Quarterback, at once, is the most essential and hardest position to find in professional sports. The Cleveland Browns’ recent history, chocked with discarded signal callers and bereft of success, illustrates both facts. They have a chance, whether they realize it or not, to both redefine their franchise and the way NFL teams approach finding quarterbacks. They have already borrowed a top executive from Major League Baseball. Now, in seeking an elusive franchise quarterback, they can borrow an important principle from that sport that’s gone overlooked in their own.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Baseball Prospectus coined a phrase that for many teams became a guiding player-development code: “There’s No Such Thing As a Pitching Prospect.” The point was not that supposedly gifted pitchers never pan out; of course some young flame-throwers at the top of prospect rankings grow up to become big league aces. The point was that many of them do not, so many that it would be foolish to count on them, or to sacrifice abundant resources to acquire them.
What if football teams took the same approach with quarterbacks? It may be time for teams to come to terms with the volatility of filling its marquee position, and to repeat over and over: “There’s No Such Thing As A Quarterback Prospect.”
The most promising pitchers fail so often because of physical attrition. In football, quarterbacks so often can’t make the leap from the speed and schemes of college football to the NFL, and evaluators struggle to choose which ones can. Either way, it’s the same problem: A position of great need is nearly impossible to predict.
In baseball, teams attempt to solve the problem via a quality-through-quantity approach: the way to find a great pitcher to acquire a lot of pitchers, groom them as best as possible and hope one emerges. It’s a lottery, so in order to win, buy the most tickets.
In football, teams have tried the opposite of the TNSTAAPP approach. They try for quality-through-quality, devoting an abundance of resources in the form of trading up in the draft to find one great quarterback. It doesn’t work out that often, and when it fails a huge waste is left behind.
The Rams and Eagles both traded away a raft of draft picks in order to move up to the top two picks, positioning themselves to take Cal’s Jared Goff and North Dakota State’s Carson Wentz. If either Goff or Wentz could be guaranteed to become a franchise quarterback, it would be worth every penny of draft capital. The problem is, nothing is assured when taking a quarterback, even at the top of the draft.
Since 1991, 27 quarterbacks have been taken among the top three picks. Those quarterbacks have produced just three Super Bowls for the teams that drafted them (or acquired them on draft day) — one by Peyton Manning for the Colts, and two by Eli Manning for the Giants. Only 11 of the 27 (40.7 percent) even won a playoff game for their first team. Last season, just four of the 12 playoff teams were quarterbacked primarily by a signal caller taken in the first round.
The way to mitigate that risk is to devote minimal resources while still trying to land a representative quarterback. The Browns have seemingly already started the process, signing washed-out second-overall pick Robert Griffin III at a discounted salary. Griffin gives the Browns one low-risk, high-reward option. They could have supplemented Griffin by taking a quarterback with the second overall pick, but they acquired a haul by trading the choice — and thus likely either Wentz or Goff — to the Eagles.
The Browns can attempt to land quality at quarterback through quantity, by taking the TNSTAAQBP approach. Former Los Angeles Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta, a key Billy Beane lieutenant and prominent figure in Moneyball, understands the concept as well as anybody. They could gamble with the eighth pick and take Memphis’s Paxton Lynch. Or they could use the pick on a safer position and take fliers later in the draft on two or three quarterbacks, using the extra picks they gained from Philadelphia.
The plan could fail, obviously, but when it does, it will not have cost Cleveland much of anything. If Wentz and/or Goff don’t pan out, the Rams and/or Eagles will have squandered significant resources. The TNSTAAQBP approach at least will come without opportunity cost.
Are the Browns better off with Wentz and some place-holding journeyman? Or by acquiring RGIII, Cardale Jones, Vernon Adams and Kevin Hogan for peanuts and hoping one hits? The first option fails more often than it succeeds. The second option might, too, but at least the Browns will not have leveraged themselves in the process and can spend those early picks improving other areas of their roster.
Teams can also fall into franchise quarterbacks in later rounds. The ultimate example is Tom Brady, but he is an obvious outlier, not a formula to try to copy. But the Redskins and Seahawks found Kirk Cousins and Russell Wilson in the fourth and third rounds, respectively. Carson Palmer may have originally been taken first overall, but the Cardinals acquired him for a sixth-rounder and a seventh-round pick swap. Those types of acquisitions are rarely going to work. But if you make three or four a year, you increase your chances to hit without sacrificing inordinate resources.
The underlying point is, acquiring a quarterback is always going to be a risk. That’s an unavoidable problem. So don’t go compounding that problem by compromising resources in order to take that risk. Instead, collect quarterbacks on the cheap until a franchise quarterback emerges while using higher picks and bigger salary cap dollars to build a team around the position.
The Browns are perfectly positioned to try such a novel approach. They just traded down. They have a ton of picks. They have such a miserable history with quarterbacks that their fans would likely welcome a new tack. And they just hired a baseball executive to run their football team. It would be a risk, for sure. But they have to keep telling themselves any quarterback acquisition is a risk, and there is no such thing as a quarterback prospect.