Big Blue View
Here are the numbers since 2010, and they are not encouraging
With the New York Giants still in the quarterback market, I am updating a series of posts I did last year looking at the success rates of quarterbacks drafted on Day 1, Day and Day 3 of the NFL Draft.
Today, we look at Round 1. The bulk of this post appeared on Big Blue View prior to the 2024 NFL Draft. It has been updated to reflect another year’s worth of data.
We have often talked about the hit rate, the percentage of time NFL teams get it right when drafting a quarterback in Round 1, being somewhere between 30-40%. Well, let’s show the work.
Below, you will find a year-by-year list of quarterbacks drafted in Round 1 since 2010. There have been 49. Bill Barnwell of ESPN did a historical look of his own at quarterback hits and misses in the draft in 2024 and provided a tiered grading system for breaking down the success or failure level of each pick.
I liked it and have adopted it, with my own judgment for which category each selected quarterback falls into.
Here is how Barnwell tiered the quarterbacks:
Hall of Famers are players who have either already made it to the Hall of Fame or have better than a 50/50 chance of making it to Canton someday.
Franchise quarterbacks are players who locked down their team’s primary job and played at a Pro Bowl level for a significant period of time, stretching well beyond their rookie deal, even if they aren’t going to be a Hall of Famer one day.
Solid starters are quarterbacks who were regulars for their teams without ever really challenging the upper echelon of the position, either because of a lack of ceiling, injury or other factors. These players might or might not have earned a second deal with their teams.
Low-end pro careers would include passers who bounced around the NFL as borderline starters or high-end backups without locking down a starting job for a significant period of time. Again, injuries could factor in here.
Disappointments are players who don’t fit into any of the above categories. They might have never earned significant NFL playing time, like Paxton Lynch, or struggled before ending their NFL career quickly, like Johnny Manziel. Teams might consider a solid starter or a low-end pro career as a disappointment depending on where they were drafted, but this group of players basically returned nil value given that it included all first-rounders.
I am including quarterbacks from the 2023 and 2024 draft classes, although there isn’t a big enough body of work to make definitive judgments on those players. That adds an “incomplete” category for several quarterbacks. Consider where I have them listed the 2023 and 2024 draftees as “for now” placements.
By the way, I dropped Daniel Jones from the “solid starter” category to the “low-end pro careers” category.
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