Last season, Mitch Trubisky was the second overall pick, Patrick Mahomes went 10th overall, and Deshaun Watson was taken with the 12th selection.  It didn’t take long for Watson to start: after Tom Savage was the Texans week 1 starter, Watson replaced him after halftime and started the following week.

Trubisky sat behind Mike Glennon, who had just signed a contract with $18.5M of guaranteed money.  Glennon started for four games, and Trubisky sat the rest of the way.  Glennon has since been released, earning $18.5M while averaging 4.12 ANY/A in four starts.

As for Mahomes, he sat on the bench behind Alex Smith the entire season. Well, almost the entire year: Mahomes started the meaningless week 17 finale. But there was a good reason for his benching: Smith led the NFL in passer rating in 2017, although he’s since been traded to the Redskins.

Watson wasn’t a top-10 pick, of course, but with three (or four?) quarterbacks likely to go early in the top 10 of the 2018 draft — Sam Darnold, Josh Rosen, Josh Allen, and Baker Mayfield — I wanted to see how early we should expect those quarterbacks to first start a game.

In the table below, I looked at all quarterbacks selected in the top 10 of the common draft (since 1967) and how many team games (treating all seasons as 16-game seasons) it took until their first start.

Of the 65 quarterbacks, 25 started in week 1, with another ten starting in the first four weeks. One (Campbell) never started a game, another (Schlichter) took 44 starts. The only other quarterback to take more than two seasons to start a game was Rivers, who sat behind Brees. In fact, just four more quarterbacks didn’t start a single game as rookies.

Since the new CBA in 2011, there have been 13 quarterbacks selected in the top 10. Just over half started in week 1, and the rest didn’t for good reasons. Of the other six, four were terrible as rookies (or longer) — Goff lost the job in camp, Gabbert and Locker never had much ability, and Bortles was a disaster early in his career — while the other two were the 2017 rookies who sat behind an expensive or good starter.

The results here aren’t surprising, but I think the main takeaway is that a rookie QB is going to start very early in his career, unless he disappoints in training camp or is sitting behind a quarterback of some stature.