- Since 2011, NFL teams have drafted 38 quarterbacks in the first round.
- As a group, they’ve lost or tied more games than they’ve won.
- It makes you wonder why 2019 MVP Lamar Jackson is still available.
The NFL draft is coming on Friday and the Carolina Panthers have the first pick.
The current debate among fans and pundits is which quarterback should the Panthers pick. And will the Texans, drafting second, pick another? If so, who?
Will it be Will Levis, known for being super jacked and eating bananas with their peels still on or Anthony Richardson, who throws so hard he can hit the roof of the dome with the ball?
It might be.
But you probably also don’t need to worry about which quarterbacks get taken in the first round. Because on average, quarterbacks taken early in the NFL draft end up mediocre or worse.
Warren Sharp at Fox Sports recently did the math.
“There have been 38 quarterbacks drafted in the first round since 2011, the year the NFL changed the collective bargaining agreement to set a wage scale for rookie deals, making it extremely affordable to draft a quarterback,” he began. “These 38 first-round quarterbacks have made a total of 1,909 starts. Their record? 1034-1035-7. Almost exactly break-even.”
“Only one of those 38 quarterbacks led their team to a Super Bowl victory: Patrick Mahomes,” Sharp reported. “Of these 38 quarterbacks, 10 are still on their rookie deal, so set them aside. Of the other 28, only 11 (39%) were even given a second deal with the team that drafted them. Most were cut or saw their rookie deals expire.”
We recently looked at the 39 quarterbacks drafted in the first round since 2010 — and it was ugly!
Take a look for yourself, below. Only a couple of names stand out as true trajectory-changers for their team.
Funny thing is that one of them is Lamar Jackson, the league MVP from 2019. And guess what? He’s available to any team willing to pay him what he wants (which is, admittedly, quite a lot) and give his current team, the Baltimore Ravens, two first-round picks.
That sounds pricey until you look at the rate of failure below. Because using two picks on a surefire bet sure seems better than risking even just one on someone bound to have a career like most of the players below.
