I trust we all remember 2023. Three years ago doesn’t seem like that long, but I imagine before article’s end it will begin feeling much longer as we realize how certain perceptions have changed.
In 2023, Sam Darnold came into the season as the winner of a backup job with the 49ers, the result of which led to 2021 first-round pick Trey Lance being shipped off to Dallas as the loser of the competition. This job followed three truly infamous years with the Jets and then two years with the Panthers in which he didn’t fare much better. It was a way to stay in the league, a luxury often afforded to first-round picks who haven’t found their footing yet. Darnold’s year in San Francisco was a relative non-event, though he did come painfully close to getting his first Super Bowl ring while backing up Brock Purdy. What took place behind the scenes, though, clearly had much larger ripple effects on the league than we could’ve possibly known at the time.
An injury to JJ McCarthy (who will be discussed later) solidified the year-long starting gig for Darnold in Minnesota, where he won 14 games and obliterated his previous career highs in just about every positive stat. There were doubters as to whether that success would be replicable. I was such a doubter, in fact, that I based some optimistic and ill-guided Vikings predictions prior to last season on the premise that Darnold had been fine, but they could do so much better.
That one year earned Darnold a handsome contract in Seattle, where he went 14-3 again and won the Super Bowl, making his detractors look rather foolish. Especially given that in the NFC Championship, he had to make real plays to deliver the victory, while defensive dominance drove the results in the Divisional Round and the Super Bowl.
This year, though it bears mentioning that he’s been playing through a hip injury for the past month, he simply hasn’t looked as sharp, and has made a few costly plays. These were most glaring in a loss to the Broncos a week ago, making at least one more mistake than Bo Nix, who will also be talked about here. Now it stands to reason to assume that he’s still a much better quarterback than what we’ve seen thus far in 2026. Simultaneously, it’s a stark reminder of the sometimes fragile and fickle nature of professional quarterback play, with all of the factors that can aid or hinder. This is true for a certain tier of quarterback in particular, a tier into which Darnold and quite a few others fall in today’s NFL.
It’s often discussed these days that quarterback progression isn’t normally linear, nor is it quite the proverbial arc that’s often ascribed to it. I’d like to point out a few quarterbacks in the league today who, while none are technically on the same or even parallel developmental paths, have enough of the same themes and patterns in their development that their situations can easily be compared to one another. While there are many general paths of quarterback development that have taken shape repeatedly over the years and decades, this sort of path appears to be growing increasingly relevant in the modern landscape of the league.
The aforementioned 2023 season featured CJ Stroud winning Offensive Rookie of the Year, and the ensuing offseason had many listing him as a top 10 player at the position. The ensuing year was a bit of a letdown. That’s nothing compared to 2025, though, which can only be labeled as a massive disappointment. For the bulk of those two seasons, Stroud lost his timing, and a quarterback can do little without timing. This year, he’s looking the best he’s ever looked at the pro level. He was the reason the Texans beat the Jaguars in London on Sunday and was the primary reason they even remained competitive in the season opener against the Bills.
While the order of events in the two scenarios provided are very different, both Darnold and Stroud have experienced similar fluctuations in quality of play and have seen their respective reputations rise and fall along with it.
An unintentional mold of such situations is becoming more and more typical in recent years. First-round picks who generally fit a lot of the stereotypes for great quarterbacks, who have a progression that is far from being linear. Consider a few other such cases:
- Jared Goff: Started off terribly in a bad situation, blew up under McVay, began to have a noticeable ceiling. After being traded, has played very well but shown when things get bad that he’s not enough to cover them. (Think of the playoff game against the Commanders.)
- Baker Mayfield: Showed a general pattern of inconsistency in his years with the Browns, but the highest highs were especially tantalizing. After being cast aside by Cleveland and subsequently bouncing around, has solidified himself (when healthy) as an above-average quarterback.
- Trevor Lawrence: Like Goff, had a terrible rookie year under awful circumstances. Had a brief explosion in his second year, but has relatively underwhelmed since, unless you ask those who are even more pro-analytics than myself. Had a similar resurgence last year, which has carried into the beginning of the season for the first time in his career, which is encouraging for his future outlook.
These developmental archetypes aren’t new, per se. Darnold’s predecessor in Seattle, Geno Smith, was an even later bloomer than Darnold himself. But they are more prevalent today than they were 10 or 20 years ago.
I won’t claim to know why this is the case, other than to say that quarterback development practices from an early age are wildly different than they used to be. The fallout of that, though, and how it may be contributing to this particular outcome, is a longer conversation fit for another day.
I won’t claim to know exactly how to fix it, either, to even out the development of these players so that it makes more linear and logical sense. I say this in part because I don’t believe anyone has the full answer; these things are unpredictable and there are hundreds of factors that go into whether a player works out or not. There are roughly as many such factors that are intangible as there are that are tangible. What I can do is point out a couple of meaningful trends.
The first and most obvious is coaching. Liam Coen (and to a small degree, McVay) has unlocked the best we’ve seen from Mayfield. Coen has also tapped into Lawrence’s potential more than anyone else. McVay and Ben Johnson have both at different points found ways to get more out of Jared Goff. Kyle Shanahan, Kevin O’Connell, and Klint Kubiak have all played a role in Darnold becoming a legitimately good NFL quarterback. Meanwhile, the primary coaches in charge of developing those guys at the start of their respective careers are all either out of the league or in dramatically reduced coaching roles.
The second is time. While coaches and GM’s don’t have this luxury with their jobs on the line, it would be nice to see some of these guys get a longer leash before being discarded, even if that only means staying on the roster longer as a backup while the search for a franchise quarterback continues. Stroud and Lawrence, who I hope will continue giving us epic divisional showdowns like they did on Sunday for years to come, have been fortunate enough to go through multiple years of growing pains with the teams that drafted them and are now flourishing with those teams. The others I’ve discussed here didn’t have that same opportunity. There’s no guarantee, of course, that Darnold, Goff, and Mayfield would have flourished (or re-flourished) in New York, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. But we’ve seen enough of these great talents come to fruition after a few years that it’s worth it more often than not to take as much time as possible in finding out what you have. Unless severe injuries take it from you, your potential doesn’t simply go away.
The one caveat to this entire conversation, in which most of these quarterbacks have a career that should end up being largely viewed positively, is that these later bloomers (save for the Kurt Warners of the world) rarely end up being elite. They’re in that next tier, where they’re good but not great. The real question is what order that tier will end up in from season to season. Unfortunately, there’s no real fix for that. Not every good quarterback is going to end up being elite, and that’s ok. But the knowledge of who you have playing the position is something you need to have and you need to be prepared to roll with the punches and tolerate the ebbs and flows.
That question of how this tier will be ordered is one of the annual focal points in the league. As we saw last year, those who hit the high end can find themselves in the Super Bowl if the situation is right. Darnold isn’t the only such example. Brock Purdy has been to a Super Bowl, and while his consistency has kept him at the top of this particular tier rather than shifting around throughout it, the best of this group each season play roughly on Purdy’s level. Goff got to a Super Bowl with the Rams on one of his highs, though the game itself was one of his lows. Several other quarterbacks who clearly fell into the “good” category rather than “great” have made and even won Super Bowls, though it has required a substantial confluence of factors each time. But when they struggle, as we’ve seen Darnold do this year, good teams can feel like they’re a far cry from truly contending at all.
So, other than those I’ve already addressed, who else is on this roller coaster right now? One obvious candidate is Bo Nix, who looked as a rookie like a highlight of his draft class and had plenty of great moments last year even as Caleb Williams and Drake Maye passed him by. And he too would have played in the Super Bowl in February had a freak injury not forced him to miss the AFC Championship. But this year has brought a drop-off, even as the weapons around him have improved.
JJ McCarthy, as mentioned above, could also fit into this category. After a short and much-maligned tenure in Minnesota that still had its notable highs, he’s now taken over the starting job with the Giants only a few weeks after being traded, thanks to a quarter filled with such highs. The next steps in his development are as murky as anyone’s, but the talent is undoubtedly there. He could end up in a position like Darnold’s or Mayfield’s in a few years, or he could even turn into the constant boom-or-bust type, like the quarterback he replaced on Sunday. When Jaxson Dart comes back next season and presumably reclaims his job, the ensuing events and McCarthy’s responses to them will dictate which way his path goes next.
Bryce Young, who also has the benefit of remaining with his original team as of now, is another prime example of a young quarterback who floundered for many years, including being benched for a time, only to finally be having what seems to be breakout year. Last year, he was arguably the worst of the 14 starting quarterbacks going into the playoffs, and the Panthers won the eight games they won mostly in spite of him. This year, they’ve won much more because of him than ever before.
One more less obvious candidate, who may be having roughly the same learning experience that Darnold has, is Mac Jones. Yet another first-round pick who fell out of favor and is now a backup. He looked good in the handful of starts he made for an injured Purdy last season, and truthfully looked pretty good when the circumstances were solid in his early years in New England. Assuming he’s not traded before the deadline to a desperate team making an irresistible offer, he’ll be hitting free agency in March after spending a second year in San Francisco behind Purdy. Some team in need of a veteran quarterback will likely sign him to be a bridge starter for them, offering him a reduced version of similar contracts we’ve seen go to Darnold, Mayfield, and even Daniel Jones. I’m keeping my eye on the Vikings, Colts, Browns, and even the Eagles if Jalen Hurts finds his career to be in jeopardy. But those are far from the only options; in reality, anything could happen.
That, I think, is the most important part to remember as we view this tier of quarterbacks, year to year and player to player. Anything could happen.
