Washington Football Team’s strange history of drafting quarterbacks
By Jonathan Eig
Washington Football Team quarterback history realizations
1) Aside from Baugh, the Washington Football Team has only drafted one quarterback who has taken them as far as a championship game. The franchise has made it to the final game five times since Sammy retired, and the quarterbacks who led four of those squads – Billy Kilmer, Joe Theismann (twice), and Doug Williams – were either acquired by trade or signed as free agents. Mark Rypien is the only QB drafted by Washington who would lead the team to a championship game.
2) Rypien was a sixth-round pick in 1986. The quarterback he essentially replaced, Jay Schroeder, had been a third-round pick a couple years earlier. This is an example of another remarkable tendency in the franchise’s draft history. They have gotten better production out of late-round picks than out of early-round picks.
In the Super Bowl era, you can easily make the case that late-rounders like Rypien, Stan Humphries (sixth round, 1988), Gus Frerotte (seventh round, 1994) and Kirk Cousins (fourth round, 2012) have had more productive NFL careers than the team’s first-round QB selections Heath Shuler (1994), Patrick Ramsey (2002), Jason Campbell (2005), and Robert Griffin III (2012).
3) If you’re paying attention to the years, you will notice a corollary to the last point. When the team has drafted two QBs in the same draft class, the lower-ranked player has outperformed the higher-regarded player.
This isn’t only true for the Cousins/Griffin and Frerotte/Shuler drafts. If you go farther back, you find 1959, when Washington chose Boston College product Don Allard with the fourth overall pick in the first round, and then 17 rounds later, took California’s Joe Kapp. Allard would never play in the NFL. Kapp, after a sojourn in Canada, would take Minnesota to the Super Bowl in 1969.
Even more eye-opening, in 1945, Washington selected USC’s Jim Hardy in the first round, then grabbed Charlie Conerly from Mississippi in Round 13. Conerly, whose number is retired by the New York Giants, has an NFL championship and league MVP on his resume. Journeyman Hardy once threw eight interceptions in a single game.
Maybe there’s nothing to conclude from this. Or maybe you can at least begin to accept the idea that whoever is destined to be the Washington Football Team’s Quarterback-of-the-Future, he doesn’t necessarily have to come from a top pick in an upcoming draft.