For the 10-year period from 2006 to 2015, only two quarterbacks with strong Hall of Fame prospects entered the league: Matt Ryan in 2008 and Russell Wilson in 2012.

And there aren’t that many franchise quarterbacks that entered during this time, either: Matthew Stafford in 2009, Cam Newton in 2011, and Andrew Luck in 2012 are the only that probably qualify. (And pickin’ nits s as to whether Ryan should be with this group, or Newton should be with the other group, is not relevant to this post.)

Heck, there weren’t even that many good starters that entered the league during this time 10-year period: the ones that qualify are Kirk Cousins, Andy Dalton, Joe Flacco, Jay Cutler, and Derek Carr.

How about solid starters? Jameis Winston and Ryan Tannehill, maybe? The book has yet to be written on Jimmy Garoppolo or Teddy Bridgewater and Marcus Mariota, so perhaps they jump into this or one of the higher tiers over the next few years.

After that, you are looking at guys like Jason Campbell, Sam Bradford, Nick Foles, Colin Kaepernick, and Case Keenum as the other top guys. But in general, this was an ugly decade.

It’s hard to think about these things in the abstract, but let me just say: that’s a significant lack of quality quarterbacks to enter the league. What we have seen, during this time, is a lot of first round busts. How much different would this decade look if RG3 never got hurt? If Tim Tebow was good for years instead of drives? If playoff Mark Sanchez showed up in the regular season? If JaMarcus Russell, Johnny Manziel, Blake Bortles, Vince Young, and Matt Leinart lived up to their college hype? If Brady Quinn, Josh Freeman, Christian Ponder, Blaine Gabbert, Jake Locker, Brandon Weeden, and EJ Manuel hadn’t been massive busts?

Consider the 10-year period immediately preceding this one. You know that’s when Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees entered the NFL, but it’s also the period that gave us Aaron Rodgers, Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning, Kurt Warner, Donovan McNabb, and Tony Romo. And Carson Palmer, Trent Green, and Jeff Garcia.  Guys with great peaks like Michael Vick, Chad Pennington, Daunte Culpepper, and long-term solid starters like Alex Smith, Matt Schaub, and Matt Hasselbeck all joined during this period.  Heck, Ryan Fitzpatrick (class of ’05) is still in the league in part because guys like Locker and Geno Smith necessitated other plans.

Let’s get to some data. I created a statistic formula to grade the careers of every quarterback to enter the NFL. The fine print here is not critical, as we are only looking for broad ways to separate the Russell Wilsons from the Tim Tebows of the league. That said, this footnote has the explanation, ^[1]For each quarterback, I calculated his ANY/A average, along with the league average, for each season. I then multiplied league average by 0.75 to create a replacement level number, and multiplied the … Continue reading, but this was sufficient to create a list of the top 150 or so quarterbacks in NFL history. Then, I chartered the first season in the NFL for each quarterback. ^[2]What do you do with players like Roger Staubach and Carson Palmer, who were drafted but did not actually play in the NFL during the season they were drafted? I used the first season they actually … Continue reading

Between 1970 and 2015, there are 99 players who entered the NFL and qualify as solid, long-term starters, and that’s being somewhat liberal with the term generally. They averaged 137 games started in their career, with 72 of the 99 starting at least 100 games. Only four started under 75 games: Doug Flutie, Erik Kramer, Elvis Grbac, and Jameis Winston. Some of these guys were not very good — Ryan Fitzpatrick, Jon Kitna, Joe Flacco, Ryan Tannehill, Jake Plummer, Kerry Collins, Kyle Orton, Jim Harbaugh, and Chris Miller are the low end of quality we are looking at here. But in general I am looking at guys who were legitimate starting quarterbacks for a notable period of time. The goal here is to see how many decent or better quarterbacks were entering the league during a given period. The full list is at this footnote. ^[3]Ken Stabler, Jim Plunkett, Terry Bradshaw, Ken Anderson, Brian Sipe, Joe Theismann, Lynn Dickey, Joe Ferguson, Ron Jaworski, Dan Fouts, Bert Jones, Danny White, Steve Bartkowski, Jim Zorn, Steve … Continue reading

The graph below shows when each of these 99 quarterbacks first entered the NFL. I’ve noted some weird results around the ’83 Draft (two players drafted then didn’t enter the league that year) and 2004 (a large outlier that arguably shouldn’t include Palmer or Romo), but those don’t really matter for purposes of this study.

Finally, here is the money chart: this shows how many of the top 99 quarterbacks entered the NFL during each trailing 10-year period. For the period from ’06 to ’15, there are just a dozen quarterbacks: Cutler, Flacco, Ryan, Stafford, Newton, Dalton, Luck, Tannehill, Cousins, Wilson, Carr, and Winston. Perhaps a couple of Garoppolo, Bridgewater, Foles, Mariota, Bortles, Keenum, or Tyrod Taylor can join this list before the end of their careers, but that won’t change too much.  The quality of quarterbacks that entered the NFL during this decade was remarkably low.

What do you think?