The NFL draft is expected to be dominated by quarterbacks when the first round kicks off Thursday night. The latest consensus mock draft expects a quarterback to be selected with each of the first three picks (Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels and Drake Maye), and some analysts have predicted that a fourth (J.J. McCarthy) will be chosen in the top five.
The stakes are high, of course, for a number of reasons. Find a franchise quarterback who can serve as the cornerstone of a team’s offense, consistently performing at a high level, and your team probably will be set up for success for years to come. But draft one who flops, and chances are there will be a new front office and coaching staff taking over before too long.
How often does a top-five pick actually yield a franchise quarterback? And what does it mean when we label someone a franchise quarterback anyway? Let’s take a look.
What does it mean to be a franchise QB?
This is one of the most common terms in sports, yet there isn’t a consensus definition. Star passers of recent years such as Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers have obviously met the threshold, but there are many others who fit the bill.
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To come up with a standard, we started by weeding out any quarterbacks who were top-five draft picks and didn’t earn a second long-term deal with the teams that drafted them. While some may have gone on to have great second acts in new cities, they don’t qualify as passers who became franchise quarterbacks for their original teams.
Andrew Luck, the No. 1 pick in 2012, was clearly a franchise quarterback. The Indianapolis Colts exercised the fifth-year option on his contract and extended him with a five-year, $123 million deal that included $87 million in guaranteed money.
Mitchell Trubisky, the second pick in 2017, did not work out as well. The Chicago Bears declined his fifth-year option in 2020, and he played 18 games (seven starts) over the next three seasons for the Buffalo Bills and Pittsburgh Steelers.
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But simply getting a second contract with the team that drafted you doesn’t necessarily make you a franchise quarterback. So to account for performance, we used Pro Football Reference’s approximate value, an attempt to put a single number on the seasonal value of a player at any position from any year (since 1950). Then we can examine production relative to the position, highlighting performance good enough to be included in the 75th percentile.
Why the 75th percentile? That would place the quarterback in the upper quartile. It’s arbitrary yet high enough to include the passers who can be considered irreplaceable and not so low that it includes those who are simply average. Quarterbacks selected in the top five since 2011 who meet the 75th percentile threshold for approximate value relative to their draft class include Luck, Cam Newton, Kyler Murray, Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Trevor Lawrence and C.J. Stroud.
How often does a top-five pick yield a franchise quarterback?
Put them together — quarterbacks selected in the top five who were kept on long-term deals and who also meet the 75th percentile threshold for approximate value relative to their draft class — and the list of franchise quarterbacks is Newton, Luck, Murray and Burrow. For our purposes, we will include Tagovailoa in that group; he meets the performance threshold, and the Dolphins have expressed interest in signing him to a second contract.
That’s only five of the 14 quarterbacks drafted in the top five from 2011 to 2020. Two more drafted in the three years since — Lawrence and Stroud — have shown the potential to join that group, which would expand to seven of 20 from 2011 to 2023.
In other words: The odds of landing your franchise quarterback with a top-five selection are worse than a coin flip.
How often does a top-five pick yield an elite QB?
Hoping that your team will land an elite quarterback who performs at the 95th percentile? The chances are even worse, dropping to 21 percent when accounting only for quarterbacks drafted in the top five from 2011 to 2020 (Newton, Murray and Burrow). All three of those passers were No. 1 picks.
That’s not the most encouraging news for fans of the Chicago Bears, who are expected to select USC’s Williams with the first pick. It does, however, fall in line with Aaron Schatz’s QBASE forecast, a projection system that uses an opponent-adjusted efficiency metric to predict NFL success.
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Schatz estimates Williams has a 21 percent chance of performing at an elite level — a forecast that’s much rosier than those for the other projected top-five picks. LSU’s Daniels, North Carolina’s Maye and Michigan’s McCarthy are given less than a 15 percent chance to perform at an elite level, with the majority at 10 percent or less.
Drafting a QB early is still worth it
The value you get from drafting a quarterback in the top five, immediately and in the future, is significant — and not only because quarterback is the most important position on the field. It’s also because of the rookie wage scale, which limits how much a draft pick can make during his first few years in the league. Even those drafted in the first five picks carry an initial salary of roughly 4 percent of a team’s available cap space; a quarterback drafted in the top five costs almost 10 percent of the cap for his second contract, more than double the entry-level contract.
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That can make a huge difference when building a roster, allowing teams with quarterbacks on rookie contracts to pay more for players at other positions. Even if a quarterback is simply good, not great (or, in other words, a franchise quarterback but not an elite quarterback), that makes the pick worth it.
The challenge for any organization with a top-five pick is to avoid the bust, of which there could be one or two this year. After all, a high draft pick is no guarantee of success. Robert Griffin III, Sam Darnold and Zach Wilson are reminders of how wrong high draft picks can go. And yet using a top-five pick on a quarterback is still a gamble worth taking.
