You may be surprised to learn this, but Jameis Winston is just the fourth black quarterback selected with the first overall pick. In 1968, Oakland drafted Eldridge Dickey in the first round, the first NFL team to select a black quarterback in the first round. But the Raiders switched Dickey to wide receiver, and he never played quarterback in an NFL game.

Then, no black quarterback went in the first round until… 1978! That’s when Tampa Bay selected Doug Williams, a groundbreaking pick for that time. Of course, it didn’t do much to stem the tide: no black QBs entered the league over the next five years. In fact, in 1983, Vince Evans was the only black quarterback in the NFL (Williams was in the USFL at the time).

The third black quarterback selected in the first round since the merger came in 1990, when the Lions took Andre Ware.

Eleven years later, Michael Vick became the first black quarterback to go first overall. He’s since been joined by JaMarcus Russell (2007), Cam Newton (2011), and now Winston.

There was a clear tipping point, and that was 1999. That year, five quarterbacks went in the first round, with three of them (Donovan McNabb, Akili Smith, and Daunte Culpepper) being players who would have had no chance of being first round picks 25 years earlier.

In the graph below, the X-Axis represents each draft year from 1970 to 2015, while the Y-Axis shows overall draft pick. In the graph, I’ve plotted the first round of each draft since the merger, with black quarterbacks represented by red dots and all other quarterbacks in blue dots. ^[1]To avoid any such questions in the comments, yes, I’ve got 2015 on there, and no, Marcus Mariota is not black. He’s Samoan. As you can see, the chart is pretty homogenous prior to 1999:

There’s no clearer way to show the institutional prejudice the NFL had in the ’70s and ’80s than this chart. This isn’t breaking news, of course, but it’s interesting to see just how highly-drafted black quarterbacks have been recently after being completely shut out of the first round for many years.

And Winston himself is something of a different player. He rushed for 65 yards his last year in college; compare that to guys like Newton (1473) or Vick (617, and more runs than completed passes). Winston going first overall is hardly a triumphant moment signaling the end of racism, but perhaps the most positive development is how little you heard about his race during this pre-draft process. ^[2]Why yes, I have now ruined everything. That was most certainly not the case with Vick, Russell, or Newton. Then again, Winston had enough other issues to keep us occupied.