How Do You Find a Good Quarterback?
There’s one way to dramatically change your entire franchise in the NFL Draft: take a quarterback. Nail it and you’ll be set to contend for years. Miss, and chances are your successor as general manager is going to have another shot to fix your mistake in the very near future.
How do you find a good one?
It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, and I’m not the person to de-complicate it for us.
I can, however, get us pointed in the right direction. While I can’t say for sure that the following three questions will definitively separate the good prospects from the bad, I think they’re a useful screener to at least weed out some of the non-contenders from this year’s list of quarterbacks.
1 - Does your quarterback have good baseline athleticism?
With respect to Tom Brady and Matt Ryan, the last of their disappearing species, the pocket quarterback is dead.
Gone are the days when a statuesque pocket passer can sit behind his offensive line and try to pick apart the defense. The modern game just simply doesn’t lend itself to that kind of approach any longer. With bootleg play-action, run-pass options (including quarterback runs), and numerous other plays involving quarterback movement deeply ingrained in modern playbooks, your quarterback must have a level of athleticism that at the very least doesn’t limit your offensive approach.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying every prospect has to move like Malik Willis. But if you’re looking at a lead-footed passer, you should at least take a second to pause and consider your options before you move on to question 2.
2 - Is arm strength an issue?
A big arm is among the more overrated tools a quarterback can possess. We’ve all seen the prospects who arrive on the NFL scene with a cannon arm and nothing else. Their NFL careers are typically short but rarely uninteresting as we get to watch in real-time as an NFL team figures out that their prize stallion is a one-trick pony.
But arm strength does matter. When draft analysts say a guy has the juice in his arm to “make all the throws,” that’s a very real consideration. If you have to take routes out of your playbook because your quarterback doesn’t have the arm to get the ball where it needs to be, you’re stacking the deck against yourself before you’ve even stepped on the field.
So, potential GM, ask yourself: is this quarterback prospect’s arm going to limit him? If the answer is yes, you’re probably best waiting until next year. If no, you can move on to question 3.
3 - Can your quarterback run a version of the Mike Shanahan offense?
Coaches from the extended Mike Shanahan tree are dominating the NFL right now. Of the NFL’s top five passing offenses by EPA, three ran some version of the Shanahan offense: the Packers, the Rams, and the 49ers. Beyond that, three of this spring’s nine new coaching hires came to their current job after spending some time under a Shanahan-tree coach: Nathaniel Hackett in Denver, Mike McDaniel in Miami, and Kevin O’Connell in Minnesota. In addition to those three, Matt Eberflus, the new head coach in Chicago, hired Luke Getsy as his offensive coordinator after Getsy spent the last three seasons on Matt LaFleur’s staff in Green Bay.
Expanding the circle even further, Robert Saleh (via Mike LaFleur) and Zac Taylor also have significant connections to the Shanahan system.
The point is, the league’s current offensive metagame largely revolves around this version of the West Coast offense, and I think it behooves teams to ask whether or not they think their quarterback prospect can execute that system well.
What would that take? For starters, consistently good decision making, an accurate arm, the arm strength for deep shots off of play action, and a certain level of comfort with RPOs.
Is that overly broad? Almost certainly, but if your quarterback prospect can’t meet those basic thresholds for one of the most quarterback-friendly systems going in football right now, you should rightly be concerned.