I define “meaningful game” as a game that took place in the regular season or postseason.
There are some guys who are career backups, and some teams that will choose to use their quarterbacks for every single snap of a season. (Peyton Manning with the Colts was a notorious example.)
What is the longest career a quarterback has had in the National Football League without ever taking the field in a game that counted?
This is almost certainly not the guy but Cliff Stoudt famously earned two SB rings with the Pittsburgh Steelers as Bradshaw’s backup before he ever entered a game. Interestingly he was once on the same team with Babe Laufenberg with the Dallas Cowboys. Laufenberg went several years before his first start. His first appearance in a game was to run out the clock.
Todd Collins comes close. He had a 15 year career, 1995-2010, and 21 total games started.
1995-1997 at Buffalo he backed up Jim Kelly; although in 1997 he started 13 games after Kelly retired. 17 total starts.
2001-2005 at KC he backed up Rich Gannon and Warren Moon. 0 total starts.
2006-2009 at Washington. Backup to Jason Campbell, mostly. 3 starts.
2010 at Chicago. Backup to Jay Cutler. 1 start.
Collins was on KC’s roster from '98 to '00 as well without getting into any regular season games.
Does this mean just starting a game? Just about every backup QB has appeared in a game to at least wrap up games in 4th quarter garbage time.
Jim Sorgi backed up Peyton Manning for 6 seasons and never started a game so he’s got to be a contender.
As an aside, there are also the long term replacement/journeymen QBs who hang around for 10-15 years but never really make much of things. Guys like Josh McCown or Chase Daniel.
Games started is just one metric, a very simple one.
Jim Sorgi started 0 games in his 6 year career. He threw 156 passes, and completed 99 of them.
Josh McCown started 76 games in his 17 year career. He threw 2,633 passes, and completed 1,584.
Now Chase Daniel is a better candidate. In his 12 year career he started only 5 games and threw 261 passes (and completed 178).
Todd Collins, the guy I mentioned before, threw 701 passes and completed 391.
I’d say that Jim Sorgi and Chase Daniel are the ‘leaders’ so far in the spirit of what the OP is looking for.
Not unlike Daniel was Charlie Whitehurst (a.k.a. “Clipboard Jesus”). Whitehurst was in the NFL for eleven seasons, almost all as a backup quarterback.
In his first four seasons, all with the Chargers, he didn’t throw a pass; in 2007 through 2009, he didn’t even appear in a regular-season game. So, he didn’t throw his first NFL pass until his fifth season (2010).
Whitehurst did wind up with nine career starts, primarily with the Titans in 2014, where he started five games. 396 career pass attempts, 219 completions.
I thought I posted something like that yesterday. Teams want to get their backups some experience. They’ll play in pre-season games but the team really wants to see the player perform in a real game just in case they actually need them someday.
If you don’t care about playing time or glory, it’s the best job in sports. Chase Daniel has earned over $40 million in his career. Collins, over $18M. Even Sorgi earned over $5M over 7 seasons.
Another, somewhat older, example which I’ve just remembered…
Brian Dowling was a star quarterback at Yale in the 1960s; he was the team’s quarterback during the famous 1968 Harvard-Yale game, and his classmate, Garry Trudeau, based the character B.D. in the comic strip Doonsebury on him.
He spent ten seasons (1969-1978) as a professional quarterback, bouncing between five different NFL teams, the World Football League, and the Canadian Football League, always as a backup. He played in a grand total of 27 NFL games, never started an NFL game, and threw a total of 55 passes in the NFL (all but one of those in 1972, with the Patriots).
The question is difficult to answer without a catalog of who spent how much time on an NFL roster, even when not getting into games. If such a log exists, I don’t know how to find it.
Then, to make things more confusing, teams have third-string quarterbacks. The third-string quarterback, on any given Sunday, may be on the active roster, on the not-active roster, or on the practice squad. Which of those count as being “in the league”?
To take one example, Cory Sauter spent six seasons on NFL rosters, oscillating among the three statuses above. He got onto the field only once, for the last drive of the Chicago Bears 2002 regular season. That’s a lot of inactivity, but even then, I only remember him because of the one game he did play. If he never got in at all, he’d leave no trace behind.
As far as I know, as they are on the team’s roster, and under contract, during the regular season, they’re still “in the league,” even if they aren’t on the field. It’s no different from player who misses an entire season due to injury, and spends it on injured reserve – he’s still under contract, and still officially a member of the team, even if he’s inactive.
That detail, at least on a game-by-game level, is kept as part of the stats that the NFL keeps for each game. Below is a link to the full “game book” of statistics from the Packers-Bears game from December of 2021; on the first page, it details:
You can see that the Bears had three quarterbacks on the roster (Justin Fields, Nick Foles, and Andy Dalton); Foles was active but didn’t play, and Dalton was inactive. The Packers had two quarterbacks on the roster (Aaron Rodgers and Kurt Benkert), both of whom played (Benkert ran kneel-down plays on the game’s final two plays).
But, yes, it’d be laborious to use those individual game logs to figure out number of games active for each player.
https://static.clubs.nfl.com/image/upload/packers/ax6dnw0s2rdifwasapct
Don’t forget about Elmer Bruker.
https://www.pro-football-reference.com has basically all of this information in a searchable form. I think someone here has an account that could maybe look this up.
I remember that commercial. That’s part of what made me think to ask this question. (I had no idea how to find the ad, though.)
I’d forgotten that commercial. And it was for SB XXIX the last time the 49ers won it all. Man, that was about 27 years ago.
Googling gives me a name to throw out there:
Babe Laufenberg: he was drafted by the Washingtons in 1983 and didn’t throw his first pass until he was with the Chargers in 1988.
I love Pro Football Reference (and it’s where I got most of the stats I referred to upthread). You don’t need a subscription to use it (or even search it), unless you want to use their StatHead advanced searching tool.
Pro Football Reference does give information on games played, and games started, but what it doesn’t show is games active; nor is it great for showing a team’s entire roster for a year, including guys who spent the season on the practice squad or injured reserve.
For example, Charlie Whitehurst (whom I named earlier) is effectively a ghost on that site for 2007-2009. He was with the Chargers that entire time, but as he was their third-string quarterback, he never appeared in a game in those years, and thus, his stat lines in PFR skip from 2006 to 2010. His nickname, “Clipboard Jesus,” came from his long hair and beard, and the fact that he spent every game on the sideline, wearing a cap and carrying a clipboard.
I recognize that name. I think I’ve seen him play. Babe Laufenberg started 7 games in his career.