A year ago, I wrote about the shrinking middle class of quarterbacks from a salary cap perspective: there were 14 teams paying huge dollars to their quarterback, 11 teams with a starter on a rookie contract, and 7 teams caught in the middle. And all 7 of those teams caught in the middle will have new starting QBs in 2020: the Bucs and Titans had QBs playing out their 5th year option, the Bengals, Jaguars, and Broncos had middling veterans, and the Dolphins and Redskins quarterback situations were wide open as of last March (Washington wound up using a first round pick on a quarterback, while Miami is likely to do so this year).
In 2019, there were 32 quarterbacks who threw enough passes to qualify for the league passing title. And over half of those passers were under 27 on September 1st (this includes two quarterbacks from the 2016 Draft, Carson Wentz and Jacoby Brissett, who turned 27 in December). That is the first time since 1960 that over half of the qualifying passers were under 27 as of September 1st of that season.
There also were a lot of old quarterbacks: Matt Ryan, Joe Flacco, Aaron Rodgers, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Philip Rivers, Drew Brees, and Tom Brady were all 34 or older at the start of the season, and that doesn’t even include opening day starters Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning. That’s part of another growing trend in the modern NFL, although the presence of more old quarterbacks isn’t quite as noticeable as the increase in young ones.
Where quarterbacks are really getting squeezed is the place you might not expect: during their prime years. A quarterback should still have their physical skill-set, but be further along mentally, in their late 20s and early 30s. A quarterback who is between the ages of 27 and 33 should be, broadly speaking, in the prime of his career. And yet last season, there were just 8 starting quarterbacks in this middle class of life: Jimmy Garoppolo, Derek Carr, Russell Wilson, Ryan Tannehill, Matthew Stafford, Case Keenum, Kirk Cousins, and Andy Dalton.
The graph below shows the percentage of qualifying passers in each season since 1960 that were, as of September 1st of that season: (1) under 27 years old, (2) between 27 and 33 years of age, and (3) 34 or older.
There were zero starting quarterbacks who were 33 years old last season: Chase Daniel and Colt McCoy were the only quarterbacks active who were born in 1986, with Mark Sanchez, Joe Webb, and Josh Johnson out of the league.
There is, of course, a significant overlap between the missing generation of quarterbacks that I wrote about last week, and the lack of quarterbacks in their prime now. Those quarterbacks would have been mostly born between 1984 and 1993, putting them at between 25 and 35 last season. In addition to Sanchez, Blake Bortles, Tim Tebow, EJ Manuel, RG3, Colin Kaepernick, Sam Bradford, Christian Ponder, Blaine Gabbert, and Jake Locker all were between 27 and 33 years old on September 1st 2019. That leaves a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question: is the NFL moving towards more young quarterbacks because of the rookie wage scale, or because the quarterbacks who would have been on their second contracts in 2019 mostly flamed out?