The Florida Quarterback Project

The 2018 season started from an unusual place. For the first time that I could remember, every team entered the league with at least some plan at the quarterback position. Some had a long term starter they felt they could rely on, others had recently invested a high pick in the draft, while a couple more had just added big money free agents. No team entered 2018 relying on one of the soggy pieces of driftwood that floats around the league, praying for the best and looking forward to next year’s draft.

Of course, it was inevitable that some of these plans would blow up in the teams’ faces. Case Keenum hasn’t been what they expected in Denver. Marcus Mariota hasn’t taken the leap forward everyone expected once he escaped the clutches of Mike Mularkey. And Dak Prescott has continued to regress since his rookie year.

But the biggest issues at quarterback have been located—as most American disasters are—in Florida. The three teams entered the season with some of the more tenuous hopes at the quarterback position, and at the midpoint of the season all three have had their hearts broken by the position. All three are now looking up the standings at the playoff race above them, and down the barrel of imminent questions at the most important position.

Miami Dolphins

Let me describe for you a quarterback. He’s 30 years old and has been up and down throughout his NFL career, showing flashes of sensational ability interspersed with regular struggles. He has plenty of talent, as a former top ten pick out of a Big 12 school, but his career has been derailed by injuries. He missed most of last season due to the recurrence of knee issues that were thought to be behind him, and he hasn’t been on the field for the past few weeks after starting the season at the head of his team.

Obviously from the image above I am describing Ryan Tannehill, the franchise quarterback for the Dolphins since 2012. But I am also describing Sam Bradford, the journeyman veteran now on his fourth team and looking like he’s on his way out of the league.

There is still this view of Tannehill as a young player just waiting to break out, and most people don’t seem to realize how old he actually is. He is the same age as Bradford and Matthew Stafford, a year younger than Andy Dalton and a year older than Cam Newton and Russell Wilson. He is smack in the middle of what should be the best years of his career, and the fact that he hasn’t emerged as a top flight NFL starter by this point suggests that he probably never will.

Tannehill’s season has once again been knocked off the rails by an injury, this time to his throwing shoulder. It is unclear when he’ll be back, or at what capacity he will perform. The Dolphins have elected to hold off on surgery for his shoulder, which is the same thing they did after his knee injury following the 2016 season, only for it to get worse and cost him all of 2017 as well.

Tannehill has only played in five games over the past two years, and the results have been a very mixed bag. On paper his performance over the first three games of this season looks excellent, completing 73% of his passes for 687 yards with eight touchdowns to only two interceptions. The Dolphins got off to a 3-0 start, but there were always signs that things would turn against them. They had unsustainable defensive success in the red zone, and large chunks of Tannehill’s yards came after the catch, including a 74 yard touchdown to Albert Wilson on a pass that traveled less than a foot in the air. And inevitably things did turn around, in back to back blowout losses to the Patriots and the Bengals that saw Tannehill throw for less than 200 yards in each game and have only one touchdown against three interceptions.

The salary cap situation with Tannehill is interesting, largely due to a contract that was structured around the albatross that was Ndamukong Suh. His cap hit this year is only $8.6 million, but next year it balloons to $26.6 million. He’s under contract through 2020, but the Dolphins can save more than $13 million in cap space by releasing him after this year.

I keep going back and forth on this, and I can’t give a clear answer because I don’t really know where the Dolphins are heading as a franchise. Both the Bills and the Jets have decided to scrap the next couple of years in the hopes of building a competitive team once Tom Brady retires. The Dolphins could do the same, but they’d be missing out on the chance to take advantage of an extremely weak middle of the AFC right now. But with the roster they have, and with Tannehill leading it, can they honestly hope to do any better than the first round exit they had two years ago?

I don’t think this is the last year for Tannehill with the Dolphins, but I expect he’ll enter next season in a bit of a lame duck position. A lot will depend on the coaching staff, whether they decide to give Adam Gase another run or jump after a new offensive system that might unlock Tanehill’s potential. But at this point, I think it’s unreasonable to expect a quarterback to suddenly break out in his age 31 season. Tanehill probably just is what he is, and that’s why I expect Miami to have to start over with a fresh young option under center in 2020.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

The only quarterback situation more perplexing than Miami’s right now is Tampa Bay’s (well, maybe Oakland’s, but that’s just because Jon Gruden is the ultimate wild card.) This seemed like a sure thing only a couple years ago, after first overall selection Jameis Winston showed promise through the early stages of his career. But issues both on and off the field have turned the situation against him, and he is now seated on the bench watching 35 year old journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick lead the team.

It’s amusing to me that this team has bounced back and forth between these two passers this year, because in truth they are really just the same player. High variance, aggressive passers who can look explosive and dynamic on any given day while looking like they’ve forgotten which team they play for on the next. It was ugly when Winston threw four interceptions this past Sunday, but let’s not forget that Fitzpatrick once threw six of his own in a single game, and at no point in his career has he shown signs of getting over his recklessness.

That is the biggest problem with Winston as well. Turnovers were an issue in his final season at Florida State, and even when they recurred during his first couple years in the NFL the hope was that he would grow out of them. But that has not happened, and midway through his fourth year in the league it is fair to wonder if it ever will.

I think it was a mistake for the Buccaneers to keep Winston on the bench. Fitzpatrick’s start to the season was incredible, but he showed plenty of signs of falling apart by the time the fourth game came around, which is how Winston ended up taking the job over in the first place. That hasn’t changed, and neither has the fact that there really isn’t any reason to play Fitzpatrick in these games. The Buccaneers are 3-4, in the bottom half of the NFC with a roster that doesn’t leave them much upside. They have a handful of winnable games down the stretch, but they are still a longshot to make the playoffs, and Fitzpatrick isn’t going to be the magic piece that puts them over the top. The most important thing they can do is figure out what their plan is at quarterback next year, and that won't happen with Winston on the bench.

Winston was given the fifth year option prior to this season, which means that next year he is due to make just short of $21 million. Assuming he passes a physical at the end of the year, the Buccaneers have the ability to save all of that by cutting him loose. And considering the still lingering questions off the field that cost him the first three games of the season, public perception seems to be trending in that direction.

Winston is a strange player because he does a lot of things extremely well, and a lot of things extremely poorly. The only player since he entered the league with more interceptions is Blake Bortles (we’ll get to him in a minute), and the only other player with at least 1000 attempts and an interception percentage greater than 3% is, of course, Ryan Fitzpatrick. He is a turnover machine, and he is going to have outings like he did against the Bengals a week ago, where his performance costs his team any chance they had to win the game.

On the other hand, Winston is extraordinary at an underrated aspect of the game, and that is picking up first downs, as highlighted by Chase Stuart of Football Perspective. Since 2015 Matt Ryan leads the league with a first down percentage of 38%. Numbers 3-7 on that list are Carson Palmer, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and Philip Rivers, a who’s who of the top quarterbacks in the league.. And number 2? That would be Winston, who over the course of his career has thrown for first downs on 37.3% of his pass attempts. (Another sneaky name in the top ten of that list? That’s right, Ryan Fitzpatrick.)

A high interception rate and high first down percentage are both functions of the same aspect of Winston's game: his aggressiveness throwing down the field. Part of this is Dirk Koetter’s system, and maybe if the Buccaneers change coaches this offseason they can change Winston’s game enough to cut down on his mistakes. But it’s likely that a great deal of this is simply who he is as a player, and no scheme changes will erase that.

Something that has been on my mind for the past few years is whether quarterbacks might be throwing too few interceptions. The league has steadily transitioned towards more short, safer passes, encouraged by statistics like completion percentage and passer rating that reward this strategy. But is it possible that they are chasing the wrong stats here, much as baseball wasted a century batting their best hitters third in the lineup because that was the best spot to get RBIs? I don’t know, and I’m not sure how to figure it out. But Winston is an excellent test case for teams and coaches that would be interested in a more aggressive passer.

In the end I think the Buccaneers need to move on, as much for Winston as for themselves. But it isn’t something I feel great about. If Winston is in fact the next Fitzpatrick, he could end up drifting through the league for years as a backup and occasional starter just as Fitzpatrick did. And while no one ever regretted not handing Fitzpatrick a long term deal, how many teams actually got better after he left? Fitzpatrick started every game for the Bills in 2011 and 2012, and the next year they split time with EJ Manuel, Thad Lewis, and Jeff Tuel. He then started 9 games for the Titans, and was replaced by Zach Mettenberger, Jake Locker, and Charlie Whitehurst. His time in Houston was followed up by Brian Hoyer, Ryan Mallett, TJ Yates, and Brandon Weeden, while his stint with the Jets led them to starts from Josh McCown and Bryce Petty.

Winston may not be the answer for the Buccaneers, but I have a feeling he’s better than whatever is going to come next.

Jacksonville Jaguars

This should be the easiest one. Blake Bortles has all of the downsides of Winston, with virtually none of the upsides. He throws interceptions at an insane rate, struggles to put together any forward momentum against tough defenses, and routinely costs his team opportunities at victories. Yes he won two playoff games a year ago, but in one of them he actually had more yards rushing than passing. He has been, by just about every measure, the worst quarterback in the league since the day he was drafted, and yet somehow he remains as firmly entrenched as a starter as any quarterback in the NFL.

To understand how we ended up here, let’s take a look season by season through Bortles’s career. He was expected to ride the bench most of his rookie year, but as often happens, incumbent starter Chad Henne proved to be a total disaster, completing barely over half his passes through three straight losses to start the year. So Bortles took over, and it was an absolute disaster, as he threw more interceptions than touchdowns and led the league in sacks taken.

It was a grim start to his career, but no one was calling him a bust after his rookie season. He was always considered a bit of a project, and on paper his second year looked like a huge jump forward. He still only completed about 58% of his passes, but his touchdown number jumped from 11 to 35. He led the league with 18 interceptions, but signs were pointing up for him.

At least that was how it looked on paper. Already Bortles had acquired a reputation as a garbage time stat padder. Of those 35 touchdowns, 14 came in the fourth quarter, usually when the Jaguars were far behind. Somehow he threw only 2 touchdowns in the first quarter, struggling early and playing a major role in Jacksonville’s eventual 5-11 record.

Entering his third season there was already plenty of questionable buzz around Bortles, and a 3-13 record with a 23 to 16 touchdown-to-interception ratio did not help matters. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for the Jaguars to move on from him following that, but they decided to give him another chance, granting him the fifth year option on his contract so he would be under team control for two more seasons. A brief attempt to bench him in the preseason went awry, as Henne once again proved to not be worthy of taking the starting spot. So they went into the regular season with Bortles under center, and somehow everything went right.

There are two sides to the situation the Jaguars have found themselves in. On the one hand, they have made no effort to give Bortles any real competition, sticking until this season with Henne as their backup option. On the other, you can argue that they passing up on using resources at quarterback allowed them to build the roster that carried Bortles to the postseason last year. They spent heavily in free agency, invested high draft picks in stars like Jalen Ramsey, and with Bortles cutting his interceptions to a career low 13, they were able to run all the way to the AFC Championship game.

There was a stretch last year where Bortles looked like he was taking a step forward, but it all fell apart in the postseason. By now most people understood that he is what he is, and that for the Jaguars to compete at the level they’d like they needed to move on. The problem was, Bortles had suffered a nagging injury down the stretch that required surgery in the offseason, and he wouldn’t be able to pass a physical in time for them to cut his fifth year option at no cost. He was due to make $15 million no matter what this year.

This is where the Jaguars really screwed up. They couldn’t cut Bortles, which prevented them from getting into the sweepstakes for one of the big free agent quarterbacks. But because of the other big free agent contracts on their salary cap, they needed to clear up money to make other additions in the offseason. So instead of keeping Bortles on the final year of his contract, they signed him to a three year contract, turning his guaranteed $15 million into $26.5 million.

This cleared up space (which they used to sign Donte Moncrief, so yeah), but it also locked them into Bortles for an additional year. He is scheduled to count $21 million against their cap next year, less than $5 million of which they could save by cutting him. This made it harder to justify spending a first round pick on a quarterback, or trading for the one year contract of Teddy Bridgewater. Whether they wanted it or not, Bortles was going to be on their books in 2019.

The Jaguars sent Bortles to the bench midway through their loss to the Texans two weeks ago, but new backup Cody Kessler isn’t any better than Henne, and Bortles is back under center again. And in all likelihood he will remain the starter through the rest of this year, and likely at the beginning of 2019 as well. They don’t have the salary cap space to bring in veteran competition, and they will likely be looking to spend a high draft selection on a quarterback in next year’s draft. By now I think even the management of the Jaguars understand that Bortles isn’t the solution, but he’s proven over and over that he isn't easy to get rid of.