In this current era of the NFL, two words run the league: “Franchise Quarterback”. A franchise quarterback can be loosely defined as a player that a team can build their franchise and scheme around, rather than one that simply slots into a game manager role. To win in today’s passing-oriented NFL, it’s (almost) always necessary to have one of these guys leading your offense.

These game changing quarterbacks are scarce, so when one becomes available, teams will go all-out in order to secure a player they believe can alter the future of their franchise. It isn’t often that an established elite quarterback hits the trade market, and even more rare for one to hit free agency. Thus, most teams are forced to turn to the draft in order to get their guy. Regardless of method, it’s always expensive to swing for a quarterback, so if your guy ends up not being who you think he is, you could set your franchise back by years.

In this article, I will investigate the cost, hit rate, and efficacy of buying a quarterback in a deep dive into all of the significant moves teams have made for quarterbacks through the draft, free agency, and trades from the beginning of the 2018 offseason until the start of the 2022 NFL season.

From 2018-22, there were 23 significant offseason moves in which front offices either traded for, signed, or spent a high draft pick on a quarterback (excluding Jordan Love, as this is essentially his rookie year). The graphic below depicts how often teams hit, missed, or “meh-ed” on franchise quarterbacks. In this piece, hits are defined as times when a quarterback both played at a franchise level and had team success, misses as situations in which both the team and QB were bad, and mehs as some combination of good qb-bad team or vice versa (we are measuring team success, after all). When defining a “hit”, the most important thing is how adding a quarterback affected a team’s success; Josh Allen and Joe Burrow are obvious hits due to how they impacted their team’s success in the postseason, but I’m also counting Justin Herbert and Lamar Jackson as hits due to how valuable they’ve been to their respective teams in spite of combining for only one playoff win. Most misses were very easy to identify, with QBs like Josh Rosen, Nick Foles, and others that didn’t last with the teams that signed them making the list. The “mehs” cover the in-betweeners like Kyler Murray, who despite being very talented has not been able to consistently elevate his team, and Daniel Jones, who has earned a hefty contract and had some playoff success all the while being very average at his position.

Unsurprisingly, it’s tough to land a quarterback who can elevate a team, as reflected in the graph – most of the time, it doesn’t work out. When separating this graph into winning and losing teams in order to attempt to account for team situation, a revealing trend arises. Winning teams will be defined as those that finished the regular season immediately prior to acquiring their new QB with a positive record (>.500), and losing teams as the rest. This allows us to easily assign quarterbacks into good or bad situations, using previous team performance as a benchmark.
*adjusted when necessary ie. Trey Lance (drafted by the technically “losing” 6-10 49ers, but was placed into an undeniably good situation)

The hit rate for quarterbacks that end up on better teams is significantly better than that for those who end up on worse teams, which makes sense – put players in better situations, and they’ll play better. We can also see that the diagram representing the whole is more similar to that of non winning teams which, again, makes sense as worse teams are more likely to draft a quarterback and thus represent a larger portion of the sample size. This data supports a surprising conclusion that, on average, building a team from the ground up, and then inserting a quarterback is a more successful strategy than swinging big for a player to build around. NFL teams know this, of course, so why are so many front offices willing to risk failure despite the odds?

To answer this question, we need to look at it from a couple different angles. Firstly, we need to look at it from the front office’s point of view: the most important thing to them is their jobs, not the long-term success of the team. The people making decisions are building rosters to win now, not for the regime that comes in to replace them. Adding a star at the most important position in football is the most effective way to instantly improve your team, and improve your job security.

Secondly, even though the odds of hitting are low, the potential rewards vastly outweigh the drawbacks in most situations. Of the last ten teams to play in the Super Bowl, eight featured elite quarterbacks with the two outliers having their offenses coached by Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay. Either a star quarterback or elite offensive mind is a must in order to contend for a Super Bowl, so unless your scheme was concocted by some kind of football genius (a characteristic of very few losing teams), you need a star quarterback to have a shot.

While hit rate is an important factor to take into consideration when going after a franchise quarterback, maybe even more important is cost. A bad investment here and there can be overcome, but quarterback is the premium position in football, and comes at a price like no other in the sport. When looking at the six major quarterbacks that ended up on new teams due to either trades or free agency in our defined time period of 2018-2022, the contracts given out by teams are huge and consistently increasing. The figure below displays the size of recent major contracts given out with the average annual value of the contract plotted as a percentage of the yearly salary cap at the time.

It’s clear that acquiring a quarterback takes a massive toll on a team’s salary cap, meaning that they don’t have the reserves to pay other key players. This makes missing on a quarterback a potentially career ruining mistake, as it can financially paralyze a franchise for years – the Jaguars, for example, ended up picking in the top 10 of the NFL Draft four years in a row after handing out a massive contract to QB Nick Foles that didn’t work out, even picking at #1 in back-to-back drafts. Despite this, contract numbers have continued to skyrocket year after year, with quarterbacks taking up more and more of the salary cap as teams realize just how important a superstar quarterback is.

Also notable is that the average Super Bowl-winning quarterback in our time period makes less than all but one of these contracts by annual pay. This is possible because of rookie contracts, which allow teams to pay their players at an extremely reduced price. This makes an elite quarterback on a rookie contract the most valuable asset a team can have, making high draft picks incredibly precious to QB-needy teams. When taking a deeper look at the draft capital spent on quarterback by year through trades and draft picks, it becomes obvious just how important the draft is in the world of quarterbacks.

The numbers in this figure are derived from a basic draft curve (Fitzgerald-Spielberger for those interested), where the first overall pick has a value of 3000 and logarithmically decreases as picks go on. The first thing that sticks out is that the average amount of draft capital spent on Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks is more than 3000 – this is because a significant number of quarterbacks selected in the draft are traded up for, which often requires a significant overpay in draft pick value. Additionally, trades involving quarterbacks often feature multiple first-round picks, which is an incredibly high price to pay.

From just having basic NFL knowledge, it’s obvious that having a good quarterback is important to a team’s offensive success. What isn’t so clear, however, is how important it really is – without one, it’s nearly impossible to make a run. For these reasons, it’s common to see teams shell out staggering amounts of money and draft capital just for a shot at hitting it big. And as long as the teams with the best quarterbacks keep winning, the price to buy one is only going to keep on climbing.