Where Super Bowl quarterbacks come from and how teams get them
There is no magic formula for this.
With Mike Tomlin’s resignation earlier this week, change has arrived for the Pittsburgh Steelers. What that change will look like in the form of a new head coach remains to be seen, but if the Steelers are going to get back to the level their fans want to see them reach — winning playoff games and competing for Super Bowls — the biggest change may not involve the head coach. At least not directly.
It is going to involve the quarterback.
While it may have been time for the Steelers and Tomlin to both start a new chapter in their respective stories (and it most certainly was), the brutal reality for the team is this: Until they get the quarterback position right, every other discussion surrounding the team is going to be nothing more than window dressing.
That includes the head coach.
A new head coach on their own might bring in new ideas, a new philosophy and a new approach that might produce an extra playoff win or two. And people will like that. For a while.
Or they might get worse.
Either way, their ceiling is going to be largely the same as it has been for the past decade without a top-tier quarterback on the roster.
That ceiling is pretty much what we have seen, a good, but not great team that does not compete for Super Bowls.
Maybe a different coach does a better job finding that quarterback. I am not dismissing that possibility.
One of the criticisms of the Steelers over the past few years of Tomlin’s tenure, strangely enough, is that they ended up being too good, and that if their ceiling was going to be what we saw over the past five years they would have been better off being bad for a year or two so they could position themselves at the top of the draft to potentially land their next franchise quarterback.
There is still an argument that the Steelers would be better off having that happen for a year or two under the new head coach.
I reject this notion. Fiercely. Strongly. Passionately.
Not only because I have no interest in sitting through a couple of two-or three-win seasons (and based on the way Pittsburgh reacts to 10-win seasons, I am guessing nobody else here does, either), but also because that has no guarantee for success. Not in terms of getting the right quarterback. Certainly not in terms of winning.
If anything, it opens the door to more extended losing, because if your team is bad enough to pick at the top of the draft it probably has more holes than you can quickly fill.
For every team that gets lucky in that situation, there’s six or seven that never get out of the cycle.
For every Joe Burrow, there’s five Zach Wilson’s and Trey Lance’s.
I have written about this before, but I am taking a deeper dive into it here, mostly because of a stat I saw earlier this week.
The stat: The last quarterback to be picked in the top-five of the draft and win a Super Bowl with the team that drafted them was the 2006 Indianapolis Colts (20 years ago!) with Peyton Manning.
Manning was drafted No. 1 overall in 1998.
Now, you might be able to quibble with that stat a little bit if you wanted to count Eli Manning.
Manning was selected No. 1 overall by the San Diego Chargers in 2004, but had no interest in playing for them so he was traded on draft day to the New York Giants for a package of picks and players that included Philip Rivers, who the Giants had taken for the Chargers with the No. 4 overall pick.
Do you want to include Eli as a top-five pick that won a Super Bowl with the team that drafted him? You could. I would not fight you on that. Even if you did, the Giants last won a Super Bowl with Manning in 2011 (15 years ago!).
I think this is relevant to the discussion of “just be bad and get your quarterback.”
After all, if the goal that Steelers fans set for their team is winning the Super Bowl, it might make some sense to look at where Super Bowl winning quarterbacks come from and how teams get them.
So let’s do a little exercise with this.
I went back to the year 2000, starting with the St. Louis Rams Super Bowl win over the Tennessee Titans. This is a solid 25-year sample size. Over that time there have been 15 different quarterbacks to win a Super Bowl. Here is the list and their overall draft position in parenthesis, listed in order of where they were picked.
Peyton Manning (No. 1 overall)
Eli Manning (No. 1 overall)
Matthew Stafford (No. 1 overall)
Trent Dilfer (No. 6 overall)
Patrick Mahomes (No. 10 overall)
Ben Roethlisberger (No. 11 overall)
Joe Flacco (No. 18 overall)
Aaron Rodgers (No. 24 overall)
Drew Brees (No. 32 overall)
Jalen Hurts (No. 53 overall)
Russell Wilson (No. 75 overall)
Nick Foles (No. 88 overall)
Tom Brady (No. 199 overall)
Brad Johnson (No. 227 ovearll)
Kurt Warner (Not Drafted)
A few things that require a deeper dive here:
The overall draft position of those quarterbacks is No. 57 overall.
Brady and Johnson skew that number quite a bit, and Brady was a stroke of insane luck in the sense that New England drafted the greatest quarterback of all time at the end of the sixth-round. That is really not a repeatable plan. But even if you exclude Brady and Johnson from that list the average draft position is still No. 26 overall.
Of the No. 1 overall picks, Peyton Manning is the only one that won with the team that actually picked him. But, again, with Eli, you get into that weird gray area of do you include him as a Giants pick at No. 4 overall?
Stafford was the No. 1 overall pick by the Detroit Lions, and while he was an excellent quarterback with them the team never actually won anything because the team around him perpetually stunk. He had to get traded to Los Angeles before he could get his Super Bowl.
The Rams traded their own No. 1 overall pick, Jared Goff, to Detroit as part of that trade. Goff had some solid success with the Rams, including starting a Super Bowl of his own (which they lost to Brady and the Patriots in one of the worst, most forgettable Super Bowl games of all time). But even the Rams did not get him by being truly bad. They won eight games the year they picked him No. 1. They were a mediocre team. But they aggressively traded up (in two separate trades) to get him.
Trent Dilfer won with Baltimore, but was the No. 6 overall pick with Tampa Bay and was a total washout there.
Mahomes is where things get truly fascinating. The Chiefs did not pick him No. 10 overall because they were bad. They won 12 games that year, were in the divisional round of the AFC playoffs, and were a missed two-point conversion away from potentially playing in the AFC Championship game. They entered that draft year with the No. 26 pick in the draft and aggressively traded up to No. 10 overall to select Mahomes. The second-best quarterback of this era did not end up on a bad team. He was picked by an excellent team that went up and got him. After he fell nine spots further than he should have (in hindsight).
Roethlisberger will be the argument Steelers fans have for being bad for a year. Go get the next Roethlisberger! See, 6-10 isn’t so bad! Maybe. A lot of things had to go right there for the Steelers to even end up with Roethlisberger. I also think this results in a confirmation bias among Steelers fans that just being bad one year is the secret to finding your Super Bowl winning quarterback. Sometimes outliers happen. Is this one of them?
After Roethlisberger, every other Super Bowl winning quarterback of the past 25 years was taken at a point where you are not supposed to be able to find Super Bowl winning quarterbacks. Flacco and Rodgers were second half of the first round. Brees was taken No. 32 overall by the Chargers, but ended up winning his Super Bowl with the Saints after signing in free agency. Hurts, Wilson and Foles were second-and third-round picks. Johnson was picked in a round that does not even exist anymore and was playing for his third different team in the NFL. Warner washed out with the Packers, played in the Arena League and was literally bagging groceries before catching on with the Rams.
But this is just the quarterbacks that actually won Super Bowls. They are, by their own definition, outliers. The majority of quarterbacks that have played in the NFL over this time period did not win a Super Bowl or even get to a Super Bowl.
So let’s take into account a larger pool of quarterbacks here.
I broke the first-round down into two different groups: Quarterbacks taken in the top-10, and quarterbacks taken in spots 15-32 (the supposed “no man’s land” for finding a quarterback).
What I looked at was what each of those teams did with the quarterback they drafted, only while they had that quarterback starting for them.
This is not a commentary on the individual quarterback play, a ranking of the quarterbacks, or taking into account what they did after they left the team that drafted them. Mostly because that is all that matters in this discussion.
I am strictly looking at team success, because that is ultimately the only thing that matters.
First, let’s look at the quarterbacks taken in the top-10.
Here is what we are looking at: The spot the quarterback was taken in, the team’s winning percentage with that quarterback as their starter, how many seasons that quarterback started a game with the team, how many seasons that quarterback started a playoff game for the team, and the furthest that team went in the playoffs with that quarterback starting for them. There are 45 of them. I had to break it into two tables because it would not all fit on one screen. They ranked in order of team’s winning percentage with that team.
Again, these numbers are only what these quarterbacks did with the team that drafted them.
The top two success stories are Mahomes and Josh Allen.
Depending on how you view the drafting of Eli Manning and who gets credit for that pick, Mahomes is the only quarterback out of these 45 that won a Super Bowl with the team that actually drafted them in the top-10.
Allen has a chance to join him this season.
We already discussed the circumstances in with Mahomes was drafted.
Allen was drafted in Buffalo in nearly identical circumstances, though not quite as extreme. The Bills won nine games and were a playoff team the year they drafted Allen. They traded up to get him and put him into a good situation on a team that was already competitive.
I also do not think you can ignore the fact the fifth-highest winning percentage on here is Goff with the Rams, who was also drafted by a team that started in the back-half of the first round and traded up.
Being a good team that is aggressive in the draft seems to be one of the best methods here.
Recent top-five picks C.J. Stroud (Houston Texans) and Drake Maye (New England Patriots) are also still playing this season and could very well end up as Super Bowl champions. And if not this season, perhaps in the future.
Other than Mahomes, the only other quarterbacks here to even reach a Super Bowl with the team that drafted them are Joe Burrow (Cincinnati Bengals), Cam Newton (Carolina Panthers), Jared Goff (Los Angeles Rams) and Matt Ryan (Atlanta Falcons).
That is not to say all of the other quarterbacks are bad. Joe Burrow is great. But the Bengals have wasted his career and made the playoffs just twice in six years with him. Trevor Lawrence has his moments, but seems like just a guy at times. Justin Herbert wows people with his talent, but he’s never really been great and has had three different types of postseason disasters. Who really knows.
I also can not ignore the fact that a lot of the teams at the bottom of the list are in there multiple times. Maybe it’s the situation.
Now let’s turn to the back half of the first round and every quarterback selected in spots 15-32 over the past 25 years.
There are only 21 of them, but there are a lot of good quarterbacks in this group that found a lot of success, both with the teams that drafted them and after. There are also lot of failures in here, and more outright busts than in the top-10, yes. But there are also at least three Hall of Famers in here (Lamar Jackson, Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees).
Jordan Love is pretty good.
Joe Flacco was pretty good and won a Super Bowl.
Chad Pennington was a very good starter.
Teddy Bridgewater could have been good if his leg did not explode.
But if you break it down into team success, there is very little difference between this group and the top-10.
The top-10 group was more likely to have its quarterbacks make the playoffs multiple times.
But a higher percentage of the quarterbacks in the second group had winning records with their teams, winning percentages of .600 or better, and a higher percentage of them reached the Super Bowl and won it.
You can make the argument that there were better quarterbacks picked in the top-10, and that picking in the top-10 might give you a better chance of landing a better quarterback. But that does not necessarily mean you are going to win more with that quarterback. It also does not mean you can not find a quarterback you can win with after the top-10.
At the end of the day, there is no magic bullet here. There is no perfect formula. There is no one way to do it.
What matters is having a smart front office and coaching staff that can identify a quarterback, having the aggressiveness to go get them (Kansas City, Buffalo) and develop them (Kansas City, Buffalo, Los Angeles), having a good team around them, and perhaps the biggest factor of them all — luck. Luck in having the right quarterback fall to you, luck in being in a position to land that quarterback in the right year, and luck in just having them develop as you hope.
The Steelers do not have a quarterback right now. I do not see that as a negative in terms of how attractive their job will be. If anything, it should be a positive. A new head coach is going to want to bring in his quarterback and tie their success or failure to them, and not have to worry about winning with a quarterback they were forced into taking.
The key for the Steelers is going to be finding the right head coach that can identify that quarterback and have the aggressiveness to get them. They certainly have the salary cap space and the draft pick capital to do that.
Now go do it.