686. Why Is It So Hard to Find an NFL Quarterback?

Freakonomics Radio

This episode of Freakonomics Radio explores the persistent challenge of predicting which college quarterbacks will succeed in the NFL, despi

Key takeaways

• College performance and Combine stats are poor predictors of NFL success.
• Cognitive abilities like decision-making under pressure and situational awareness are more critical than physical attributes for quarterback success.

Main topics

• NFL quarterback evaluation
• Predictive analytics in sports

Notable quotes

"You can't be a good quarterback and be bad at those things." – on the essential physical and cognitive skills.

"I was put into the game, and I only played one drive. They were trying to figure out, OK, we don't want Kurt to get hurt as well..." – Kurt Warner recalling his first NFL moment.

Conclusion

Despite advances in data and scouting, predicting NFL quarterback success remains elusive. The most

Transcript preview

Speaker 8 (0:04) If you have ever been responsible for hiring people, you may have developed a checklist of some kind, something to help you identify the perfect person for the job. So as you assess your candidates, you want to be Speaker 7 (0:17) sure that they are good at problem solving. They can see what's happening. They can understand what's going right. They can understand what's going wrong. You will want to know if they are good communicators. Speaker 8 (0:27) X, Speaker 3 (0:27) blue, Z, nine, seven, blah, blah, Speaker 8 (0:30) blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. You may also want to know whether they can handle chaos. How much can you take in? How much can you see? How much can you handle? Can you respond when it's getting tougher? And some jobs, some very specialized jobs, may even require certain key physical Speaker 7 (0:47) attributes. We look at height. We look at speed. We look at armor strength. We look at accuracy. Speaker 8 (0:54) Wilson to throw. Plenty of time. Deep ball. Can he chase it down? He does! Speaker 7 (0:59) You can't be a good quarterback and be bad at those things. Speaker 8 (1:02) And in the National Football League, you can't win unless you have a good quarterback or maybe a great one. It is the most important position in the NFL. And since the NFL is the world's biggest commercial sports operation, this means that hiring a new quarterback is a big dollar, high risk decision. So how does that decision get made? Every year, there is a fresh crop of college quarterbacks who enter the NFL draft. College football would seem to be the ultimate audition for the pros. It generates mountains of evidence, statistical and otherwise. And then the NFL holds Combine, where all 32 teams get to poke and prod the new talent. Part meat market, part beauty pageant, part job fair. These teams are simply trying to predict which of the best college quarterbacks will succeed in the pros. How Speaker 7 (1:55) hard can that be? Quarterback evaluation is probably one of the most studied and still most uncertain problems in all of professional sport. Speaker 8 (2:02) If you are a football fan, you already know this. You know that NFL draft history is littered with can't-miss quarterbacks who miss big time. You also know that some of the very best quarterbacks were overlooked in the draft. Tom Brady was the 199th player taken in his draft season. And in 2022, the San Francisco 49ers chose Brock Purdy with the very last pick of the draft, earning him the nickname Mr. Irrelevant. Purdy was the ninth quarterback taken that season, but he has turned out to be easily the best quarterback from that class. This quarterback prediction problem. has been discussed for a while. A 2011 research paper found that college and combine statistics have little value in predicting whether a quarterback will be successful in the NFL. Why is this such a hard problem? And what does it take to thrive as an NFL quarterback? To find out, we will hear from a Hall of Fame quarterback, a professional scout, a pioneering sports psychologist and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who wants to fundamentally change how athletic potential is evaluated. Also, you'll hear me take a very specialized IQ test. Speaker 4 (3:18) Now you're going to see more designs. Speaker 8 (3:20) That's brutal. Speaker 4 (3:24) That's brutal. Whoa, Speaker 8 (3:27) what happened there? Oh, mama. Brutal. Today on Freakonomics Radio, how to pick, or in my case, how not to pick, a great NFL quarterback. Speaker 2 (3:51) This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. Speaker 8 (4:08) The rookie quarterback that everyone has their eyes on this year is Fernando Mendoza. The Las Vegas Raiders took him with the first overall pick in the draft. Last year, Mendoza led Indiana University to an undefeated season and its first ever national championship. Will Mendoza thrive in the NFL? No one knows for sure, but the expectations are huge. Mendoza got very high grades from most draft analysts. Although we should say these analysts are often dead wrong. They make sins of commission and sins of omission. Consider this former quarterback who wasn't even invited to the NFL Combine. I was told Speaker 5 (4:47) that I had a grade that was good enough to go to the Combine, but they passed me up to take a guy from Speaker 8 (4:52) a bigger school. That is Kurt Warner. He grew up in Iowa and played his college football at Northern Iowa, which is not a football powerhouse. What's he do now? NFL analyst on ESPN NFL Network. In 1994, after Warner's final season with Northern Iowa, he entered the NFL draft, but not a single team was interested enough to use a draft pick. The Green Bay Packers invited Warner to join their training camp, but he was released before the season started. He kept himself in shape in case he got a call, and he took a job stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee grocery store. Speaker 5 (5:29) That was probably the most difficult time of my career. And not just because you go from inches to accomplishing your dream, to working for 15 hours, stocking shelves in a grocery store. Not just because of the distance you can see between those two situations. But it was more because no one had ever gone from aisle seven at Hy-Vee Speaker 8 (5:49) to the NFL. That's the story we hear because you didn't make it in the NFL in the normal route. Is that a story you're sick of or do you take pride? I'm curious. I do Speaker 5 (6:02) celebrate it a little bit more because I think my story is way more like real life than most professional athletes. Most guys that get their scholarship and play great in college and get drafted and have great careers. That's not what normal life is for most people. Most people have their. supermarket moment along their journey as they're trying to chase some dream and trying to get to the mountaintop. Speaker 8 (6:27) Kurt Warner wasn't just disappointed that he had a hard time making the NFL. He was also surprised. Every time I had played, all I knew was I'm Speaker 5 (6:37) successful. You can't show me a time when I was between the lines, ball in my hands, and I needed to play well. And I didn't. And so that's where my mindset was when I was going through all this is like, why Speaker 8 (6:50) can't somebody see that? But Warner stuck with it. He joined the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League. And after three seasons there, he was offered a futures contract by the St. Louis Rams of the NFL. They sent him to play in Amsterdam for NFL Europe. After leading that league in passing yards and touchdowns, Warner was summoned back to St. Louis to play for the Rams. And he got his chance when, in a preseason game, the Rams' starting quarterback was badly injured. Speaker 5 (7:19) I was put into the game, and I only played one drive. They were trying to figure out, OK, we don't want Kurt to get hurt as well, so, you know, we're going to give him one drive. And they called a pass play. It was a 20-yard in-breaking route. I threw it and completed it, didn't think anything of it. And as we were going back and watching... the film of that game, Mike March was my offense coordinator at the time, and he stopped that play. And he goes, okay, Kurt, thinking about making you the starter and just going to be your team. And we watched the play and it looked really tight. And I know he was kind of alluding at like, hey, if you're going to be our starter, I'm not sure you can take chances like this. You just go back and throw it. And I remember thinking in the game, like. That was easy. Like it wasn't tight. It wasn't a tough throw. I really didn't understand why he wanted to make a big deal of this particular play. And so he goes, okay, Kurt, I want you to walk me through why you threw this. I want you to take me through your thought process. I remembered it vividly. I still do to this day. When I came back to throw that, there was a big in route as I was talking about over the top. It was like a 20 yard route. And then we had something underneath it at like five or six yards. And so. The whole goal for me in simple terms, right, was I got a high and I got a low and there's one defender in between those two guys. And my job was to read that defender. And if he stays low, then I throw it high. If he goes high, I throw it low, like simple. Right. And so I remember telling him, well, the key was that linebacker. When he started to drop, I saw his hips turn. to the inside and his shoulders just shifted enough that I knew because of that shift, he could not stop the big in round. Once I saw that I threw the end because I knew he had no chance to get there. And so we watched it on film and I'm like, right there, there, you see it. And he just looked at me and he goes, okay, Speaker 6 (9:14) I can live with that. Speaker 5 (9:16) So it would ultimately become the route that built my house is what I say, because we threw that more than anybody else. Speaker 8 (9:27) And so it was that Kurt Warner, overlooked, undervalued, but undeterred, wound up becoming one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. He appeared in three Super Bowls, two with the Rams and one with the Arizona Cardinals. The Rams won one of those Super Bowls, and Warner was voted the game's MVP as well as MVP of the league that year. Now he's in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I believe we can get better at just Speaker 5 (9:52) about anything. If we immerse ourselves in whatever that is and we take the time to learn and grow and subject Speaker 8 (9:59) ourselves to it. Once you were established in the league and the opposing coaches could see what you were good at, how did they try to counteract that? And how did you then counteract what they were counteracting? Speaker 5 (10:12) Yeah, I think the biggest thing, first and foremost, that teams would try to do is they would try to blitz me. It's like, okay, if we're going to sit back here and just play coverage, we don't have a chance. Kurt's really good at that. He sees it. So we've got to speed this up, right? Okay, it's four to five seconds on a field. Well, let's see if I can make that three seconds. He's got to take all that information in, and he's got to respond correctly in three seconds. Maybe we've got a chance if we speed him up, and he'll make bad decisions. I thought that was the greatest thing ever. Like, the faster, the better. I played three years of arena football. Smaller field, everything was faster. Decisions had to be made faster. When I got to St. Louis, we played on what they called the old turf. It was, you know, a baseball turf. There was no padding underneath it. And it was just a faster game. There is no doubt in my mind, you try to speed it up, you're going to make more mistakes than I can. The second thing that they had to try to do was it became more about scheme. I talked about the route that built my house. So now teams had to just kind of cheat to go, we got to try to take away what they do well and get the advantage before the play even starts. Otherwise, we don't really have a chance. So that became the cat and mouse of who we were and how we got really good. And then how you stay good is, okay, we know teams are going to try to stop us from doing what we've really built this offense on. Now can we complement that? So for a quarterback, hey, can you throw out breaking routes as well as you throw in breaking routes? Can you see these particular coverages? Can you connect the mental and physical of something different as well as you did to the stuff that you were very familiar with? And so that became the challenge for me and for us was I want to be great at everything. Speaker 8 (11:58) I'm starting to understand why there's only a handful of guys on the planet who can do this on a high level every week. It's a really hard job, isn't it? It is a hard job, and there's a lot that goes into it. When I think about the cognitive and processing speed, it's really hard to comprehend, I think, for a layperson. So do you feel a bit like you're in a kind of separate layer of humanity when you have those abilities? Speaker 5 (12:22) Yes, I do. Just in my realm, when it comes to my job, our job as an NFL quarterback. Yes, I do think that I see and understand the game differently Speaker 8 (12:34) than most people. Some people say that when you're watching professional athletes, you're basically seeing the guys who, unlike everybody that fell away, they are the guys who perform under pressure. You can be great, but if you don't perform under pressure, you don't become a pro. So I'm curious to know how that developed or how that came about for you. I don't know the Speaker 5 (12:57) answer to that. I know a lot of people talk about, hey, the greatest to ever play are the ones that elevate their game in the biggest moments. I don't believe that. What I believe is that most people shrink under pressure. They don't embrace that. They don't play to that level. And so I always felt like when the game was on the line, I was the best version. of myself. I can't put my finger on why that was. I know that I played hundreds of Super Bowls in my front yard. I played hundreds of NBA championships in my driveway. I pitched a number of World Series championships into a taped-off wall. I do believe when you talk to the greats, specifically in sports, that seems to be a thread with all of them. I want the ball. I believe I'm going to be successful. And whether I'm successful or not, that doesn't affect me from believing I'm going to be successful the next time. I really felt like very early on in my career at Northern Iowa that I was the most talented guy there. But I still couldn't get on the field. I had a friend on the team, and I just asked him if he would mind talking to the coaches on my behalf because he had a better relationship. Just asking him, you know, what's Kurt missing? So this was after practice one day and I'm sitting in the locker room and I'm all by myself, just waiting for him to come back in and finally shows up. And he goes, all right, Kurt, here's what they told me. They told me the reason that you're not starting is because you're not very good in practice. Wow. And I was, you know, I was disappointed and I was angry because I thought it was just an excuse. And the more I got to think about it, the more I started