It’s a quarterback-driven league. I write it every year, and still I read commentary on the contrary. These contrarian points are exactly that. Outliers and exceptions that remain outliers and exceptions. And I’ll start with the biggest one.
I often cite a list of recent Super Bowl Champions and their respective quarterbacks. The names of Brady, Roethlisberger, Manning, Rodgers, and a few others are peppered throughout said list, many of whom are repeated more than once. Then there’s Joe Flacco. He’s the one to whom most would point when citing that “a team doesn’t need a great quarterback to win.”
False. It does. But, I’ll make one slight concession. In the event that a team doesn’t have a consistently great quarterback, it then needs an extraordinarily great quarterback performance. Something like eleven touchdowns without an interception in a four-game playoff span. Which is what Joe Flacco did en route to his Super Bowl victory. Or maybe 373 passing yards and four total touchdowns would do. Akin to Nick Foles playing out-of-his-mind in Super Bowl 52.
Note the commonalities between the two. The production of both Flacco and Foles was uncharacteristically outstanding. In fact, if you removed the names from the players and showed only the statistics to the most hardcore of fans, they would need dozens of guesses as to the owners of said statistics before landing on Flacco and Foles.
In Flacco’s ten-year career, to date, he has thrown at least 10 interceptions in each season, while never reaching the 30-touchdown milestone. In fact, he failed to reach 20 passing touchdowns in four of his ten campaigns, and only one of these four was shortened by an injury. Nick Foles has 39 career regular season starts to his name. Only 10 of these 39 included a quarterback rating of 105 or higher. Last year’s NFC Championship Game and Super Bowl featured quarterback ratings of 141.4 and 106.1, respectively.
It is, as usual, undeniable how critical quarterback play is to the success of a team. It is where every season-long prediction article should begin. And it is where my notes started and ultimately redirected my writing.
I planned on writing my usual breakdown of each team and splitting them between the two conferences. I will. But, not yet. Because the first set of notes I wrote was solely dedicated to the quarterbacks to watch. And the list kept growing to the point where it needed to be split. So, too, did my article.
The 2018-2019 season may not necessarily be ‘make-or-break’ for the quarterbacks listed below, but their performances will make-or-break their respective team’s chances at a deep playoff run. Certainly, that is true of almost every season of the last few decades, but the list of “quarterbacks to watch” has reached unprecedented levels. Others will be watching, too.
As always, our jobs – both as the writer behind these words and the readers who form this growing community – is to see what others don’t and find what can give us an edge in growing our sports portfolio.
This quarterbacks preview column is multi-part with a new quarterback – or set of quarterbacks being released daily. Each quarterback listed below also has a release date for his writeup next to his name. When the article releases, the player’s name will become a link to his writeup.
Deshaun Watson (Houston Texans)
Andrew Luck (Indianapolis Colts)