Most NFL general managers have two well-understood career goals. The first is to obviously bring home a Lombardi trophy for the team and its fan base. The other goal is to find the ever-elusive franchise quarterback who brings stability to a football team for at least a decade, in a perfect world. Yet, as Buffalo Bills fans know, finding a franchise quarterback is the hardest job in all of football.
A recent report by Albert Breer showed that in the second decade of the 21st century (2010-2019), there were 29 quarterbacks selected in the first round of each NFL Draft over this span. Drafting a quarterback in Round 1 is where general managers usually put all their chips on the table in hopes of finding a franchise cornerstone. However, with the release of quarterback Kyler Murray by the Arizona Cardinals last Wednesday, there are only three remaining quarterbacks currently playing for the team that drafted them.
One of those three, Patrick Mahomes, already has multiple Super Bowls wins and is making his way up the charts in a bid for the greatest of all time. The other two are Mahomes’ biggest rivals and have yet to climb the mountain top: Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen. Three MVP winning quarterbacks, three already-legendary players for their fan bases.
Importantly, these are three quarterbacks who play for football teams that had faith in them no matter what the outside noise said. Mahomes wasn’t the sure-fire prospect coming out of college. People were saying that Jackson wouldn’t even be a quarterback in the NFL, and Allen had accuracy issues that people didn’t believe he could overcome.
It’s not like there was a lack of “can’t miss” prospects during this time span. In Mahomes’ draft class the first quarterback off the board was Mitch Trubisky — who was run out of town by the Chicago Bears. Allen and Jackson were in the same draft class but had to wait until the likes of Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold were drafted ahead of them.
Sometimes it just comes down to a player’s fit with the team that drafts them. Just ask Super Bowl Champion Sam Darnold who seems to have found a happy place with the Seattle Seahawks.
