Five Years of First-Round Dreams and the Overrated QB Question That Keeps Haunting Football's Front Offices

Listen, I've been watching football for a long time, and every year the same thing happens. We get these quarterback rankings where somebody takes a hard look at who's supposed to be great and says, "You know what? That guy's not as good as we think he is." Then everybody gets all worked up about it, and half the fans in the country disagree violently with the other half. It's beautiful, really, because it shows how much we all care about this game. But here's the thing that really matters: when you look back five years at all those first-round draft picks, especially the quarterbacks, you start to see a pattern that nobody wants to talk about honestly.

The quarterback position has always been the most important thing in football. I mean, that's not debatable. You could have the greatest defense ever assembled, but if your quarterback can't get you down the field and put points on the board, you're not winning championships. That's just football. Every team knows it. Every front office knows it. Yet somehow, year after year, we still end up with quarterback situations that don't work out the way everybody thought they would. Some guys who we thought would be transcendent end up being very good instead of great. Some guys we thought would be above average end up being something else entirely. And some guys end up in situations where it's hard to tell what they really are because the team around them is so bad or so good that it skews everything.

When you talk about overrated quarterbacks in today's NFL, you have to understand something fundamental. Overrated doesn't mean bad. That's where people get confused. A guy can be a really good football player and still be overrated if people expect him to be one of the five best players at his position and he's really more like the tenth or twelfth best. That's actually a compliment in a lot of ways, because it means you're still talking about a professional quarterback in the National Football League. That's already an incredible accomplishment. There are only thirty-two of those jobs in the world, and the competition to get there is unbelievable.

The thing about the first-round quarterback picks from 2020 onward is that they've mostly turned out to be either really interesting stories or cautionary tales. Some of them are exactly what we thought they'd be. Some of them are better than anybody expected. And some of them have had their narratives written about them so many times that we've actually lost sight of what they actually are on the football field. That's where the overrated conversation gets real. It's not about whether they're good. It's about whether we've built them up into something that maybe isn't quite fair.

Let me tell you something about quarterbacks that I've learned over decades of watching football. The position is so hard, so brutally difficult, that there's almost no such thing as a truly overrated guy at this level. Every starter in the NFL is doing something at an elite level compared to the rest of humanity. The problem is that we live in a world of Twitter and ESPN debates where everybody has to have a take that's either "This guy is a Hall of Famer" or "This guy is a bust." There's no in between anymore. But football doesn't work in a world of no in between. Football is all in between.

When you look at the first-round picks from the last five years, you're looking at young men who were selected to be the future of franchises. That's an enormous amount of pressure. The average fan doesn't understand how much that matters. It's not just about having talent. It's about having talent, and having the right coach, and having the right supporting cast, and having the right defense, and having the right protection scheme, and being drafted by a team that actually has a plan for how to use you. All of those things matter, and they matter a lot.

Here's what I've noticed about quarterback evaluation in this era. We've gotten really good at watching film. Everybody can pull up tape now. Everybody can see how a quarterback throws, how he moves in the pocket, how he reads a defense. But what we've gotten worse at is understanding the context of everything we're seeing. We see a guy throw an interception and we judge him on that one throw instead of understanding what coverage he was facing and whether he made a reasonable decision based on what he saw. We see a guy have a great game and we immediately think he's arrived, without understanding that maybe his team's defense was really good that week and his job was easier than it normally is.

The overrated quarterback conversation exists because we, as football fans, want certainty in a sport that's all about uncertainty. We want to know right now, five years after a draft, whether that pick was good or bad. But football doesn't work that way. Some guys take longer to develop. Some guys are in the wrong system and we don't know what they'd be like in another system. Some guys get injured and never get back to what they were. Some guys get better every single year and we were right about them all along, we just had to be patient.

When you stack up the first-round quarterback picks from 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, you're looking at a group that includes some guys who are probably going to be in the conversation for greatness, some guys who are solid professional quarterbacks, some guys who are still figuring it out, and some guys who, yeah, maybe didn't work out the way anybody hoped. That's how it always is. That's how it always will be.

The guys who look overrated to us now might be the ones who look genius a few years from now. The guys who look like disappointments might end up being the ones who just needed a system change or a coaching change or a supporting cast upgrade to become something special. That's the beautiful part about football. You don't know. Nobody knows.

What fans need to understand is that when you hear somebody talk about overrated quarterbacks, they're really talking about the gap between expectation and reality. And that gap exists for every quarterback at every level. It exists in college. It exists in the NFL. It exists even with guys like Joe Montana and Tom Brady. Somebody, somewhere, thought they should be doing something different than what they're doing.

The first-round picks from the last five years represent millions of hours of evaluation, thousands of coaches and scouts making their best judgments, and billions of dollars being wagered on these decisions. That's real. That matters. But it also means that even when those evaluations are really good, they're still just educated guesses. Football is too complicated, too variable, too dependent on too many moving parts to ever be certain about anything.

For fans, this means you should enjoy the ride and stop trying to grade the decisions before the story is finished. Some of those guys are going to be great. Some of them aren't. That's just how it is. The beauty of football is that you don't know which is which until you wait a little while and actually let it play out. Keep watching. Keep loving it. That's what it's all about.