How do you draft a good QB? You hire a good coach first.
The quarterback position is the most important in all of sports yet despite this, or maybe because of it, the NFL is no better at identifying good, or even decent, quarterbacks than a coin. Every year we get promised a new crop 3-4 of polished QB products in the draft and then for 18 Sundays in a row we watch over half of the starting quarterbacks top out at mediocre and bottom out at Bryce Young. As a Denver Bronco fan, I have been living in a quarterback desert since Peyton Manning retired after the 2015 season. In that time we have had over 15 starting quarterbacks, with low lights such as Drew Lock, Paxton Lynch, Brett Rypien, and Jeff Driskel. It hasn’t been as bleak as Cleveland or Chicago but it’s not great Bob.
Ryen Russillo leads at least one podcast a year with an update about the rate of QB’s who make it to their second contract, and after his most recent one I had a not that original hypothesis that maybe quarterback success is more a product of the team they’re drafted to than their skills itself.
To investigate this, I charted every quarterback who was drafted in the first or second rounds from 2010 to 2020. I looked up their draft position, the number of wins their team had the previous year, the number of starts they got their rookie year, whether the team traded up to get them, how many coaches they had in their first 4 years, and if they got a second contract from the team who drafted them. I was looking for any statistic to pop out that would indicate a successful equation for drafting quarterbacks, and then hoping to God that it applied to my sweet prince Bo Nix. I was not looking at pro-bowls, or all-pro selections, or playoff wins. All I wanted to know was, did this quarterback do enough to justify the team that drafted them giving them a second contract.
There were 42 quarterbacks who were drafted in this time frame in the first or second round, and it was pretty cut and dry in terms of whether or not they were given a second contract. The exceptions were Blake Bortles who technically got a second contract but then got waved, Jimmy Garoppolo who would have been given a second contract until he was traded because Robert Kraft wanted to keep Brady over him, Jameis Winston who probably would have been given a second contract and had his 5th year option picked up, but didn’t get that next extension because Brady wanted to go to Tampa Bay, Carson Wentz who got his second contract but got traded for a third rounder when Doug Pederson was fired, and Christian Hackenburg who only made it two years in the league before signing with something called the Memphis Express. So that leaves 37 first or second round draft QBs, only 16 of which got a second contract with the team that drafted them compared to 21 who definitively did not. 16 out of 43 QBs in a decade played well enough to justify entrusting your franchise to them after a 3–4-year tryout.
My first thought was to look into average draft position. I thought that maybe one of two things are true, maybe quarterbacks who are drafted higher are more likely to be good because maybe they’re just better- hence the higher pick. Or, maybe it pays to draft a QB later in the draft when your team is a little more stable and presumably has a decent offensive line and an NFL caliber wide receiver or two. Welp, no. The average draft position of QB’s who did get a contract was 20, basically the same as the average draft position of QB’s who did not (20.7). Even when you removed the second rounders there was no difference in average draft position (12.5 for those who did get a second contract vs 12.6 for those who didn’t). And for every Andrew Luck or Cam Newton who did work out, there was a Sam Bradford or Marcus Mariota.
Ok, so draft position doesn’t seem to be an indicator, what if we looked at competence of the team that drafted them. The obvious caveat here is that teams who win a lot of games usually don’t turn around and use a high draft pick on a QB, but maybe there’s a noticeable difference between the garbage teams who win 3-5 games, draft a QB, break that QB by being garbage, and then move on and the competent or semi competent ones who establish themselves before bringing a QB in. Nope, nothing there either. Teams who did get their guys to second contracts won an average of 6.5 games the year before drafting the QB in question compared to an average of 5.7 wins from a team that couldn’t get a QB to a second contract.
The next thing I looked at was starts by quarterbacks their rookie year. Maybe better quarterbacks just beat the door down and earned starts earlier. Or maybe the move is to develop a quarterback over the course of a season and only let them start when they are theoretically more used to the speed of the game. No difference here either, the average number of starts for rookie QBs who would get a second contract was 9.9 while the opposite was 8.7. And when you look at QB’s who didn’t start at all their rookie year, or only started once or twice you have just as many Jake Locker’s and Johnny Manziels as you do Patrick Mahomes and Jordon Love’s. So no dice there.
Maybe teams that trade up for a quarterback have better luck? This one is tough because it doesn’t happen that much and when it does it’s often a situation where a team is trading back into the first round or something. With all this noise, I don’t know that you can draw too much from these examples but 12 teams traded up in some form or fashion. 6 of those QBs worked out, 6 did not. And here you have some real doozies. Trade up stars include Mahomes, Deshaun Watson (bad dude, and might be washed now, but used to be good. Such a bad guy though), Josh Allen, Lamar and Jordon Love. Trade up busts include Josh Rosen, Blaine Gabbert, and Tim Tebow.
The only predictor of QB success that I looked at that showed any reliability in predicting if a quarter back was going to get a second contract was the number of coaches they had in their first four years. Now, look, I know that this is a chicken and an egg deal. If a coach sucks the quarterback isn’t gonna look good and if the quarterback sucks the coach is probably getting fired. But the strength of these splits is was what really caught my eye. Of the 19 eligible quarter backs who did not get a second contract 18 of them had at least 2 coaches in their first four years. On the other side of the coin, only 5 (Derek Carr, Kyler Murray, Tua, Justin Herbert, and Jalen Hurts) of the 18 quarter backs who got second contracts had multiple coaches (shout out Justin Herbert here, who survived both Anthony Lynn and Brandon Stayley in his first 4 years. It’s hard to survive not one shitty coach, let alone two- no wonder he hasn’t won anything).
We can look at this another way, of the 13 QBs who only had one head coach in their first 4 years, only Teddy Bridgewater was unable to get a second contract. That’s crazy, and a testament to how sick it must be to be an NFL head coach who has a great QB on their roster, shout out to Ron Rivera who failed upward until he rode Cam Newton all the way to the Super Bowl and eventually to the Commanders/Football Team job.
What does all this tell us? It tells us that quarterbacks are much more like orchids than snake plants. It is so so so rare to put a QB in a metaphorical dark basement and only give him water every other week and expect him to grow. No, these guys are orchids, and if you give dumb dumb coaches like Jay Gruden an orchid, he’s gonna kill it. On the other hand, if you give a good coach even a mediocre quarter back, he can get that man paid. Which is the perfect transition to our case studies.
First up is Brock Purdy. Now, I know the debate about “is Brock Purdy really good” is leading talk shows on every network, but I think it’s clear that, barring something crazy, the 49ers are going to give him a second contract. That will mean that Mr. Irrelevant, Brock Purdy will do something that Heisman winners Sam Bradford, Tim Tebow, RGIII, and Baker Mayfield failed to do, and I refuse to hear any argument that Kyle Shannahan is not at least 77% responsible for that. If you disagree, here’s a list of other 7th round quarter backs who “succeeded” in the NFL, Ryan Fitzpatrick- love him as a back-up not as a starter, Matt Cassel- he parlayed going 10-6 after Brady went down mid Patriots dynasty into a decent career, and Gus Ferotte- who could forget his 45-47-1 record from the 70s and 80s. Solid backup is usually the ceiling for those guys, but because Purdy is in the stable Shanahan system with CMC, Debo, Aiyuk, and Trent Williams AND he is grabbing this opportunity with both hands, he is going to make hundreds millions of dollars.
Just a quick aside here before we look at the other side of the coin, can you imagine how good Baker Mayfield would be if he were drafted by a stable franchise? He was drafted by a team that went ofer the previous year. He survived Hue Jackson, interim coach Gregg with three G’s Williams and Freddy Kitchens only to have the owner swoop in and replace him with a washed up sexual deviant. It is a miracle that he is still starting in the NFL, shout out Baker for being the most resilient person ever.
Ok, back on the main road with another case study. This time let’s look at Mitch Trubisky. Before the 2017 draft Pro Football Focus wrote this about Trubisky, “Shows all of the tools to develop into a very solid NFL starting quarterback and appears to be the safest option of the 2017 quarterback draft class.” The only problem is that he got drafted by John Fox, who was fired after Trubisky’s rookie year. Then the Bears hired Matt Nagy, so now Trubisky is best known for being the first quarter back drafted in the Mahomes draft.
This leads us to the actionable takeaways that all GM’s and owners are welcome to use when they are looking to replace their quarterbacks. Hire a good coach first, or hell, trade for one. Do not do what the Bears are doing with Caleb Williams where you draft a quarterback to a team with a coach on the hot seat. And definitely don’t do that when coaches like Mike Vrabel, Pete Caroll, and Bill Belichick (although his QB track record can be debated) are currently unemployed. If there is one cheat code in the NFL, it is having a good coach. Good coaches can make mediocre quarterbacks look awesome while bad coaches can break even the most “sure thing” prospects.
This leads me to my hot take that I am going to leave you with. When the Carolina Panthers traded for the Bryce Young pick, they should have offered that haul of assets, and more, for a proven coach. They should have made a godfather offer for Shanahan or McVey or Harbaugh or LaFleur. Then David Tepper should have given that coach like 25 million dollars a year to rebuild the Panthers before they drafted a quarterback, because coaching stability is the best indicator of drafting successful NFL quarterbacks. They’ll almost certainly have another chance as Bryce Young is on his second coach in 2 years.