The way NFL Network analyst Daniel Jeremiah sees it, the greatest offseason of quarterback movement in NFL history actually took root two years ago when the Arizona Cardinals hired a newly-deposed college coach amid a growing appetite for risk in the league’s easy-to-manipulate economic system.
With new coach Kliff Kingsbury at the helm following his dismissal from Texas Tech, the Cardinals became the third team in modern NFL history to use consecutive first-round picks on quarterbacks, and the first to do so free of extenuating circumstances.
Kingsbury inherited a Cardinals team that went 3-13 and a quarterback in Josh Rosen who made 13 middling starts as a rookie.
Rosen was the fourth of five quarterbacks taken in the first round of the 2018 draft, No. 10 overall, but his skill set was hardly a match for Kingsbury’s Air Raid offense. Rather than overhaul his scheme to fit a quarterback he was lukewarm about, Kingsbury and the Cardinals used the No. 1 pick of the 2019 draft on Rosen’s replacement: Kyler Murray.
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Murray was a hit as a rookie, winning Offensive Rookie of the Year honors and transforming the Cardinals from perennial afterthought to dangerous division contender. And while Arizona has yet to have a winning record under Kingsbury, Jeremiah said their relative success has given cover to NFL teams struggling with the hardest but most essential task in the sport — finding a good quarterback to build around.
“If we feel like there’s an opportunity to upgrade, we would do it at every other position, but forever we wouldn’t do it at quarterback,” Jeremiah said. “You’d say, ‘Ah, he’s good enough.’ But man, you’re always trying to get better at the other positions. It only makes more sense you try and get better at that one.”
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Eleven teams have shuffled their cards at quarterback since the end of the 2020 season, including the Detroit Lions, who traded longtime starter Matthew Stafford to the Los Angeles Rams for Jared Goff and three draft picks.
Goff, 26 and a former No. 1 overall pick, will start at quarterback for the Lions this fall, though the team has not made any public commitment to him going forward.
Instead, general manager Brad Holmes spent the spring traveling to pro-day workouts across the country where he watched some of the draft’s top quarterback prospects, including BYU’s Zach Wilson, North Dakota State’s Trey Lance and Ohio State’s Justin Fields.
Few NFL observers expect the Lions to take a quarterback at No. 7, but no one will rule it out. And in today’s NFL, where allegiances are short-lived and shrewd moves must be made to reach the top, no one would be stunned if it happens, either.
“It’s not as cost prohibitive as it used to be (to move on from unwanted quarterbacks), so you don’t have these monster rookie contracts that you’re committed to long-term,” Jeremiah said. “You have a lot more turnover in terms of head coaches and GMs. That cycle has been shrunk. So teams have been, ‘OK, we’re not married to a guy.’”
Striking numbers
Five quarterbacks are expected to go in the first round of this week’s draft — Wilson, Lance, Fields, Trevor Lawrence and Mac Jones — and quarterbacks could go with the first four picks for the first time ever.
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Using history as a guide, most of the teams that draft those quarterbacks will walk away disappointed.
“Quarterbacks are getting kicked to the curb very early now,” ESPN analyst Mel Kiper Jr. said. “I really can’t wrap my arms around the way they’re doing with quarterbacks now, but that’s life in 2021 now. But I think if you look at the quarterbacks this year, you’re right. … I think two are going to be bad. So out of these five, there’s going to be probably two disappointments. One’s going to be a complete bust and one’ll be, like I say, a disappointment. That’s what history tells us.”
From 2009, when the Lions took Stafford with the No. 1 pick of the draft, through 2016, when Goff went first overall, NFL teams spent 22 first-round picks on quarterbacks.
None of those 22 players remains with his original team, and on average, those quarterbacks started just 54 games with the teams that drafted them, or less than 3½ seasons under the league’s old 16-game schedule.
Goff, Carson Wentz and Cam Newton are the only members of that group to take their teams to a Super Bowl, and Wentz was injured when the Philadelphia Eagles won their championship.
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Newton, league MVP in 2015, and Andrew Luck were legitimate stars. But on balance, there have been most first-round quarterback busts — Paxton Lynch, Brandon Weeden, Johnny Manziel, Blaine Gabbert and Tim Tebow all played three or fewer seasons with their teams — than success stories.
“It used to be you had the GM, the head coach and the quarterback in place for a long period of time, and whatever their warts were, these were our guys and we’re going to roll with them and try and build around them,” Jeremiah said. “And now when you have so much turnover, these coaches and GMs are not married to these quarterbacks. They walk into the room and they’re like, ‘This wasn’t my guy. I want to go get my guy.’ So that’s part of it. You’re not going to have the penalties financially that you would have in years past.”
As risky as drafting quarterbacks has proven to be, teams keep pushing them up because of the importance of the position.
Of the past 20 Super Bowl champions, 13 have been quarterbacked by current or future Hall-of-Famers Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers. Patrick Mahomes is on his way to joining that group, and Eli Manning and Russell Wilson may, too, leaving Nick Foles, Joe Flacco and Brad Johnson as the only QBs in the past 20 years to win a title and likely miss out on Canton.
And while it is true good quarterbacks can be found later in the draft, like Brady, Brees and Wilson, all second-round picks or later. Playing that game is even more treacherous.
“There’s a reason Patrick Mahomes gets $40 million a year,” former Lions quarterback Dan Orlovsky said. “Physical talent does come into play. How well you perform with that physical talent at the highest level on a consistent basis comes into play, and there’s just not that many people on the planet that do all of that.”
‘Total shift’
NFL teams already have started placing bets on which of this year’s crop of rookie quarterbacks will join that special group.
Lawrence is considered a generational prospect and expected to go No. 1 to the Jacksonville Jaguars. The New York Jets traded Sam Darnold, their first-round pick in 2018, for the right to take Wilson at No. 2. And the San Francisco 49ers traded up from 12 to three, where they presumably will draft Jones.
One high-ranking NFL executive told the Free Press this week that he expects a quarterback to go fourth, and if that happens, there’s a good chance whoever is left of Fields and Lance also will go in the top 10.
Kiper gave Lawrence the fourth-highest draft grade he’s ever given a quarterback. But predicting which quarterbacks flame out is a different story.
“I don’t have a crystal ball for that,” he said. “I would say when you have 17 starts and you’re coming from the I-AA level, there’s some risk there with Trey Lance. Mac Jones only has 17 starts and doesn’t have a tremendous amount of overall natural ability to make things happen with his legs and if a play breaks down he’s not going to do it, but the greatest of all-time didn’t have to do that in Tom Brady. … Justin Fields is going to be the fifth quarterback taken. Obviously, the NFL feels he has the more of the risk, or he wouldn’t be the fifth quarterback taken. … Wilson had one great year at BYU.
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Holmes said in his pre-draft news conference Friday that as much as he wants to hit a home run with his first ever draft pick, he will adhere to the same philosophy his former boss Billy Devaney had as GM of the Rams.
“I always kind of go back to when you’re turning that pick in, you don’t want to feel nervous,” Holmes said. “You want to be confident and you want to feel really, really good when you make that selection. Not a nervousness of, ‘I hope this works.’ And I’m not saying that all selections don’t have any warts, because everybody’s got a hole or something that they can improve on. But at the end of the day it’s do we have buy-in and do we all feel good about the pick?”
Of course, the Cardinals felt good about Rosen in 2018 or they wouldn’t have taken him 10th overall. Ditto the Rams with Goff in 2016, when Holmes was the team’s college scouting director, and Sam Bradford in 2010, when he was a college scout.
Goff and Bradford played a total of 10 seasons with the Rams, their careers sputtering out for different reasons and the organization — one of the Super Bowl favorites in 2021 — no worse for the wear.
“I think it’s just been a total shift over the last couple years, and I don’t think it’s going away,” Jeremiah said. “That’s why to me, I think we identify who the teams are that are in the quarterback market, but when you really look at it and you say, well, if you think you can just get this much better, then there might be more teams in the quarterback market than we all know.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.