The right way to find your QB

Why you can wait and why he won't look perfect

It’s the spring of 2017 and the Chiefs are coming off a 12-4 and a divisional round playoff loss to the Steelers. They are picking 27th in the draft and are widely expected to take a RB, Dalvin Cook or Joe Mixon, at that spot to upgrade over current starter Spencer Ware.

The criticism is loud when the team instead trades up all the way to the #10 pick to take an erratic, gunslinging QB widely considered a 2nd round pick who is described as “raw” by many analysts, with a 15-21 record as a starter from a team that runs an offense considered gimmicky by many NFL coaches, an offense that has never produced a respectable NFL starter.

Why would a team on the verge of being a Superbowl contender waste so much draft capital on a prospect that isn’t even going to play for a year or two and has so many question marks?

Spring of 2018, Baltimore Maryland. The Ravens are coming off three disappointing seasons in a row. It’s been 5 years since their Superbowl win. They had a respectable 9-7 record the year before.

Joe Flacco is still playing decently, has a large contract that seems unlikely to be off-loaded, and the defense is quite good. The offense lacks a little juice. The team’s top receiver is 31 year old Mike Wallace and their #2 receiver in yards is 37 year old TE Ben Watson.

The team is widely expected to draft a receiver, a seemingly yearly need. Calvin Ridley is the favorite to be their pick at #16 overall.

Instead the team trades back and takes 25 year old TE Hayden Hurst with their first pick. Then they trade back into the last pick of the first round for Louisville’s Lamar Jackson.

Jackson is passed on 31 times including by the team that eventually took him. He is considered a gamble, a highly athletic run-first QB with accuracy issues, one that will need years to transition from a spread option college offense to a traditional pro-style NFL offense.

Spring of 2020 and two teams are about to make draft picks that will be widely criticized.

The Packers are coming off a 13-3 season, HC Matt LeFleur’s first year with the team.

Aaron Rodgers is 36 years old but still considered one of the best QBs in the game. The defense is rising but the offense, particularly the passing game, looks like it needs an upgrade. Davante Adams had a breakout the year before but didn’t have a great follow-up season in 2019 with a mere 5 TDs and not cracking 1000 yards, albeit in just 12 games. The #2 receiver is Allen Lazard.

The team is expected to draft a WR in the first round, something they haven’t done in a long time.

Instead they traded up 4 picks in the first round, jumping the Titans, Ravens, and Seahawks, 3 teams that didn’t need a QB, to take tiny Utah State’s Jordan Love, a prospect that just had a disappointing final college season due to shaky decision making and accuracy issues.

The media is outraged. How on earth could the Packers draft an inaccurate QB that is going to sit on the bench behind Rodgers for years when they could have gotten Rodgers some help instead? And to make matters worse they drafted a RB in the 2nd round that many people felt was a 4th rounder when they already had Aaron Jones, a rising star in the league!

How much disrespect could the Packers possibly show their two time MVP?

In Philadelphia things aren’t much better. The Eagles won a Superbowl just three years prior, but their last two seasons with Carson Wentz have been disappointing. Still, Wentz is young and Doug Pederson is considered an offensive whiz, surely the team will get Wentz back on track.

The team decides to spend a 2nd round pick on Oklahoma’s Jalen Hurts. The pick is unpopular to say the least. Hurts was not only was replaced at Alabama by Nick Saban, the preeminent college coach, for Tua Tagovailoa, but he is widely considered to be a run-first, inaccurate passer in a QB friendly system at Oklahoma.

Hurts will go on to lose most of his starts after replacing Wentz at the end of the 2020 season while turning the ball over at an alarming rate. He is announced as the starter for the 2021 season, and despite a respectable 9-8 record he still only threw 16 TDs to 9 INTs and fumbled the ball 10 times. The media has been calling for the Eagles to replace him from his very first start.

Spring of 2024 and the Falcons are on the rise. They have seemingly solved their long-standing QB issue by signing Kirk Cousins away from the Minnesota Vikings. Adding him to a stable of highly drafted young players on offense in Bijan Robinson, Drake London, and Kyle Pitts, has most in the media picking the Falcons to win the division.

The Falcons once again have the 8th pick in the draft and almost universally expected to take an edge rusher, Dallas Turner or Laiatu Latu.

Instead the team shocks the world by selecting Michael Penix out of Washington, a QB that will already be 24 years old as a rookie and has a history of multiple ACL tears. Many analysts didn’t even think Penix would be drafted in the first round due to his injury history, but the real shock to most is that the team just paid Cousins a huge contract to be their starting QB.

This was an affront to Cousins! Penix would likely be sitting for several years, potentially his entire rookie contract and it was insulting and threatening to their starter as well! Why would the team waste resources on a backup QB when they could have spent it on an edge rusher to help the team win now?

You’ll see where I’m going with this by now.

Many of the most successful starting QBs in the league right now, on some of the most successful teams, were not brought in under the path that most media types would prefer. And they were highly criticized when they did it.

The standard logic is that if your team is absolutely terrible and has a top 5 draft pick, you take one of the hot young QB prospects with the fewest flaws, and that new franchise QB will turn your team around.

The only issue is…that model rarely works, and yet it’s the model that your team will be praised for in the media.

In fact, the only time it has worked with much success in recent years was when the Bengals took Joe Burrow #1 overall, and even then the Bengals only had a 2 year run where they were one of the NFL’s best teams. The defense has completely tanked this year and even Burrow can’t carry them. In fact, the team is on the verge of firing HC Zac Taylor because things have been so bad (despite the fact that Taylor isn’t really the problem).

CJ Stroud’s rookie season was ended with analysts proclaiming the Texans future Superbowl contenders for the rest of his career. They had found their version of Patrick Mahomes with the 2nd pick in the draft, and it was all sunshines and rainbows from now on. My warnings on this point were roundly ignored.

The same will happen to the Commanders and Jayden Daniels next season, and while it is no guarantee that they will see immediate setbacks the way Houston did, it is still a possibility.

The point is that the traditional model everyone thinks is natural, bad team drafts elite QB and becomes a good team, almost never works, certainly not the way people expect it to.

Instead, the successful pattern around the league has been to build a strong team first and then acquire a great QB to run it. And the QB doesn’t need to be one of the absolute best either. The Lions took the capital they received for trading Matt Stafford to the Rams and built up their team around the very solid Jared Goff they also got in that trade.

And let’s not forget that all these same QBs that have gone on to be among the most successful were thought to be the lesser prospects, the ones with warts and flaws. That is why they were even available in the middle parts of the first round and into the second…the bad teams didn’t want to take them because they didn’t look squeaky clean coming out of college.

Brock Purdy was the last pick of his entire draft because he was small and played for Iowa St.

Dak Prescott was a 4th round pick running a spread option offense at lowly Mississippi St who was only picked as a backup option because the Cowboys missed out on trading up for Paxton Lynch. He was selected after Christian Hackenberg, Cody Kessler, and Connor Cook.

Kirk Cousins was a 4th rounder selected to backup #2 overall pick and franchise savior Robert Griffin.

Baker Mayfield was picked #1 overall but dumped by the Cleveland Browns, despite taking them to the playoffs in his third season, so that the team could pay the largest fully guaranteed contract in history to Deshaun Watson, a guy dealing with multiple accusations of a very serious nature. Mayfield was then let go by the Panthers and Rams before signing a minimum contract with the Buccaneers where he restablished himself.

Likewise, Goff was a #1 pick but was traded away by his team three seasons after taking them to the Superbowl, along with multiple first round picks so they could mildly upgrade to Matt Stafford.

Sam Darnold was the #3 overall pick in his class and looked dreadful as a starter for the Jets and Panthers before leading a borderline MVP level season with Vikings in 2024.

Russell Wilson was a 3rd round pick most people considered too short to play QB in the league, and he was taken right after the Seahawks paid Matt Flynn a large contract to be their starter.

The fact of the matter is that successful quarterbacks almost never look like successful QBs the way we think they should. It’s easy to believe that the best guys are all 6’5” with big arms and perfect accuracy and they only play for good colleges where they won every game, but the real world is much, much more complicated and messy than that.

And the teams that stay bad are the ones that still believe in silly narratives like this, that they have to spend their top 5 pick in the draft on the QB prospect with the fewest obvious flaws.

There are almost no clear success stories of teams doing following this path and mountains of evidence supporting a better model. Why then do so many teams and fans and media types still believe in it? Why do they ignore the evidence staring them in the face and continue with their blind devotion to a course of action that doesn’t work?

I don’t know the answer to these questions.

My best guess is idealism. It’s an easy logical trap to fall into, thinking that your team is bad because the QB play is bad because we all know QB is the most important position, thus we have to take the highest rated QB prospect in the top 5 if we have that chance.

It seems to make sense. It sounds like it makes sense, like it should work. It feels obvious.

But it doesn’t work if you check the record.

What does work is building a competitive team and then finding a good QB prospect with some flaws you can work around (because you’re not going to find a flawless player outside the top handful of picks). You don’t need him to be perfect. You just need good enough and then surround him with other good players.

That’s the formula. And the timing matters just as much as the particular QB you bring in.

And if you want to know which QBs are most likely to succeed, look for the ones that have obvious concerns coming out of college, the ones that end up on good teams that take the most criticism for bringing in that player.

Likewise the QBs most likely to fail are precisely the ones where their team received the most praise for drafting them highly to fill a need, the guys with the fewest perceived flaws as prospects.