For a franchise quarterback to succeed, it takes both the right franchise and the right quarterback
“As long as Dan’s there,” the former official said, “they don’t have a chance.”
At the same time, some evaluators within the league winced at the selection. Haskins wasn’t a first-round pick on some boards, and a general manager with a track record of choosing elite quarterbacks dismissed him as a prospect after attending one of his games. Mock drafts tabbed Haskins as a surefire first-rounder, but NFL consensus was far less bullish.
What lesson should the NFL draw from the futile Washington-Haskins alliance, which ended Monday when Washington cut Haskins only 20 months after drafting him with the 15th pick? Is it more important to pick the right player, or to create infrastructure that will allow his success? The squandering of a first-round quarterback is a dual failure, but it is often hard to determine where the quarterback’s ends and the franchise’s begins.
A glance around the NFL this weekend provided ample examples of how using a first-round pick on a quarterback could implode. Josh Rosen, picked 10th in 2018 by the Arizona Cardinals, surfaced on the sideline of the San Francisco 49ers, his fourth team. Sam Darnold, taken third that season, led the New York Jets to their second victory and may become trade bait if the Jets’ new management wants to start over with a new passer. Do the New York Giants really know what they have in Daniel Jones, the sixth pick of 2019, who has won seven of his first 25 starts?
Teams constantly attach their future to a first-round quarterback and wind up with regret. They have little choice but to try. Great quarterbacks almost never become available in any forum other than the draft, and without a great quarterback, building a sustained Super Bowl contender is a fantasy. But the necessity does not mitigate the capacity for disaster.
Even apparent successes can go wrong. In the 2016 draft, the Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles traded up to take Jared Goff and Carson Wentz first and second. Both teams quickly went to a Super Bowl, with the Eagles winning even as injury sidelined Wentz. Each team signed its quarterback to a massive extension. Wentz was benched this year and has surfaced in trade rumors, and Goff has not shaken maddening inconsistency. Neither is a lost cause, but both contracts now seem to be potential, if not likely, albatrosses.
Those high-profile blemishes obscure how the NFL has become more proficient at developing young quarterbacks. Rule changes have made it harder for defenses to physically punish quarterbacks and their receivers. Coaches have been more willing to run plays that bubbled up from college. The passers themselves tend to be more polished, having been nurtured from youth by seven-on-seven leagues and pass-heavy offenses that were once used only in college and the NFL.
As teams line up to draft Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Zach Wilson and company in April, it is worth weighing what separates the first-round quarterback successes from the train wrecks. It often has as much to do with the franchise as the quarterback. There are counterexamples. Surrounded by organizational chaos in Houston, Deshaun Watson has been incredible. But it is difficult to find an excellent quarterback in a bumbling organization.
The Kansas City Chiefs let Patrick Mahomes learn for a year under Alex Smith, placed him in Andy Reid’s offense and surrounded him with the NFL’s fastest receivers to take advantage of his celestial arm. It’s possible Mahomes will end up as the greatest player of all-time. What would we think of him if, say, the Jacksonville Jaguars had taken him fourth overall in 2017?
Mahomes may be too talented for that thought exercise, but other quarterbacks have thrived because their teams catered to them. Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson — the final pick of the same first round that produced Darnold, Rosen and Buffalo’s Josh Allen — represents the most obvious example of a quarterback who thrived after his team shaped the franchise around his abilities. But other teams have done the same thing. The Bills realized Allen needed pass-catchers who could separate from defenders, so they acquired Stefon Diggs, John Brown and Cole Beasley — wideouts renowned for their speed and route-running. The Cardinals chose Kyler Murray first overall in 2019 after hiring a coach, Kliff Kingsbury, who specialized in the spread offense he had run his entire life.
NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah, during a broadcast of the 49ers-Cardinals game Saturday, put forth the opinion that Darnold, currently stuck on a dysfunctional Jets team, would be a star if he played for Kyle Shanahan’s offense in San Francisco. Rosen might simply be a bad player, but he began his career on an offense bereft of talent, playing for a first-year head coach and an offensive coordinator who was fired in the season’s first month. He then got shipped to the Miami Dolphins at the nadir of their since-successful teardown.
How would Haskins be viewed if, in an alternate universe, he ended up playing for Reid in Kansas City? The problem with that hypothetical is the Chiefs are unlikely to have drafted Haskins in the first place, even if they had needed a quarterback. They understood what to look for at the position and valued emotional intelligence, whereas Haskins’s Washington tenure was cut short in part because he failed to put in the work that coaches felt was necessary for him to succeed. The Chiefs grew enamored with Mahomes not only because of his extreme physical gifts. They knew he had made the Big 12’s all-academic team, and he blew away Chiefs officials at a whiteboard session during a pre-draft meeting.
There are so many ways to screw up the search for a franchise quarterback. Even smart teams blunder. The Bills are on the cusp of clinching the AFC’s No. 2 seed, another milestone in the masterful rebuild that Coach Sean McDermott and General Manager Brandon Beane began four years ago. They drafted Allen with the seventh pick in 2018, surrounded him with talent, hired offensive coordinator Brian Daboll to call plays and watched Allen blossom into one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks. They also began their ascent in 2017 by trading the 10th pick, which the Chiefs used to select Mahomes.
Buffalo eventually nailed it, but as the Eagles and Rams can attest, a first-round quarterback’s success can be fleeting. You need to do everything right, and sometimes even that may not be enough.
