The End of the Brady Era, and a New Way to Think About Quarterbacks

It appears neither Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees nor Aaron Rodgers will enter the postseason as serious Super Bowl contenders for the first time since 2001. That’s because NFL teams have finally changed their approach to young QBs.

The worst and most accurate observation you can make about Tom Brady right now is that he has the same chance of winning this year’s Super Bowl as Peyton Manning does. Brady’s Bucs might make the playoffs, but only for bookkeeping reasons: Somebody has to win the NFC South—it is, quite literally, in the rulebook. The Bucs are lousy and unworthy of belief, and Brady (who said earlier this year that he sees “a lot of bad football” in the league) surely knows it.

And with that, an era ends. Not Brady’s career, necessarily; we’ll see where he plays next year and then the 11 seasons after that. But for the first time since 2001—yes, 2001—we will enter the playoffs knowing that none of Brady, Manning, Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees will win the Super Bowl. Manning spends most of his time joining brother Eli on a multipronged, money-printing operation. Brees is on his second postretirement job, as an interim assistant coach at Purdue. Rodgers’s Packers are so bad that the only interesting question is whether they will bench Rodgers.

Brady's Bucs might make the playoffs, but they don't look like a Super Bowl contender :: Matt Pendleton/USA TODAY Sports

It is a new era in the NFL, and that is not just because the names have changed. The game is different now, too. For the last two decades, the most conventional of all wisdom was that you either had an elite quarterback or had to search desperately for one. This infected seemingly every conversation about the league. It clouded the greatest coaching performance in NFL history; people whispered—some more loudly than others—that Bill Belichick won only because of Brady.

It also shaped every NFL front office. Entire organizational philosophies were built on the premise that they needed a franchise quarterback, which was especially entertaining because nobody seemed to know who would be a franchise quarterback.

In the 25 drafts before Manning was picked in 1998, quarterbacks went No. 1 just six times. In the 25 drafts since, quarterbacks went No. 1 18 times. Missing on a quarterback was considered better than not drafting one, because at least then you tried, or so said the Raiders before drafting JaMarcus Russell.

This belief that teams needed an elite quarterback affected vision, too. If you didn’t have Peyton, you convinced yourself Eli would play like Peyton when it mattered (and sometimes he did!). The Rams traded way up to draft Jared Goff, who was not a superstar, and then paid him like a superstar when he was still not a superstar, and finally soured on him because he was not a superstar—instead of seeing him, all along, like the solid quarterback he still is. Teams overpaid solid quarterbacks and overdrafted unproven ones, all because they were so sure they needed one.

Now? They don’t need one anymore. Yes, this sounds wild in an era of Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow, Josh Allen and Justin Herbert, and of course every team should want one of those guys. But want and need are not the same. Offensive coordinators are more creative, and general managers have realized that paying superstar money to a good player weakens the rest of the roster. If you don’t have a truly elite player, you can find a skilled one—maybe, the league has finally realized, somebody who can pass and run—and build your team and scheme around him.

This is what the Eagles have done with Jalen Hurts. A year ago, it was not clear Hurts was a viable starting quarterback. Now he is an MVP candidate. There remain real questions about whether Hurts can do what we have always expected MVP quarterbacks to do—stay in the pocket, read the whole field, make the right decision and fire a pass into tight windows—but the Eagles aren’t asking him to do that. They have expertly weaponized his running, built a team designed for his passing and have been the best team in the NFL.

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Is Hurts truly one of the best players in the league, or have the Eagles just made him look like it? We can argue that, but it won’t really matter until it’s time to negotiate a contract extension. What is clear is that the Eagles are much better off with Hurts than they would have been if they kept convincing themselves Carson Wentz was the next Brady—and, remember, there was a brief, wondrous stretch in 2017 when Wentz was also being called an MVP candidate.

Hurts is an extreme success story, but he provides a template for other teams to follow. Justin Fields might never be an elite passer, but if he can break 50-yard runs on a regular basis, he doesn’t have to be.

The NFL has been so driven by drop-back quarterbacks for so long that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always that way. Restricting illegal contact with receivers in 1978, plus the rise of sophisticated passing schemes like the West Coast offense, eventually made the NFL a passing league. Now the rules protect quarterbacks from anybody who sneezes within five yards of them, and more creative coaches are designing plays to take advantage of their quarterbacks’ mobility. This does not mean drop-back passers are disappearing. It means teams can win with more kinds of quarterback play than ever before. That means they can win with more quarterbacks than they could before.