Washington Football Team vs. Tampa Bay: A brief history of quarterback rotations

The Washington Football Team could be one of the few teams ever to employ a two-quarterback system.

On Tuesday, Washington Football Team coach Ron Rivera announced that he is considering rotating quarterbacks Alex Smith and Taylor Heinicke during his team’s wildcard playoff game against Tampa Bay. This is a move born out of necessity.

Few coaches – at least few professional coaches – would contentedly take such a decision. But Rivera finds himself with a hobbled veteran who was ineffective in his outing last week and a 27-year old who has ridden the benches and practice squads of four other teams and was not even in the league a month ago.

There is no magic solution to this hellacious problem. Especially considering the opposing quarterback this Saturday night may be the greatest to ever play the position.

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Rotating quarterbacks is nothing new. And under the right circumstances, it can create headaches for opposing defenses. This is especially true if the quarterbacks being rotated have different skill sets.

But the drawbacks tend to outweigh those advantages. During the week, practice reps need to be divided. During the game, other offensive players need to be attuned to different cadences. And then there is the psychological challenge.

Your quarterback is your leader. Your alpha male. It can be confusing when you have to follow two separate alphas.

A few weeks ago, the innovative New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton seemed to have the perfect situation in which to rotate quarterbacks. His unquestioned starter Drew Brees would be out for several games. Behind him, Payton had the athletic, running QB Taysom Hill and the strong-armed pocket passer Jameis Winston. Both were talented. Both had issues.

Many suspected Payton would find a way to use both. But he did not. Payton chose Hill as his starter. There was no rotation. He apparently decided the cons outweighed the pros.

This is primarily a pro football phenomenon. I don’t know if anyone has data on this, but anecdotally, it certainly appears that in high school and in college, the idea of rotating quarterbacks is not so anathema to coaches. As recently as a week ago, University of Oregon coach Mario Cristobal rotated Anthony Brown and Tyler Shough in his team’s Fiesta Bowl loss.

But in the professional ranks, this is not something you want to do. At least not in the modern era.

It was not always like that.

If you look at promotional material from the early days of the Washington Football franchise, you may be struck by the fact that Sammy Baugh – considered by some to be the greatest quarterback of all-time – was not even listed as a quarterback. Baugh began his career as a halfback.

This was in the day of the single-wing formation. The closest thing to the single-wing in today’s professional game is the wildcat, in which a player – usually a running back or wide receiver – takes a direct shotgun snap. Imagine the wildcat with more moving parts – an unbalanced formation in which the center might snap the ball to as many as four different players – and you have some idea of the single-wing.

When Baugh came to Washington, Riley Smith was the quarterback. But Baugh still took a lot of the snaps from his halfback position, and Baugh did almost all the passing.

After Smith left, Washington used Frankie Filchock as a rotating quarterback, and Filchock did throw the ball. Washington went to a couple championship games with both Baugh and Filchock at QB.

In 1944, Washington abandoned the single-wing for the classic T-formation and Baugh became the one and only quarterback. No more rotations. Unless he was injured, Sammy Baugh was under center.

But every decade or so, the quarterback rotation will pop up again at the pro level.  From the Rams of the early ‘50s, where future Hall-of-Famers Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin shared snaps to great effect, to the Saints debacle in 1984, when neither Richard Todd nor Kenny Stabler could manage much of anything, the results have generally diminished to the point that no NFL coach willingly employs the system.

Cowboys coach Tom Landry, ever the innovator, experimented with rotating quarterbacks as early as 1962, when he used both Eddie LeBaron and Don Meredith at various points. A decade later, Landry employed the most famous quarterback rotation when he continued to go back and forth between Roger Staubach and Craig Morton. It didn’t work very well, and eventually, Landry chose Staubach, who went on to bring championship glory to Dallas.

Since then, rotating quarterbacks at the NFL level has been seen largely as a desperation move. (Not so in college – where at the very same time Landry was flipping QBs in Dallas, Nebraska coach Bob Devaney was riding Jerry Tagge and Van Brownson to national championships.)

A lot of Ron Rivera’s decision this Saturday would seem to be dependent on Alex Smith’s health. If his calf injury is not significantly better by then, I expect we will see a lot more of Heinicke. Smith did look better early in the Philadelphia game, and if they determine that he simply needs a little more rest in order to keep his leg strong, perhaps a rotation would be the best solution.

It does create a challenge for Tampa defensive coordinator Todd Bowles. I would think that the two quarterbacks would call for two different defensive mindsets. If an immobile Smith is in the game, I would think that simple zone coverage with blitzes up the middle would be the main avenue of attack. Against the more mobile but far less-experienced Heinicke, I would think less blitzing but far more disguised coverages would be the way to go.

Either way, it makes for an intriguing chess match. If Washington manages to pull it off, you can begin mentioning the Smith/Heinicke tandem in the same paragraph as Baugh and Filchock. And that is something no one saw coming in 2020.