Since it’s Super Bowl week, I decided to update some data analysis around how Super Bowl teams acquire their starting quarterback.
There is a widely held view that you have to have a “franchise” quarterback like a Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes. Don’t get me wrong – that helps a lot! But one of those comes along every 10 or 20 years. What about if you don’t win the lottery with a historic QB?
The consensus is you have to draft one either first overall or at least in the top 5 or 10 or you’re doomed to mediocrity. What I will show today is that consensus is horribly wrong.
Drafting a QB that early is often a curse. If they are a bust, they set your team back years (because teams won’t give up on them due to sunk cost). If they are good, they still rarely get you to a Super Bowl.
The conclusion is you should not trade up to draft a QB high and, if you are drafting in the top 10 and have the opportunity to trade with a team who will overpay you so they can draft a QB, you should definitely do so.
The Data
I have looked at the quarterbacks who started in the Super Bowl over the last ten years (including this one). There are twelve QBs who made at least one Super Bowl in that time (nine were solo and three had multiple appearances).
I then went back to quarterbacks drafted in the top ten between 2008-24. Why those years? Because this was the most favorable data set to support the idea of drafting a QB early.
In other words, I anti-cherry-picked. I could have used picks in the top 5 only but that would have excluded Mahomes (drafted 10th in 2017), and I could have said let’s start in a round year like 2010 but that would have excluded two QBs picked high in 2008 and 2009 who made a Super Bowl. I also excluded 2025 since nobody makes a Super Bowl as a rookie and included 2024 to allow for Drake Maye this year.
This gives us a pool of 37 QBs to evaluate. I’ll jump to the conclusion…just seven have reached a Super Bowl in the last ten years but…only *five* for the team that drafted them (Matthew Stafford, drafted in 09, never even won a playoff game for his original team and Sam Darnold, who made it this year, is on his fifth(!) team).
Of the other five, one is Mahomes who has made five Super Bowls. You had a 1 in 37 chance of finding him! The other four (Matt Ryan, Jared Goff, Joe Burrow, and Drake Maye) each made one but none has won (maybe Maye will change that Sunday?).
Given the multiple appearances by Mahomes, these top ten picks do account for 11 of the 20 recent Super Bowl appearances. Some may say that is great since it is a majority. But, given the value of high draft picks, it’s a terrible hit rate.
Note, Cam Newton (drafted in 2011) made a Super Bowl more than ten years ago. If we include him, then only 6 of 37 made a Super Bowl at any point with their original team and only Mahomes won with his original team. You are better off trading those high draft picks or taking a player at another position who is more likely to be successful.
Where Else Do You Find Super Bowl QBs?
Great question. Not later in the first round, that’s for sure! There were 17 QBs taken later in the first round (picks 11-32). Not a one made a Super Bowl in the last ten years. However, Joe Flacco did win one earlier in the time period so we’ll call it 1 for 17.
So where did those other nine Super Bowl appearance come from? QBs drafted in the second round or later. Four of them came from Brady who, famously, was drafted in the sixth round. One was Brock Purdy who was the last pick in the entire draft that year!
The others were taken in the second or third round – Jalen Hurts (2 appearances) – 2nd, Jimmy Garoppolo (drafted to be Brady’s replacement!) – 2nd, and Nick Foles – 3rd.
If I counted correctly, there were 36 QBs taken in the second and third rounds between 2008-24. In addition to the three above, Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson (twice) made it prior to the last ten years.
You know what that means? Yup, 5 of 36 2nd and 3rd rounders made a Super Bowl at some point, nearly identical to the 6 of 37 taken in the first round!
So you’re just as well off taking a QB in the 2nd or 3rd round as the first. And that doesn’t even include that between the 6th and 7th rounds, Brady and Purdy have combined for 11 total appearances (five in the last ten years), though that strategy requires an immense amount of luck.
Assessing The Relative Value Of Draft Picks
If you don’t follow the NFL closely, a lot of these numbers may seem like reading Latin to you, so let me try to provide some perspective.
NFL teams have formulas to evaluate the worth of one draft pick relative to another. This is necessary because teams often trade draft picks. While every team has somewhat different values for picks, in order to make trades, teams need to have relatively similar values on similar draft spots.
Some of these “trade charts” have become public domain so we can assess what the relative difference is between a first and second or third round draft pick.
I will not get deep into the detail but to simplify, a top 5 pick in the first round is worth about five second round picks or, alternatively, ten third round picks.
Paying The Overconfidence Tax
So, if the odds of finding a Super Bowl QB are the same at the top of the draft as later, would you rather have one of the first picks to get your top choice or humbly admit you don’t really know who the best choice is and have five chances in the second round?
Nearly every NFL team chooses the former option because they overestimate their own ability to assess college quarterbacks. This is why many of these teams tend to end up in a perpetual cycle of wasting a high pick on a rookie quarterback, watching them struggle, lose more games, end up picking in the top ten of the draft again only to gamble on another rookie QB and restart the cycle.
If you’re a Jets or Browns or Cardinals fan, you know what I mean!
Yet, year after year, teams pay the overconfidence tax betting they have special insight to find the next Mahomes at the top of the draft.
Paying The Certainty Tax
The other observation I’d make is many of the quarterbacks taken high in the first round were considered third or fourth or even seventh rounders just a year earlier. Then, they have one great year in college and they end up going first overall. It’s going to happen again this draft as the presumptive #1 pick, Fernando Mendoza, was considered a 2nd or 3rd rounder a year ago.
If we do a thought experiment where he transferred to a school other than Indiana and had less success, he may still have been projected as a 3rd rounder. Yet, he would have the same skill level.
Many QBs who end up selected in the 2nd or 3rd round historically could have had an alternate reality where they would have had a lucky break in college and gone in the first round. Similarly, some of those “late risers” who went in the first round could easily have had a different outcome where they would have remained a later pick.
While there are surely times where players do get materially better during their senior year in college and deserve to move up in the draft, there are plenty of cases where their skill level is constant and all that has changed is their luck.
Thus, teams overdraft the players who had good fortune in their final year of college and pass on those who had bad luck. When they get to a new situation with a fresh start in the NFL, that luck can easily change.
In other words, they overweight the most recent observation when faced with an uncertain future outcome. They effectively pay a tax (in the form of drafting someone too early) for receiving that extra bit of information.
A wiser strategy would be to recognize that one data point may not be meaningful and trade their draft pick for five second round picks and spread the risk.
Caveats
Do I really think there is no ability to find a better quarterback in the first ten picks that later on in the draft? Not really, but I do think the benefit to picking early is substantially overestimated. Any ten year sample isn’t robust enough to draw a long term conclusion though.
However, ten years is long enough to suggest the conventional wisdom is flawed and teams need to think harder about how they value taking quarterbacks early in the draft.
For example, it is well known that teams “reach” for quarterbacks relative to other positions, meaning they might think a QB is the 20th best player but take him 2nd anyway because of scarcity value.
This reaching is likely some of the reason for the results I found. There weren’t 37 QBs worthy of being drafted in the top 10. If teams picked more rationally maybe there would have been 25 and 6 of 25 would seem like better odds.
However, this argues even more strongly that teams in the top 10 should trade back for multiple second round picks where there is less panic buying.
Another argument one could make for still picking QBs early is that the case for not using a first rounder on a QB is bolstered by the anomaly of Brady that will likely never repeat. That is true to some extent but we did get a miniature repeat with Purdy, who was picked even later than Brady and there are plenty of second and third rounders who made Super Bowls as shown.
Also, the first round numbers would have looked a lot worse if not for Mahomes who is just as much an anomaly as Brady. And I could have easily, as noted, made the cutoff the top 5 picks rather than the top 10 so as to exclude Mahomes as he was the only QB taken between 6th and 10th to make a Super Bowl in the last decade.
I’m sure people can nitpick other technicalities but I think the broader thesis holds up. If you are fan of a team picking in the top 10 of the draft this year (or any year!) you should hope they decide to trade the pick to a foolish team who will take an undeserving QB while your team stockpiles other players.
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