Will the young stud quarterback become devalued in the modern NFL?
As the passing game becoming seemingly easier will teams pass on expending all their energy on finding the next great quarterback?
If there’s one thing we can agree upon, it’s that the most precious resource in the NFL is a stud quarterback, and even more precious still, a young stud still on his rookie four-year deal. In the Moneyball realm of modern football, that’s the jackpot. It immediately throws open a multi-year Super Bowl window, and hands the franchise a stack of blank checks – in the form of early-round draft picks and free-agent contracts – that can be spread across several other key positions. And as long as quarterbacks are central to the team, it shall always be thus.
If we need any more proof, well, just look at the past two decades, an era in which this particular unicorn has eluded the vast majority of the NFL. It’s been called “the hardest job in America”– something only football super-computers like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady can do, and if you don’t have one of them you might as well pencil in a 6-10 season right now.
As a result, it has become NFL franchise-building dogma that capturing such a mythical beast is worth any price. Even if you wind up with Jameis Winston or Marcus Mariota – decent NFL quarterbacks, not washouts, but not stars – well, you had to take your shot. And just to be clear: we were right. The stud QB was worth any price. You couldn’t win a Super Bowl without one, unless you were the Baltimore Ravens.
But that’s not true anymore.
In 2018, in the modern NFL, for maybe the first time in the history of the position, the next-best alternatives are both plentiful, and plenty good enough. For the first time, the quarterback position is kind of overrated. This seemed unimaginable just a few years ago, when the league started its slow march toward outlawing molecular contact with quarterbacks. The new rules, designed to make sure the NFL’s biggest stars stayed upright, would only increase the dominance of the Brees and Bradys and Rodgers, allowing them to go from virtually unstoppable to actually unstoppable.
But it also had a ripple effect across the talent pool that seems obvious in retrospect: making it against the rules for a defense to obliterate a quarterback’s body and concuss his brain has made it – go figure – much easier to play quarterback. The evolution of offensive strategy, particularly the rise of college-style run-pass options, has also made it possible for good coaches to scheme above-average quarterbacks into excellent performers.
Our first real glimpse of this paradigm shift came in this year’s Super Bowl, but for the most part it was written off as a miracle: the Philadelphia Eagles winning a Super Bowl – over Brady and Belichick, no less – with their backup, Nick Foles, and doing it despite losing that most magical of chips, their young stud quarterback, Carson Wentz, to a season-ending injury.
Now we’re learning that Foles’s performance in the Super Bowl was no miracle, and maybe not even much of an anomaly. Through 14 games this season, nine starting quarterbacks have a QB rating over 100. Last season, there were six, in 2011 four, and in 2008 there was one. The lesson here isn’t that it’s meaningless to have the NFL’s top-rated quarterback: that is still a super good idea. The lesson here is that the market value of the NFL’s top-rated quarterback just isn’t what it used to be – not if you can instantly replace him with the next guy and not completely implode.
Now let’s replay this spring’s NFL draft. Baker Mayfield is awesome and he plays quarterback; ergo, he was the correct No1 pick for the Browns. Even if Mayfield wasn’t awesome, in fact, he was the correct pick in the moment, because we all thought he would be and what do any of us know anyway. Next up were the Giants, and this is where the draft replay gets interesting. At the time, in late April, most league experts thought the Giants would be crazy to pass up the chance to replace aging Eli Manning with either Sam Darnold or Josh Rosen, a pair of gifted college quarterbacks who, OK, weren’t Mayfield but who seemed like good bets to be good NFL quarterbacks. And boy did the Giants need one of those.
Instead, though, in an act of franchise-building sacrilege, the Giants took a running back. The league didn’t emit a collective LOL, exactly – Barkley was too electric for that – but there was no question that NFL Smart People thought it was dumb. And it only looked dumber when even the Jets – the Jets! – did the obvious right thing by taking Darnold with the very next pick.
But now here we are in December, and we’ve all gotten to see nearly a full season of Barkley and Darnold. Does anyone think the Giants would make a different decision now? If anything, they’d probably try to get the pick in faster. And here’s the surprising part: Darnold is pretty good. It’s unclear how good – he still plays for the Jets, after all – but he sure looks like a legit NFL quarterback. The Giants could have really used him. Instead, they apparently screwed themselves by selecting the most explosive rookie weapon in NFL history.
So here’s the question: is that outcome still worth a No3 overall pick in the draft. Is Darnold really still worth more than Barkley? Drafts don’t actually occur in isolation, no matter how much we talk about them that way. The Giants now have Barkley, which means they can go get their quarterback in next spring’s draft. They’ve also got both Barkley and Odell Beckham, plus nifty tight end Evan Engram, under contract for several more seasons – an arsenal that gives their new quarterback a much wider margin for error than he would have had if he’d been drafted last season and didn’t have Barkley behind him.
In 2015, Jared Goff and Carson Wentz went first and second. In 2016, Patrick Mahomes and DeShaun Watson went two picks apart, 10th and 12th. All four are killing it (or Goff was until the last few weeks). One way to look at this trend is that quality QBs are as indispensable as ever. But there’s another, more market-oriented way to look at it, too. The fact that four stud QBs got drafted out of back-to-back classes underscores an emerging truth about the modern NFL: there are sure are a lot of Goffs, Wentzs, Mahomes and Watsons out there now. They’re all franchise-caliber quarterbacks. But if it keeps up like – and there’s no reason to think it won’t – none of them are worth quite as much as we think.
