In a little more than a week, some NFL teams will take one of the biggest leaps of faith you can take in the NFL: They’ll draft a quarterback.
We don’t know how many quarterbacks will be selected, where they’ll end up or whether any will blossom into solid NFL starters. What we do know is that despite their best efforts and the efforts of the teams around them, many of these quarterbacks aren’t going to pan out. They’re going to fail.
Just look at the QBs who have been selected over the past 10 years. Excluding 2024 — it’s too soon to judge that crop — 116 were drafted between 2014 and 2023. Many QBs were taken after the first couple of rounds, but teams still drafted them in hopes they’d become meaningful contributors to their franchises. Unfortunately, most haven’t. Of those 116, just 15 are expected to serve as starters this season for the team that drafted them this season, and the historic 2020 NFL Draft (Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Jordan Love and Jalen Hurts) is doing most of the heavy lifting there.
If you exclude QBs still playing on their rookie contracts, only 13 of the remaining 93 still play for the team that drafted them. Most of the rest aren’t even in the NFL anymore.
That doesn’t mean those QBs were busts or that those still on teams won’t eventually enjoy some measure of success in the NFL, but for many QBs selected next week, that success — if it ever comes — won’t be with the team that picked them.
Why? There are dozens of potential answers to that question, but we know the circumstances around them play a massive role. Though each quarterback’s talent and makeup certainly contribute a huge part to the equation, so much of whether a QB will enjoy success in the NFL falls outside of his control.
Maybe a team with an unstable regime drafts them and the quarterback ends up playing for multiple coaches with different offensive schemes early in their career. Maybe he lands with a team with a porous offensive line, without talented pass catchers or a decent running game.
Every circumstance is different, and teams are tasked with trying to figure out how to evaluate “failing” QBs amid the chaos. When is it time to cut bait and move on? When does a quarterback just need a little more time or help around him? What about a new coach or a new coordinator?
Or is a change of scenery the only answer left?
It’s almost impossible to know for sure.
“This is not a science experiment,” said Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel, who helped put quarterback Tua Tagovailoa on a Pro Bowl path after two shaky seasons to start his NFL career. “If you just take the results, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to missing out on people who can be very adept at their job.
“The quarterback position has a lot of uncontrollables that you’re at the mercy of, so you try to do your best to put yourself in the player’s situation and evaluate from that standpoint. And often that can lead to, ‘OK, we need to give this guy another chance.’”
Though there’s no sure way of knowing when to give a QB another chance, with so many recent examples of QBs succeeding in new spots (Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Geno Smith) and others hoping to be next in line (Justin Fields, Daniel Jones), we wanted to let key NFL decision-makers with expertise in this area tell us what they have learned about this part of the QB development process.
So, we recently posed a question to them and allowed them to interpret our query as they saw fit in hopes of collecting their rawest answers: When the NFL world is ready to give up on a QB, how do you know if you need to give him more time?
This is what they said.
Due process
As McDaniel explained, QB development isn’t a science experiment. There are few controlled variables in the NFL.
“I think it’s become very popular for people (outside of the organization) to decide at the moment (that) people can or can’t play,” Minnesota Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell said this offseason. “But I think it’s always very important to evaluate each situation as its own.”
For O’Connell to assess whether a QB is good at his job, O’Connell must first be good at his. The ex-NFL QB believes that to judge quarterbacks fairly, teams must provide them with the most hospitable conditions possible.
As a head coach, O’Connell believes he is responsible for creating that nurturing environment, from the scheme he asks his QBs to run, to the coaching staff around them and the QB room he drops them into. It’s the Vikings’ “process,” and only once all those boxes have been checked does O’Connell believe he can fairly evaluate a quarterback.
O’Connell, of course, is something of an expert in this area, having shepherded Kirk Cousins to some of the best seasons of his career before helping to reinvigorate Darnold’s career last season.
“We feel very strongly about our quarterback process that we go through (and) how we train the position in Minnesota,” said O’Connell, who helped coax a Pro Bowl season (4,319 passing yards and 35 touchdowns) out of Darnold and will look to do something similar with untested 2024 first-round pick J.J. McCarthy.
“Whether it’s a young player, a guy at a midpoint in his quarterback journey or a veteran player like we coached my first two years here, in Kirk. With the difficulty of the position, each player deserves the utmost respect and emphasis from us as coaches to help him reach … that potential.”
Help wanted
As O’Connell alluded to, the cast around a quarterback is critically important to the QB’s success. And though O’Connell’s immediate response to the question focused more on what coaches must do to nurture a QB, Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles knows that providing a QB with a high-quality supporting cast is pivotal as well.
“I don’t think any quarterback can do it by himself, although (Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick) Mahomes has kind of dispelled that notion,” Bowles said. “Most of them cannot. … So, you’ve got to put guys around him to help him make plays.”
Bowles, who has a defensive background, has seen both sides of the QB development coin as a coach. He was in the final year of his tenure with the New York Jets when they drafted Darnold with the No. 3 pick in 2018, and he was fired after the QB’s lackluster rookie season. Who knows if stability would have helped Darnold succeed in New York, but it’s become apparent that Darnold has the talent to thrive in the NFL.
After leaving New York, Bowles landed in Tampa Bay as the defensive coordinator for the final year of Jameis Winston’s Buccaneers career. Tampa Bay gave Winston a long leash (five seasons as the starter) before finally pulling the plug and pivoting to Tom Brady and, after three successful seasons, Mayfield.
It wasn’t so long ago that Mayfield, the No. 1 pick in the 2018 draft, looked like he might be a bust after flaming out with the Cleveland Browns and Carolina Panthers. But Bowles and the Bucs bet Mayfield could be much better than he’d shown, and their faith has been rewarded with back-to-back Pro Bowl seasons to go along with back-to-back NFC South titles.
“You have to give him time,” Bowles said. “You give him a lot of time. You see how he grows, and if he’s growing the right way, you stay with him. That doesn’t mean you’re winning, but if he’s growing the right way, you kind of keep it that way.”
Said Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Liam Coen, who helped Mayfield deliver the best season of his career while serving as the Bucs’ offensive coordinator: “I think when you’re ready to move on, I think it’s pretty clear to a lot of people in terms of the building, the staff, the players. If the cliff has (come, and he’s) fallen off, it’s typically something you can see with the naked eye, but it’s more the development, the fundamentals, the technique. If that’s all still there, then you can continue to win with that player.”
Going on instinct
Coen alluded to the idea of trusting your gut by suggesting “it’s clear” to people in the building when a quarterback’s time with a team is over. New Las Vegas Raiders general manager John Spytek, who spent nine seasons in Tampa and witnessed Winston’s struggles and Mayfield’s renaissance, offered a similar thought about knowing when to pull the plug versus when a QB just needs more time.
“I’ve been a part of a couple of these,” said Spytek, whose first major move as GM of the Raiders was to orchestrate a trade for Geno Smith, another QB whose career once seemed left for dead. “We kind of go back to our evaluation coming out and what we believe the player to be and the person to be. And then you kind of try to envision, like, does it work in our system? Will this play? Is it a good fit for the team that we’re at? You’ve got to kind of trust your gut.
“Just because the guy didn’t work somewhere (else) … there’s always an opportunity that if it’s set up the right way at the place that you’re at, and you believe in it, that guy will feel that. A lot of times, they haven’t been (set up) the right way. They don’t feel like they’ve been believed in it. If you can kind of breathe that life back into them, I think they’ve got a chance.”
Coen said the same before Mayfield exploded for a career-high 4,500 yards and 41 passing touchdowns last season.
“He’s somewhere he’s believed in,” Coen told The Athletic’s Jeff Howe last year. “That’s all he’s been looking for throughout his whole career: to be at a place where people believe in him, and that’s what he has here.”
Though the Mayfield story had a happy ending, that hasn’t been the case for a lot of quarterbacks. Even with the right coaching, the right supporting cast and the belief of the franchises around them, so many have failed.
And so many more will fail.
In the coming years, the quarterbacks selected in this upcoming draft are going to struggle. And the teams that picked them are going to have to question everything about their processes to figure out why. Is it the QB who’s failing or are they failing him? How much time does each side have to figure it out?
Perhaps the lessons learned over the past few years about these rags-to-riches quarterbacks like Darnold, Mayfield and Smith can be instructive. Maybe teams will continue to get better at understanding which QBs are deserving of patience and which aren’t.
Then again, patience isn’t easy to come by in the modern NFL.
(Photo of Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold: John Raoux / Associated Press)
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