The Pressure to Find (and Keep) a Great QB Is Being Felt Around the League

Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson both got what they wanted, furthering a recent trend for the league’s top quarterbacks.

It didn’t take much more than a pair of binoculars to see what the Buccaneers were doing.

Tom Brady’s body coach and business partner Alex Guerrero—around whom a dust storm of acrimony had been kicked up back in New England—was out on the practice field with hard-to-miss resistance bands, getting the quarterback his work in after Tampa Bay had just trudged through a two-hour joint practice with the Titans. Alongside Brady was his eldest son, Jack, holder of a hard-to-get, tiered-in spot with the players through COVID-19 protocols.

From where father and son ran gassers together, Brady could throw a ball through the window of Guerrero’s office, located on the ground floor of the team’s facility. And it was through that office more than half of the Bucs’ 53-man roster would pass for treatment over the course of the season. (Brady thought it was important all his teammates had access to Guerrero, so as to make sure the area remained a team space.)

The Buccaneers’ operation had become, in so many ways, Brady’s operation, and you couldn’t take five steps in that place over the last two years without tripping over another reminder of it. The Bucs were happy to make it so, too, because, well, it meant they had Brady, and having Brady meant winning 29 games and a championship.

It’s a new day in the NFL and, really, that new day is just an outsized version of the old day. Quarterbacks have always been the most precious commodity in the sport. But the last three offseasons have taken it to another level. The story above illustrates how every team that has a great one has to operate around him now. And the last week has brought to life, repeatedly, both that fact and the lengths to which those who don’t have one will go to get one.

Within an hour’s time on Tuesday, Aaron Rodgers closed the book on a year of drama by getting word out that he’d be back in Green Bay for an 18th season, and Russell Wilson opened a new chapter in his career as he boarded a private jet for Denver and the next phase of his NFL life. Twenty-four hours after that, the Commanders, having fallen short in the pursuit of Wilson, became the latest team to take a swing on pumping life back into the career of Carson Wentz, who was once seen in the sort of light the two aforementioned QBs are.

William Glasheen/Appleton Post-Crescent/USA Today Network

“Obviously, the position’s always been important,” said one AFC executive. “Now, if you don’t have one, you flat-out can’t compete. So you’re going to be doing everything you can to please the quarterback. Like, your whole plan has to be structured around him now. In the past, there’s maybe not that much emphasis on it. Look at the Colts. They have a really good roster, but you don’t have the quarterback, you don’t even make the playoffs.

“And there’s such a drop-off now from the top eight or so to the next tier. It’s like hitting the lottery if you have one.”

Which is why this week’s quarterback moves promise to define this offseason, in much the same way the Matthew Stafford trade, and ongoing quarterback drama elsewhere, defined last offseason; and Brady’s bolting from New England defined the offseason before that.

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In this week’s GamePlan, we’re drilling down on what exactly the big-box news of this week is going to mean for the sport in general and the position in particular. And if you want to boil the whole thing down to a sentence, here it is: Last year, Wilson and Rodgers glanced at what Brady had, said Get me that, and, a year later, both have their wish.

Rodgers didn’t have to move to get it. The Packers have, more or less, blown up the old way that they’d always done business—the draft-and-develop-and-keep-the-future-first model—in favor of a Tampa’s today-is-the-day model used in its Brady era, to accommodate Rodgers’s timeline. Conversely, Wilson did have to switch teams to get in the sort of quarterback-centric situation he’d lusted over.

But what’s really key here is the end result.

Both guys got what they wanted. As did Stafford in 2021. As did Brady in ’20.

And even more interesting is that these are all, to a man, image-conscious players who were always very careful about coming off as anything but team first. Rodgers, in fact, closely studied how Brett Favre separated himself from his teammates over their three years together and intentionally went the other way. Favre did media at a podium, Rodgers in front of his locker. Favre had his own locker room area near where the assistant coaches were, and an office off the equipment room; Rodgers never sought anything like that.

What’s changed since isn’t so much Rodgers as it is the sport around him.

“There’s just more people cognizant of the fact you can’t win without one; you can’t even get to .500 without one,” said another AFC exec. “People have tried to treat every position similarly, but just look at it. I’m not even sure Seattle or Indy had any leverage. There was only one realistic team in each case, and both still got a big haul.”

And once the select few realized, through Brady, they had that amount of power, it was only a matter of time before they started using it.

“It’s more like the NBA now with quarterbacks,” the exec continued. “There’s some agents that saw that coming, and they’re all trying to treat it that way now. I mean, it took Rodgers how long to realize he didn’t have to shut up and play? I think the teams need to realize that these guys don’t want to just shut up and play.”

What Rodgers and Wilson, and Brady before them, just proved is something every team that has a guy like that is paying attention to now.

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Kareem Elgazzar/Cincinnati Enquirer/USA TODAY

The Bengals know the score—their future is tied to Joe Burrow.

So, Burrow wasn’t the one to turn in the card to draft his college teammate and favorite target, Ja’Marr Chase, 11 months ago. But yes, you better believe the quarterback was consulted before the team made the call to take the LSU playmaker over potential star left tackles Penei Sewell and Rashawn Slater.

“With Joe, it’s a little different,” Bengals personnel chief Duke Tobin told me before the draft. “You want him to understand the why’s on it, especially with offensive players that we’re bringing in. And you want him to see the reasons and you want him to have some voice in it. So he could say, ‘Hey, here’s what he did for us [at LSU].’ … The great thing about our players is when we ask them, they’re not expecting to be decision-makers, they’re information sources for us. And if we can use that information source, then that’s great.”

And if it makes Burrow feel a little more like a partner than an employee, even better.

That ties together the elements of the mounting power quarterbacks have—where a team acknowledges the leverage the star has and works to keep him from ever having to use it in an adverse way. It can be in how the team approaches an offseason or handles a free-agent signing. It can be on matters that may seem more trivial football-wise, but are important to the player (like how a quarterback’s family and friends are treated on a game day).

But it’s there, and it’s just one of a number of ways this week shed light on the future of the position, and how it’ll impact an entire sport.

• A sort of super-elite class, which our first exec referenced, is emerging, and those guys are driving the financial market upward. Six years ago, Andrew Luck reset the quarterback market at just under $25 million per year. That set off a string of second-tier quarterbacks becoming the game’s highest-paid—it went from Derek Carr to Jimmy Garoppolo to Kirk Cousins. After that, Stafford and Matt Ryan became the torchbearers, before Rodgers and Wilson wound up topping the market.

Now, it’s fair to ask whether that dynamic has changed. Cousins and Carr are in contract years. Will the Vikings and Raiders pay them where the market’s going (it’s closing in on doubling what Luck got in 2016)? Can those teams, instead, create a new second tier? Or, would you want to, if you feel like what you have is ultimately going to be good but maybe not quite enough to string together wins in the playoffs against the elite?

• That likely will mean more teams will try to pull off what the Rams and 49ers did last year. At the outset of the 2021 offseason, both had 20-something quarterbacks with whom they’d been to Super Bowls under contract for multiple years to come. Each made a big move to replace those guys. For the Rams, it worked—going from Jared Goff to Stafford begat a Super Bowl run. We’ll see on San Francisco and Trey Lance.

But as for the idea? It makes sense. Sean McVay lost a Super Bowl to Brady. Kyle Shanahan lost one to him as an assistant and another to Patrick Mahomes as a head coach. They both stared up at the mountain and decided they needed a better Sherpa. And if you’re a team in the AFC that doesn’t have an elite quarterback right now? You’re looking up at Mahomes in Kansas City, Burrow in Cincinnati, Josh Allen in Buffalo, Justin Herbert in Los Angeles and Lamar Jackson in Baltimore for the next decade. All five are 26 or younger.

“If you don’t have that f---ing guy, you don’t have a chance,” said the first AFC exec. “You can have a real good coach, real good GM, and you still can’t get over the hump because of it, especially, because eventually, you’re going to have to play one of them in the playoffs.”

• Because of that, the pressure is going to be on the teams that do have one to be really, really good around him. Witness how aggressive the Rams were this year in building around Stafford. Or how the Bengals’ free-agent activity spiked once they got the pick that would become Burrow. Or how the Chargers just traded for Khalil Mack.

The pressure on teams that don’t have one is, of course, greater. But there’s pressure on the teams that do have one, too.

• And one AFC GM pointed out on Thursday that the pressure now is also internal—with owners putting it on their execs and coaches to get an elite QB, regardless of how scarce those might be. Colts boss Jim Irsay wasn’t shy in voicing his disappointment after Indy’s season ended, on the failure of a talented roster to deliver when it counted. Weeks later, Wentz is gone. Panthers owner David Tepper has been quarterback hunting since he bought the team, and Dolphins owner Stephen Ross’s desire for one hasn’t been subtle of late.

So as the importance of having one has escalated, so too has the involvement from above in pursuing one.

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Again, the idea that quarterbacks are important is nothing new. Bill Walsh knew what Joe Montana meant to his operation, and pulling Steve Young out of Tampa was doubling down on the position. Jimmy Johnson took Troy Aikman with the first overall pick in his first draft then, a couple months later, spent the following year’s first-round pick to backstop him with Steve Walsh. The Packers’ ’90s revival and the resulting three of decades of sustained excellence, likewise, has really been about two guys.

It's just that now it’s on another level altogether.

And maybe that was on most vivid display on the night of Jan. 23, when Mahomes and Allen put on a spectacular show in the AFC divisional round, basically trading haymakers through the fourth quarter and overtime. The Chiefs wound up winning that game, and nearby was Mahomes’s Texas-based trainer Bobby Stroupe.

Stroupe, by the way, now has a residence in the Kansas City area.

Because, well, of course he does.