A Good Quarterback Is Hard to Find

Being an elite NFL quarterback is really, really tough. It rates right up there with “running successfully for president” and “achieving nuclear fusion” as a thing which is so difficult it seems fairly delusional to even imagine yourself doing. At any given moment, there are maybe five guys who are great NFL quarterbacks, another ten who are barely good enough to placate their fanbases, and the rest basically faceless dudes with names like “John Beck” or “Kyle Ramirez,” shuffling from team to team, occasionally starting and mostly failing. The problem is unique to the position, too—most wide receivers, linemen, and backs who were good in college have gone on to be at least adequate NFL players. But the game moves so much faster at the pro level—and the space you have to put the ball inside is so much smaller—that some of the greatest quarterbacks in NCAA history flame out entirely (see Leaf, Ryan) or become one of those aforementioned wandering backup QBs (see Leinart, Matt). The quarterbacks with the combination of awareness, hand-eye-coordination, and “heart”/”leadership”/balls required tend to last a lot longer than good backs and receivers, which is why Vinny Testaverde and Brett Favre played until they were 10,000 years old. Especially lately, as teams have gone to more pass-heavy offenses, finding a quarterback who’s one of those five guys good enough to transform a team into a winner (and, not incidentally, appear in high-profile product endorsements) has become the primary—if not the sole—goal for NFL front offices.

Thus, the Redskins mortgaged their future to draft either Andrew Luck or Robert Griffin III, who haven’t played a snap of NFL football; the Seahawks gave Matt Flynn, who’s started a mere two games, a pile of money; and the Broncos gave Peyton Manning, a 36-year-old who just had his third neck surgery and hasn’t played in a year, an even bigger pile of money. These moves reek of desperation, but who cares? Franchise quarterbacks seem to come from the murk. You never know when you’re going to find the next Kurt Warner, who got dredged up from the sewage of the Arena Football League by the Rams to lead them to a Super Bowl win, or the next Tom Brady, a sixth-round pick who rose from professional obscurity to become the touchdown-throwing and supermodel-impregnating machine he is today. Somewhere in a dark room smelling of stale farts and Cheetos, there are a bunch of stat-heads working diligently to find some combination of metrics that will predict what quarterbacks will be successful on which teams—if a team does figure out who, they’ll have a serious edge; imagine if the terminally quarterback-poor Jaguars or Dolphins had a chance to know in advance whether Tim Tebow or Alex Smith was going to be a better fit for them, or whether Cam Newton was the real deal.

But for now, the only way to judge quarterbacks before they get a chance to play in the NFL is hopelessly subjective. Andrew Luck has the intelligence, accuracy, and size to dampen a GM’s team-branded panties, but Ryan Leaf caused a similar reaction a decade and a half ago.

The stakes are so high when it comes to hunting down franchise quarterbacks that overpaying them to the point of potentially ruining your team for years might actually be the rational move from a game theory standpoint. You either break the bank to acquire a possible savior and hope he turns out to actually be good (and doesn’t start drinking that purple drank), or you try out a new stiff or two every year, hoping that this season Tavaris Jackson or Rex Grossman takes the right kind of HGH and puts it all together—and that latter route is bound to cause a bunch of grumbling in the talk-radio ranks. No one wants to buy Kevin Kolb jerseys, sorry. “Adequate” is not an adjective that inspires; kids are not going to pretend to be Chad Pennington in their backyards.

There’s another, more cynical, way to pick the ball-thrower/public face of your team, of course, and that’s to get Tim Tebow. Timmy the virgin probably isn’t going to light the scoreboard up (unless he uses his MAGICAL GOD POWERS), but he’ll definitely sell jerseys and put asses in the seats, at least until he starts really sucking. Jacksonville’s his hometown, the team is currently attendance-challenged, and their quarterback is a bunch of brooms tied together to look like a person. They could do worse than Tebow, and who the fuck knows? I might be totally wrong and some day Tebow will be telling a moon-eyed interviewer on ESPN China how tough it was to win that fourth Super Bowl ring. I have no idea which quarterbacks are going to make that jump from OK to amazing, and I don’t think anyone else does either.

@HCheadle