I was extremely critical of the Houston Texans’ decision to spend $72 million last offseason on a quarterback with seven career starts and a passer rating of 86.0 on his résumé. And it turns out, a lot of us were right. Brock Osweiler doesn’t appear to be a franchise-caliber quarterback, and the Texans are likely suffering from buyer’s remorse after Osweiler posted the second-lowest qualified passer rating in the league in 2016.
I’ll continue to predict whether or not teams are going to regret big trades or signings at the quarterback position, but I’m no longer going to call teams stupid for rolling the dice on quarterbacks who have shown that they might have even a small chance at becoming reliable starters.
Why? It’s simple, really. This is a league with 32 teams and fewer than 32 starting-caliber quarterbacks, and 13 of the last 14 Super Bowl winners were led by quarterbacks named Brady, Manning, Roethlisberger, Brees, Rodgers and Wilson. The other was won by Joe Flacco, who was off-the-charts good that postseason for the Ravens.
You don’t win anymore without a quarterback. Not in this era — the most pass-happy era in NFL history. Teams know that, which is why so few high-quality signal callers hit the open market. But sometimes, lucky franchises have two franchise-caliber or potential franchise-caliber quarterbacks. Those lucky bastards (New England this year with Tom Brady and Jimmy Garoppolo; arguably Denver last year with Osweiler and youngsters Trevor Siemian and Paxton Lynch en route; Indy a few years ago when they had Peyton Manning and the chance to draft Andrew Luck) are able to demand a king’s ransom in exchange for whichever talented quarterback they decide to deal.
Teams with no franchise quarterbacks have little choice. They can’t afford not to swing the bat. In fact, they have to take as many bloody cuts as possible until they find that Prince Charming, because there’s almost no chance they’ll be relevant until they do.
So I’m done with shaming teams for giving up arms and legs for quarterbacks. I get it. Some make more prudent desperate decisions than others, but they’re all still desperate.
