to a clever scheme that let him get the ball out of his hands quickly to wide-open receivers who weren’t far away from him. He did well on deep passes, too, but sporadically.
It is plausible that both Penix and Nix are longtime starters who raise their teams’ Super Bowl chances from zero to 5 percent. But at least in Penix’s case, the Falcons weren’t thirsting for a QB. They just signed one, the veteran Cousins, for nine figures guaranteed. And the highly touted J.J. McCarthy, a 21-year-old who played a relatively minor but still effective role as the starter for national champion Michigan, was right there for the taking. Some thought McCarthy would go as high as No. 2 or No. 3, and the Falcons liked Penix more. (He was indeed a better college QB, albeit with a three-year age gap and in an offense that, unlike Michigan’s, believed in the forward pass’s utility.)
That is sort of the sticking point, though. The Falcons already have the dictionary definition of a mildly above-average quarterback in Cousins. The chances that any drafted QB turns out better than that are quite low, and they get lower as the draft goes on. The Falcons were so obsessed with the position that they’ve already taken Cousins’ successor, even though Cousins is 35, aging but not done for at least a few years yet, barring injury. That means Penix won’t be lined up to start until he’s solidly in the back half of his 20s. Atlanta’s general manager said afterward that if Penix sat on the bench for five years, it would be a “great problem to have.” Not exactly! He’ll be 29 in five years. The Falcons also opted for some unusual relationship management by not informing Cousins, who had just signed with them, of their plan to take Penix. Cousins’ agent made sure the NFL news media knew as much within minutes.
In the same spirit, the Broncos took Nix in the hopes that he’ll give them a pulse at the position. But they, too, already had a quarterback who gave them that much: Russell Wilson, the veteran whom they’re now paying $39 million to play for another team. Wilson was also 35 and no longer good, but he was approximately average last year. Betting on promising youth over age that’s past its prime is a common practice across professional sports, including the NFL. But expecting Nix to be anything more than passable for his first year or two is a big gamble, and Denver already had passability.
That’s where the Penix and Nix moves feel like a move onto a new frontier. It is old hat for NFL teams to spend extravagantly on quarterbacks who may not be great but won’t get them laughed off the field. It’s something different to already have poured infinite dollars and time into quarterbacks who still have some football in front of them (more for Cousins than for Wilson, probably) and then spend draft picks in the front half of the first round on nearly 25-year-old QBs who do not profile as world-beaters even in their more optimistic projections. The game has 24 positions just on offense and defense; they do not carry equal importance to winning, and none is more important than quarterback. But most teams suffer from a lot of weak spots that the draft is their best shot at treating, and it hardly needs to be said that Atlanta and Denver have plenty that could use attention.
The news isn’t as grim for fans of other teams. The Bears, the most famously QB-poor team in NFL history, have a potential savior in the fold in Williams. Every draftee can bust, but Williams’ right arm and play-extending ability are spectacular. And thanks to some savvy trading over the past year, the Bears have dropped him into a stunningly good situation for a team with the No. 1 pick. Williams will throw to two excellent veteran wideouts, D.J. Moore and Keenan Allen, and the club also got him Washington star Rome Odunze with the No. 9 pick. If Williams doesn’t work out, it’s proof that no Bears QB ever will, and the franchise should fold or run the triple option.
The Commanders should likewise feel hopeful about Daniels, who won the Heisman Trophy last year at LSU. Daniels has a reasonably short track record. He was a good but not great college player until his last year, and he ran up a lot of his biggest numbers against bad opponents. But when Daniels cooks, he cooks, and he has a real chance to be good enough to break the hex that’s been on the Commanders for three decades.
That left Maye, from UNC, for the Patriots. He’s the franchise’s second crack at picking a Tom Brady replacement after 2020 first-rounder Mac Jones turned out to be both bad and annoying. But Maye is really the start of a clean slate for everyone except the Kraft family, which owns the team. He’ll play for a new head coach, Jerod Mayo. And while the Tar Heels’ egregious defense kept Maye from college stardom, the ball jumps out of his hand.
McCarthy, from Michigan, went 10th to the Minnesota Vikings. McCarthy was the most polarizing QB of the predraft arguin’ season. He was not the focal point of a run-based Michigan offense, and the Wolverines did not ask him to make a great deal of high-difficulty downfield throws. He also wasn’t very good at them when he tried. But McCarthy has what the kids are now calling that dog in him. He conducted a game-tying touchdown drive in the Rose Bowl against Nick Saban’s Alabama war machine, and his athleticism suggests he has room to grow.
It was unsurprising that the Vikings would take McCarthy, trading up by a spot to get him. After all, their quarterback of the past six seasons (Cousins) just walked out the door to Atlanta. A team with a quarterback vacuum will always fill it. What comes as more of a surprise is when a team without an immediate quarterback need decides that the specter of a need several years from now is worth forgetting about everything else. As of Thursday, that is the NFL.
