Rookie QB's - why the sudden success?

No, it wasn’t.

Just randomly looking at profootballreference.com … Manning, Favre, McNabb, Marino, Fouts, Elway, Ken Anderson, Esiason, Bradshaw, Greise, Bartkowski, Hadl, Starr, Tarkenton, Tittle all started at least one game as rookies and were full time starters by year two – Most were starting as rookies.

Mosat who didn’t start right away were either late-round surprises (Unitas, Montana), or bounced around other teams before starting, (Dawson, Layne). Usually, the only time you really see a talented young guy sitting behind a veteran is when the team is already winning behind the entrenched starter (Pennington behind Testaverde, Stabler behind Lamonica, Staubach behind Morton, Jurgensen behind Van Brocklin).

Oustide of that, you have to look long and hard to find examples of a team starting a mediocre veteran over a talented young guy for more than one season. Closest I can find is the Eagles letting Jaworski hold off Cunningham for too long.

So, I’m not at all convinced this was ever the norm. The platonic ideal, perhaps, but the reality seems to be that most of the time the young QB plays if/when he’s better than the old guy ahead of him.
If you want to say that the issue is the success of this year’s rookies, you have to define “success.”

Newton is the 15th-rated passer, Dalton is 24th, Gabbert is 30th. They are a combined 4-9 as starters. They’ve all refrained from being Ryan Leaf, but it’s not like they’re tearing the league up. Their numbers are somewhat inflated because league-wide passing stats are inflated, but two of the three are among the very worst starters in the league, and while Newton has huge yardage numbers, he’s thrown a ton of passes to do it, and his completion % is mediocre. Let’s hold off on anointing him just yet.
You won’t find many examples of rookies tearing the league up – including this year’s guys. But a list of guys who came in and played about league-average as true rookies would include Tarkenton, Kosar, Greise … as well as Chris Chandler, Jeff George, Jake Plummer, Charlie Batch, and Don Majkowski (and, of course, more if you keep looking). They’re not the norm, but they’re not all that hard to find. If you just looked for guys who played OK through 5 games, I’m sure the list would be longer.

I’m not sure that this is specific to (American) Football but a general phenomenon in modern sports. In the last ten years many (Association) Football clubs had many very young players reach early “star” status: Ronaldo (both of them), Messi, Rooney - to name a few. Similar situation also in Formula 1: Alonso (2006), Hamilton (2008) and Vettel (2010) all were “youngest F1 world champions of all times”.

I am certain you can find many more such examples in other pro-sports as well. I think that this accounts mostly to better education of young talents, better scouting and more confidence in the abilities of young players.

I’d add Charlie Conerly, Greg Cook, Jim Plunkett, and Jim Kelly (if he qualifies as a rookie).

But association football has always produced young superstars. George Best was an every-day player at 18 and a superstar at 20. Maradona was the most expensive player in the world at 21. Ruud Gullit was the Eerste Divisie player of the year at 17/18.

Okay, going back and looking at the OP, if we strike Stafford, Freeman, and Sanchez for not being good as rookies, and Dalton for a combination of small sample size and not being all that good, we are left with Roethlisberger, Ryan, Flacco, Bradford, and Cam Newton.

Of those Flacco and (especially) Bradford were pretty much only good quarterbacks in the league if you graded them on a curve; if you count them as “good”, then you can include rookie seasons by Plunkett, Chris Chandler (who was mainly good at handing off to Eric Dickerson, but there you go), Tarkenton, Jeff George, and probably a few others.

Raise the bar to top-10 and Matt Ryan actually just misses the cut (#11 QB rating), but we’ll sneak him in; that leaves you with just Roethlisberger and Ryan and possibly Newton joining them this year, against Marino and McMahon’s historical seasons. (McMahon was #8 in QB rating his rookie year, 1982). I’m not seeing a really strong trend there.

Just adding on to the point of how much of the perception of this is driven by changes in the way the game is played: In 2011 60% completion and 7.8 y/a are average.

20 years ago, it was 57% and 6.9.
40 years ago, it was 51% and 6.7.

In 1970, rookie Dennis Shaw was, relative to his league, better than Andy Dalton.

Peyton Manning.

The Colts didn’t have many wins his rookie season, but that’s not entirely on him. He set all sorts of rookie QB records. He did throw a ton of picks, but also threw for almost 4000 yards and over 25 TDs. His apparently “bad” rookie season would be better than many starting QBs this season.

I’ll give you his brother Eli. He stunk up his rookie season.

Jim Kelly’s first year wasn’t great, but he was at least average (and another 1983 class draftee besides Marino), even if his team didn’t win many. I don’t recall if Elway started his rookie season, so I can’t comment on him.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty other examples. It takes some massive selective memory to claim Marino is the only one who was at least average as a rookie starter.

Is it wins you are counting? That’s not entirely a fair way to judge that a rookie QB was “above average or better”. There’s plenty of veteran QBs who are considered very good but play on losing teams.

There seem to be two different theses here that need to be addressed.

  1. Teams tend to sit their rookies for 2 or 3 seasons until they are “ready”? That theory is blown out of the water. There’s too much undeniable evidence over the last 4 decades that contradicts this theory. It is true that some rookies get 2 or 3 years to learn, but that’s usually under a stable veteran. Bad veteran QBs have always been replaced as soon as possible.

Aaron Rodgers vs Brett Favre is the most notable recent example for a stable veteran QB. Blaine Gabbert is one example this year of a rookie getting a chance immediately (though it looks like some more time would have been good).

  1. QBs who are NFL ready their first year are more common now. It might be the case, but we only have 2 or 3 draft classes to show that. That’s hardly a pattern. As I said in an earlier post, if we see the same thing happen to the 2011 draft class as well as the next few after that, it may actually be true. But there’s just not enough data to make a firm conclusion.

Besides that, the correlation appears weak. For each Matt Ryan, we’ve got a Josh Freeman or a Brady Quinn.

Kelly (or Warren Moon) really shouldn’t count; neither of them came to the NFL straight from college.

Joe Flacco and Ben Roethlisberger WEREN’T stellar quarterbacks from day one. As rookies, they were a mixed bag. They both put up decent (not spectacular) numbers, showed signs of future greatness, and didn’t hurt their teams as much as rookies often do.

Both guys were good, but they were also LUCKY to be playing for teams that were ALREADY of playoff caliber and that already had top-notch defenses. Roethlisberger and Flacco were a bit more than mere “game managers,” but they didn’t have all the pressure of winning on their shoulders. Both guys had the luxury of handing off a lot, making safe throws from behind a sold offensive line, and relying on the veterans to win games.

It’s USUALLY that way. Remember that Dan Marino, the best rookie QB of all, was playing for a team that had just been in the Super Bowl the year before with David Woodley as quarterback!

Marino had a Pro Bowl caliber offensive line to protect him and great receivers to throw to. Most quarterbacks drafted in the first round DON’T have those things. Most of the time, if a rookie is starting right away, it’s because his team is awful. For some reason, NFL scouts saw something they didn’t like about Marino in 1983. That’s why he fell from sure-fire #1 pick all the way down to the Dolphins. If he’d had to start for a weaker team, he might have taken a beating and put up the same pathetic numbers as most rookie quarterbacks.

I’m guessing that “something” was his entire senior season. And his freshman and sophomore seasons, for that matter.

Hey, I thought Todd Blackledge was the best quarterback in the 1983 draft. Shows you what I know.