Early draft advice for the Washington Football Team

3. Don’t rush your quarterback-of-the-future

This is the most important one.

You know what the most annoying question I hear over and over and over is? Why are teams so bad at picking a quarterback in the draft? There is no one answer to this, but I would humbly suggest that this is the biggest contributing factor:

NFL teams draft a 21-year old kid (or younger) and expect him to take over the most complex position in all professional sports immediately. Now, don’t get me wrong. Some can do it. But they are the exceptions. Most simply cannot. They need time.

But no one gives a highly-rated quarterback time these days. They are thrown to the wolves to sink or swim. If they play on a bad team, like this year’s “can’t miss” rookies Trevor Lawrence and Zach Wilson, they may be irreparably damaged by the experience.

You don’t need me to run through all the QBs who didn’t pan out in the past decade. You know them all by now. I think the Washington Football Team has even had a couple, though I have scrubbed them from my memory.

So, just for fun, let’s go back about thirty years and check on how top-tier QBs used to come into the league. There were 14 QBs between 1990 and 1992 who were selected play in the Pro Bowl. I’m going to leave three of them out at first, due to special circumstances that I will get to shortly.

Of the remaining eleven, guess how many started from Day 1?

Two of them – Troy Aikman and John Elway. (Elway started Day 1, but was quickly benched in favor of Steve DeBerg when it became clear he needed a little more time to adjust.)

Of the remaining nine, guess how many started in the first half of their rookie season?

One – Dan Marino, who took over from David Woodley six games into his rookie season.

That’s three Hall of Famers. As I said, there are exceptions.

Two others – Jim Everett and Chris Miller – got a few token starts toward the very end of their rookie seasons.

That means six of those Pro Bowl quarterbacks did not start during their rookie seasons. Some – Randall Cunningham, Ken O’Brien, Neil O’Donnell, and Washington’s own Mark Rypien – turned out to be pretty good QBs.

The other two – Joe Montana and Brett Favre – are in the Hall of Fame.

As are the other three mentioned above – Warren Moon, Jim Kelly, and Steve Young. What made them different is that each played professionally multiple years in other leagues (The CFL for Moon, and the USFL for Kelly and Young) before entering the NFL.

That means that of the 14 Pro Bowl QBs from 1990-1992, only three stepped directly off the college field into a starting role in the first half of their rookie season.

It’s a hard thing to do, and whoever the Washington Football Team drafts in 2022 to be the quarterback of the future, none of us should demand that he start immediately. Give him time. There’s a good chance it will pay off.

I don’t want to overload the front office with too much good advice at one time so I’ll stop there. We have plenty of time to offer more helpful suggestions down the road. As I write this, there are still 157 days until the 2022 draft.