Nobody has time for QB development
At a position that takes patience, the world wants the answers right now
By Matthew Coller
EAGAN — Following the 2024 NFL Draft, I was on the phone with former Minnesota Viking QB and Super Bowl champion Brad Johnson talking about the best ways to handle young quarterbacks. At one point, he ran through a long list of quarterbacks who didn’t play much right away in the NFL and ultimately turned out to be very good.
Guys like Philip Rivers, Carson Palmer, Eli Manning, Donovan McNabb, Steve McNair, Daunte Culpepper and so on.
I started looking up some of the early years of their careers.
Rivers only threw 30 passes in his first two seasons.
Palmer sat and watched Jon Kitna go 8-8 in 2003.
Manning went 1-6 with a 55.4 QB rating.
McNabb went 2-4 with a 60.1 QB rating.
McNair started six games in his first two years.
Culpepper sat behind Randall Cunningham and Jeff George in 1999.
Sometimes when we talk about how quarterback development used to be different back in the day, it sounds like we’re talking about when Terry Bradshaw threw six touchdowns and 24 interceptions as a rookie in 1970. But it really wasn’t that long ago that franchises used to handle their merchandise quite a bit differently than today.
There are a lot of reasons for that. One is the implementation of the rookie wage scale in 2011. Since then teams have focused on pairing up their “winning window” with an inexpensive young QB.
The Los Angeles Rams drafted Jared Goff in 2016 and spent huge dollars around him in 2017 and then found themselves in the Super Bowl by 2018. The Philadelphia Eagles moved on from expensive Carson Wentz and reached the Super Bowl in 2022 with Jalen Hurts on a rookie deal and the San Francisco 49ers found themselves in The Big Game with Brock Purdy and an All-Pro group of veterans surrounding him.
The rookie QB contract playbook for roster building creates urgency. Teams have four years to win and then things become much trickier with the salary cap. If teams are planning their biggest spending in that short window, the QB has to be ready to win. The only other way has been cheap veterans like 2023 Baker Mayfield with the Bucs, Sam Darnold in 2024 or Daniel Jones in 2025 landing on very good teams who either weren’t ready to play their young QB or the guy already flamed out. But those success stories are few and far between.
So if all the spending has been done and the roster is ready to win around the young QB, he’s gotta play. If he’s not ready, then it’s the coach’s job to get him ready ASAP.
The growth in popularity of the draft plays into it as well. Years ago, Mel Kiper Jr. would give his takes along with a handful of other outlets and magazines but the draft was nowhere near the hype machine that it has become. Not only does every QB get broken down and analyzed from head to toe and by every datapoint possible by the draft media universe, but those who tend to stand out in that analysis world are the most extreme. If you don’t LOVE or HATE a prospect, you’re not loud enough and you’ll get drowned out.
Once the player arrives, every game is WWE style big, bold takes.
Vikings offensive coordinator Wes Phillips said on Tuesday that the biggest thing that has changed during his time in the NFL is the extreme declarations on QBs after seemingly every game.
“I feel like in general people want to put guys in a box immediately,” Phillips said. “He’s a bust, he can’t do it, or he’s a Hall of Famer.”
Teams shouldn’t be impacted by unreasonable expectations but every team has an ownership group that watches TV and reads the internet and coaches/front offices are human. They hear the noise. It’s impossible to ignore. In 2003 when sports radio and the newspaper were the only ones talking about the QB situation, it would have been quite a bit different. Now when the QB is struggling or not playing, they hear about it 24/7.
“Each guy’s different,” Phillips said. “There’s a development to each player in this league, each young player. And the time that guys are given now before we just declare what this guy is, they’re getting a lot less time.”
It isn’t just the non-stop coverage and endless fan reaction that the teams are inundated with that puts more pressure on them to get the QB up to full speed instantly that makes it challenging, it’s also that the rules have changed with practice. There are no longer two-a-days. There are no longer four preseason games and starters basically never play in the three preseason games that teams are allotted.
That leads to basically QBs having to develop in real games. That can be painful at times. Denver’s first-round QB from 2024, Bo Nix, had a 71.2 QB rating in his first five games. New England’s Drake Maye had an 85.8 rating through five contests. Atlanta’s Michael Penix put together an 82.6 rating through five games. League average, by the way, is 92.7.
Even young players who shine right away have their struggles. Houston’s CJ Stroud was the easy Rookie of the Year in 2023 and then played poorly enough last year that his offensive coordinator was fired. Washington’s Jayden Daniels went to the NFC Championship last year as a rookie and then went 2-4 in an injury-riddled season.
The only option that teams have is to use the small amount of practice time that they have to build off what they see in the games.
“We come in from the games, and [players] are coached on, ‘this was not the proper technique or fundamentals,’ okay, and then we go out and we work on it,” Phillips said. “We’ve got a very good group of guys that are extremely conscientious that are going to go out and work very hard, including JJ, to go ahead and get it right and make sure that we’re better the next time we go out.”
On Tuesday, head coach Kevin O’Connell was on KFAN with Paul Allen and answered a call-in question about how fans should watch for McCarthy’s development.
“When he gets to the top of his drop, we are trying see if we can get him to be a little bit more in a repeatable body position,” O’Connell explained. “What I mean by that is the posture a firm but athletic lower half. We don’t really like when his feet get too far outside the framework of his body and that happened a couple times the other day.”
The takeaway here is that the Vikings coaches are trying, in real time, to work through basic footwork with a wildly young and inexperienced quarterback while the rest of the world is demanding that he be good enough to win a lot of games right now.
This is the world they created for McCarthy.
The ownership, front office and coaches all decided that they were going to be able to develop him fast enough in real time in order to win games. Otherwise they wouldn’t have spent more money than any other team this year in free agency.
You can’t declare JJ McCarthy the franchise QB (as KOC did in 2024 after he got hurt), move on from 14-win Sam Darnold, turn down Aaron Rodgers, spend like crazy in the offseason on 30+ players to stack the roster to chase the playoffs, have players wear “More is Required” shirts, never have any type of legitimate competition for McCarthy and then receive a grace period from the outside world like the Titans with Cam Ward.
The organization put him in this position to stand in front of the Hot Take Firing Squad. As part of the development process, they should expect to have to work through that part too.
NOTE: (To be clear, Phillips did not say he was frustrated by this or that he did not expect it, he only said it was different from the past. The previous paragraphs are not a criticism of his perspective, only to point out that the media/fans pressing for answers was to be expected under the circumstances).
Where Phillips’ words hit home are when he says that every player has a different development timeline.
It’s very possible, with the raw talent and high-end moments he’s shown, that McCarthy can figure things out and become a very good QB just like the aforementioned QBs of the early-2000s. Anyone who is declaring him a bust is going way too far.
They can’t go back in time now and make different decisions knowing that McCarthy’s footwork and timing with the offense wouldn’t be at the level to win games right now. Otherwise they would have done the Favre repeat or tagged Darnold. All they can do is develop McCarthy in real time over the next seven weeks and hope that it clicks. They can’t expect much more patience than that because that’s the world we live in. The days of Philip Rivers sitting for two years are long gone.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
McCarthy handling pass protections
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