Today’s post is an outside the box thought experiment.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether this could actually work for an NFL team.

There’s nothing more valuable in the modern NFL that a good quarterback on a rookie contract. Despite that golden rule, teams are not wont to spend multiple draft picks on quarterbacks in the same draft. Since the new CBA was adopted in 2011, only two teams have spent two picks on quarterbacks in the same draft, and no team has used three.

Famously, Washington selected Robert Griffin with the second overall pick in 2012 and then drafted Kirk Cousins early in the fourth round.  That second decision turned out to be a brilliant move by the Redskins in retrospect, even if many criticized that plan at the time.  The other example was in that same draft: Indianapolis selected Andrew Luck with the first overall pick, and took Chandler Harnish with the last overall pick.

But in those cases, we had a top pick with a mid-round or later pick, which leaves a team with an obvious franchise quarterback and backup quarterback situation (even if things didn’t exactly turn out that way for Washington). Instead, I’m advocating spending two or three picks, perhaps consecutively ^[1]Using three straight draft picks would allow a team to avoid the appearance that it was highest on any one player. It would also be the only way to ensure that all three quarterbacks would be … Continue reading, on quarterbacks in the middle rounds. Think back to 2013, when Ryan Nassib was drafted by the Giants with the 110th pick, Tyler Wilson by the Raiders two picks later, and Landry Jones by the Steelers at 115. What if one team made those three picks? ^[2]Okay, maybe not those exact three picks, but you get the idea.

According to my draft pick calculator, those three picks are equal to the 27th draft pick. According to the traditional calculator, that trio of selections is much less valuable, being equal to the 76th pick. So while it may be costly to use those three picks on quarterbacks using my chart, it wouldn’t be expensive to acquire those three picks via trade.

NFL teams pride themselves on the mantra that competition brings out the best in players. The best quarterback from that 2012 Draft so far hasn’t been Luck or Griffin, but Russell Wilson, drafted in the third round. Wilson was in a training camp battle with Matt Flynn (and even a three-way battle early on with returning starter Tarvaris Jackson), but he earned the starting job because of his great performance in training camp.

The base salary for fourth round picks in 2017 is less than $700,000.  Three fourth round picks cost less than $2m on a team’s salary cap, which means the financial investment is close to meaningless.  At those rates, a team could hire a quarterbacks coach for each draft pick and still be allocating fewer resources to the position than 30 or 31 other teams. This may border on a reality TV-type of idea (NFL QB: Survivor Edition!), but it may also bring out the best out of those involved: three mid-round quarterbacks, each with their own position coach, competing for a job.

Teams famously don’t know what they are doing in the draft, so spending three straight mid-round picks on quarterbacks is an acknowledgment that the best way to improve your chances of success in the draft is to have more chances. With three bites at the apple, your odds go up significantly that you’ll land the right player.  And if two of the three are busts, who cares? The cost to acquire those picks is minimal, and the upside of one success is enormous. ^[3]The real downside is that you could wind up losing a year of competitive football, if all three quarterbacks turn out to be replacement-level of worse. Of course, this scenario only makes sense for a … Continue reading

But the real question is whether having three mid-tier prospects actually increases the chance that one of them becomes a star.  If competition brings out the best in players, and if “iron sharpens iron“, then the peak value of the best of the three quarterbacks (or the peak of the best quarterback) should be more than the sum of the parts.  This also goes for having three quarterback coaches: it may make for some awkward coaching rooms, but it’s capitalism and the NFL taken to its extreme.  And while this is certainly an unorthodox way to address the quarterback position, it feels like a better — and certainly higher-upside — than recycling old quarterbacks with limited upside.

What do you think?