The Fab Five they are not, but three weeks into the NFL season it is far too early to write off this year’s crop of rookie quarterbacks. In fact, this group of five’s struggles are more in line with historical norms than impatient fans and pundits care to admit.
When the Detroit Lions visit the Chicago Bears on Sunday at Soldier Field, they likely will face a rookie quarterback for the second time in four games this season.
Justin Fields, the 11th pick of April’s draft and one of five quarterbacks to go in the top 15 — an almost unprecedented feat — is expected to start for a Bears team that has long been searching for its future at the position.
In Week 1, the Lions saw Trey Lance, the No. 3 pick of the draft, play four spot snaps off the bench. Lance threw a 5-yard touchdown on his only pass of the game, helping the San Francisco 49ers to a 41-33 win at Ford Field.
Lance’s touchdown is one of the few highlights for a rookie quarterback class that has combined to go 1-11 in starts this season with 12 touchdown passes, 19 interceptions and 43 sacks.
Those ugly numbers underscore just how difficult it is to play quarterback as a rookie in the NFL.
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“We do this every year where these kids get drafted in the top 10 and we expect them to be the best player in the league right away,” Lions quarterback Jared Goff said. “It’s rare. It’s rare. I think you look around the league and how many guys have done that in the last 20 years? I don’t know, one or two. (Patrick) Mahomes may have ruined it for all these guys being as good as he was in Year 2. But it’s a tough game. It’s a different sport than in college almost. It’s a different game.”
Goff knows from experience.
The No. 1 pick of the 2016 draft, Goff went 0-7 as a rookie starter with more interceptions (seven) than touchdowns (five). He finished his rookie season with an unsightly passer rating of 63.6, failed to reach 170 yards passing in five of his seven starts and immediately was criticized as a bust.
A year later, he won 11 games as starter, and by 2018 he had the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl.
“I remember my transition was hard and you’re learning a lot, you’re learning on the fly,” Goff said. “And I remember they always ask you, ‘Are you ready to play? Are you ready to play?’ No, you’re never ready to play as a rookie. You never are until you go out there and do it and you have to experience it and you have to go through it and you have to make the mistakes and get better.
“So, I always laugh at it every year with calling out who’s going to be good and who’s going to be bad after their rookie season. Give them three years, give them four years. See how they pan out and then make your decision.”
Patience can be hard to come by in a league where players and coaches rarely get more than three years to prove their worth.
And as Goff said, Mahomes and others like Justin Herbert and Lamar Jackson have spoiled the wait with special seasons.
Herbert was supposed to spend his rookie year as a backup but was thrust into a starting role last September after a Los Angeles Chargers team doctor accidentally punctured Tyrod Taylor’s lung.
Making an emergency start on literally seconds’ notice in a Week 2 game against the Kansas City Chiefs, Herbert threw for 311 yards with rushing and passing touchdowns in an overtime loss to the AFC’s best team.
A week later, Herbert put up similar numbers — 330 yards passing and a touchdown — in a close loss to the Carolina Panthers, and by the time 2020 was done he had authored one of the truly remarkable seasons in NFL history: 4,336 yards passing, 31 touchdowns, 10 interceptions and an Offensive Rookie of the Year award.
Herbert’s huge season came a year after Jackson won NFL MVP honors in his second season and first as a full-time starter, and two years after Mahomes did the same.
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Throw in impressive early-career play by the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen and the Arizona Cardinals’ Kyler Murray, neither of whom is yet 26 years old, and it’s easy to see why so much is expected from this year’s highly touted rookie quarterback class.
“It seems like (there is no patience),” Goff said. “And right or wrong, I think at our position it’s too hard. It’s too hard to expect them to pick it up right away. They need to make those mistakes. They need to go through the trials and tribulations. They need to go make the mistake, watch it, and then not make the mistake again. That’s kind of the way it goes.”
Teams crave quarterbacks like Herbert and Mahomes, franchise-altering signal callers who transcend their youth — and whose slotted rookie contracts allow organizations to spend more on the parts around them.
Historically, though, many of the game’s greatest quarterbacks struggled as rookies. Peyton Manning threw a rookie record 28 interceptions while going 3-13 with the Indianapolis Colts his first season. Troy Aikman threw twice as many interceptions (18) as touchdowns (nine) in an 0-11 rookie campaign. John Elway did the same (seven touchdowns, four picks) while going 4-6.
Manning and Elway fared significantly better in Year 2, winning 13 and 12 games, respectively, while others like Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Brett Favre and Mahomes benefitted significantly from sitting most or all of their rookie years.
“I look back at those nine games (I sat as a rookie) as like some of the most valuable learning experiences I had with Case Keenum as the starter and learning from him, learning from his successes, learning from his mistakes and just the way he treated me,” Goff said. “It was an invaluable learning experience and I’m sure Patrick would say the same thing about Alex (Smith) and Aaron would say the same thing about Brett sitting behind them. Those guys got that experience of learning that stuff.”
Three of the five teams that took quarterbacks in the top 15, the Jacksonville Jaguars (Trevor Lawrence), New York Jets (Zach Wilson) and New England Patriots (Mac Jones), deputized their rookies as Week 1 starters with mixed results.
Lawrence, a generational prospect who was considered the best quarterback to enter the draft since at least Andrew Luck, has shown flashes of greatness but at 0-4 already has suffered as many losses as he did in high school and college combined. Jones, similarly, has played well at times, though wins and big passing numbers have been hard to come by. Wilson, meanwhile, has been a turnover machine with seven interceptions and 15 sacks in three games.
The 49ers with Lance and Bears with Fields have taken a different approach, preferring to bring their quarterbacks along more slowly behind veterans, though Fields was forced into the starting lineup last week when Andy Dalton suffered a knee injury.
In a 26-6 loss to the Cleveland Browns, Fields completed 6 of 20 passes for 68 yards and was sacked nine times. The Bears, because of sacks, finished with 1 net yard passing and 47 yards of net offense.
Davis Mills, a third-round pick by the Houston Texans and the other rookie quarterback to start a game this season, also took his place because of injury, ironically to Taylor, the same quarterback who opened the door to Herbert’s greatness.
Lions coach Dan Campbell may have his own play-or-sit decision to make with a rookie quarterback in the coming seasons ( the 2022 draft is shaping up to be light at the position, though the Lions are trending toward their fourth straight top-10 pick). He said perhaps jokingly when he was hired that his philosophy on rookie QBs is “you let them go and you let them win until they can’t. And then if they can’t, they sit behind a veteran who can.”
Campbell was an assistant with the Miami Dolphins in 2012 and saw first-round quarterback Ryan Tannehill struggle through the early part of his career only to have a resurgence when he was traded to a new team, the Tennessee Titans, in 2019.
“It’s part of the growth,” Campbell said of a young quarterback’s struggles. “And the difference is, when you play quarterback, the ball is in your hand every snap and you’re making all the calls here for the most part. I’m always touching the football whether it’s a handoff, it’s a pass. I may have some checks, and so it gets magnified because all of these things are on you.”
That seems to be the case with Fields, who may or may not become a star, and thus make the Lions regret passing on him (like they did Herbert) in the draft, but whose lone start was more beneficial than it looked.
“Look, he’ll be better for it,” Campbell said. “The kid’ll be better for it. He just will. He’ll be a better player, and I thought as the game went on last week, he actually started to play better and kind of got in a little bit more of a groove. I would expect, there again, if he’s playing, he’ll be better than he was last week.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.