Why the NFL Has a Quarterback Crisis
Coaches see more QB prospects entering the league without the skill sets to excel; Will the classic NFL passer go extinct?
By KEVIN CLARK
Sept. 9, 2015 1:24 p.m. ET
Since the dawn of the NFL, head coaches and general managers have been calling top college quarterback prospects into conference rooms to pepper them with rudimentary questions: how to attack a certain defense, for instance, or what to do when a play breaks down. The answers were sometimes dull and sometimes brilliant, but there were always answers.
This year, according to separate interviews with dozens of NFL coaches and executives, something disturbing happened in these pre-draft quiz sessions. When asked the same basic questions, many quarterback prospects responded with something NFL insiders said they have never seen before: blank stares.
Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi said the new crop of college quarterbacks were flummoxed by a simple question about an “under” front, one of the most common defensive alignments. “Whoa, no one’s ever told me ‘front’ before,” he remembers one prospect saying. “No one’s ever talked to me about reading these defenses.”
Buffalo Bills general manager Doug Whaley said he had the same results when he asked prospects a question about defenses shifting from a common scheme called “cover 2” to an equally mundane tactic called “cover 3.” Hue Jackson, the offensive coordinator from the Bengals, said he had to dumb down his questions, while Indianapolis Colts offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton said some QBs failed to grasp things as basic as understanding a common play call. “You have to teach these kids the absolute basics,” he said.
The knowledge base was so low, Buffalo’s Whaley said, that it left him feeling “a little nervous about the long-term future of this game.”
As the 2015 NFL season begins, the league’s decision makers say they are daunted by what they see as a widening gulf between the college game and the pro game, one that has existed for a while but is now starting to affect the quality of the league’s most-cherished commodity: Quarterbacks. The kinds of passers the NFL thrives on are those who can survey the field before the snap to “read” the defense and make any necessary adjustments, then drop back and dissect the coverage again, picking through a number of passing options to find the open receiver.
For years, this brand of preparation has been regenerated from Joe Montana to Tom Brady to relative newcomers like Seattle’s Russell Wilson and Andrew Luck of the Indianapolis Colts. Spoiled by their immense talent and football intelligence, the NFL has organized itself around quarterbacks to the point where it is hard to imagine the sport without them. The five most productive individual passing seasons in history have happened since 2011.
But if current trends continue, NFL insiders say, quarterbacks who have the sophistication to outfox NFL defenses to deliver the ball to open receivers are “going to be on the endangered species list,” said Cleveland Browns coach Mike Pettine. “The quarterback may not be gone yet,” he added, “but if you have one, protect it.”
“It’s doomsday if we don’t adapt and evolve,” said St. Louis Rams general manager Les Snead.
In the last decade, many college football teams have embraced a form of offense that runs at a furious tempo with no breaks for huddles, the goal being to grind down and exhaust the defense. Teams that play this way don’t bother trying to fool their opponents with complex schemes and trickery, they just bull forward as fast as they can. College defenses have been forced to adapt to this “hurry-up” mode by simplifying their fronts and coverage packages to help the players keep pace. The learning curve, at the NFL level, NFL people say, is so massive that it’s hard to overcome for all but the best college quarterbacks.
The trouble with this trend, NFL experts say, is that many of the players coming from the college ranks have spent their entire careers playing in this high-throttle system, which is completely different from the slower, deliberate and more complex nature of the NFL. When they come to the NFL, it’s as if they’re being told to stop playing speed checkers and start playing chess. And the NFL, which doesn’t have a minor league of its own, has no influence over college coaches. “They don’t coach anything,” said Rex Ryan, the head coach of the Buffalo Bills, when discussing college defenses.
At Baylor, quarterback Bryce Petty was one of the most prolific passers in the country. He led the Bears to two conference championships in his last two seasons on campus and holds 31 Baylor passing records and has the lowest percentage of interceptions per pass in NCAA history.
But NFL teams were wary of Petty. Because Baylor played a “spread” offense that forced defenses to fan out across the field, making them unable to disguise anything, many scouts worried he would struggle to master the NFL game. He had to wait until the 103rd pick before the New York Jets scooped him up. Petty said he was “upset and frustrated that I was thrown away like I couldn’t learn it,” he said. “I’m like ‘you’ve got to give me a chance a little bit.’”
Petty admits to grappling with tasks such as hearing and calling the play, identifying defensive backs in coverage and identifying which player in the defensive backfield was the “mike” linebacker, the central part of the defense whose location teams base their offensive line protections on. “As crazy as it sounds, at Baylor, we did not point out the ‘mike’ linebacker,” Petty said.
Petty was unfamiliar with making adjustments to the play or the formation before the snap.
“Honestly, I wish I’d done a little bit more as far as being proactive to get into a pro style [offense],” he said, singling out the need to decipher fronts or coverages. “It was things I have never seen before.”
Exactly 101 picks earlier, another quarterback from a spread offense was selected. Marcus Mariota, who won the Heisman Trophy while leading the Oregon Ducks to the national championship game last season, was taken with the second overall pick by the Tennessee Titans. Mariota can run as well as pass, but NFL teams worried about his ability to translate to the pro game. Titans general manager Ruston Webster defended Mariota and the Oregon offense and said they used NFL principles—like the quarterback reading multiple receivers on a play or him staying “in the pocket”—the area behind the offensive line—“more than what people realized. It gave us confidence.”
‘It’s doomsday if we don’t adapt and evolve’
—St. Louis Rams general manager Les Snead
A parade of general managers, like Pittsburgh’s Kevin Colbert, think that if the current model holds, the notion of drafting a quarterback to start right away will need to scrapped.
NFL officials agree that the new wave of quarterbacks will need more time than previous generations, but some fret that today’s roster limits and time constraints may prevent them from getting the time they need to learn or develop. “It might become like major league baseball now, where you take a guy that you think will be able to play in three, four, five years,” said Pettine.
Even that can be hard. One general manager admitted that he’s having trouble finding a young quarterback to keep on the roster whose lack of knowledge of the pro game won’t frustrate his team’s established starter.
In NFL facilities across the country, the race to figure out what works is on. “It’s on us to adapt, I don’t think any of us want this thing to crash,” said the Rams’ Snead.
Cleveland’s Farmer has one idea: What if you could design an offense to minimize the passing deficiencies of modern quarterback prospects? Farmer used the example of Auburn’s Nick Marshall, who threw 20 touchdowns last season but was projected to transition to defensive back in the NFL. What if, Farmer said, you devoted resources to designing an offense where Marshall could thrive? He would cost you almost nothing—Marshall went undrafted—and “you might get your franchise quarterback in the later rounds, and that’s unheard of these days.”
“Whoever cracks this code the soonest is going to have a huge, huge advantage,” Farmer said, adding he and his coach, Pettine, have had broad discussions on the topic.
Indeed, Snead has similar thoughts. He recalled the brilliance behind the “Cover 2” or “Tampa 2” defenses, popularized first by the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s then refined by multiple teams in the 1990s, which minimized the importance of “cover” cornerbacks, who could lock up wide receivers in man-to-man coverage and are expensive and hard to find. Snead said the race is on to find a similar strategy that minimizes the importance of the quarterback. “The person who makes the quarterback like they made the cornerback will be a name that will be remembered forever,” Snead said. “But it will take courage to do it.”
NFL coaches are still trying to figure out which elements of the college innovations can be used in the NFL. One issue is that NFL rules prohibit teams from snapping the ball as quickly after plays, meaning they cannot run a pure uptempo offense. Chicago Bears offensive coordinator Adam Gase singled out Philadelphia Eagles coach Chip Kelly, a former Oregon coach, as bringing positive elements of the spread to the pros. “They do a good job and they haven’t sold out to the scheme and most importantly their quarterbacks don’t take huge hits,” Gase said. “The quarterback position is so valuable you want to adapt to their strengths, they do that.”
For his part, Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Todd Haley sees an altogether bleaker future for teams searching for a quarterback. “You do not want to be in the top five pickers in the draft, you really don’t,” Haley said. “Guys are going to get fired. General managers, coaches, they’re going to go because it’s just guessing. It’s harder than ever to find a quarterback.”
Write to Kevin Clark at
kevin.clark@wsj.com
