If you've been following me on Twitter for any length of time then you know that I have made the whole "quarterback wins are not a real stat" thing a pretty big part of my career. It's because I think it's it's the dumbest and most dangerous stat out there.
There's a lot of reasons I've disliked it for so long. One of them is that it demeans the 53 other guys on the team that helped get the win on Sunday. The really big one is that it ruins quarterbacks careers because teams are using it to evaluate their young and inexperienced quarterbacks.
I have always used Vikings quarterback Sam Darnold as my prime example. The Jets took him third pick in the 2018 NFL Draft and gave him three seasons before they moved on from him and drafted Zach Wilson.
The Jets did nothing to help Darnold. They gave him no weapons to play with, an offensive line that allowed him to get sacked 30 plus times a year and three different head coaches with three different offensive coordinators. Then when that didn't work out, it was Darnold that took all the blame.
That's blame that you can't just get off of you. As a quarterback you carry that around with you and it becomes the thing that everyone knows about you. So obviously you don't get a lot of chances. Sometimes you get even worse chances like being traded to Carolina. The team everyone agrees is the worst ran organization in football.
This season Darnold wound up in the right place. For the first time in his career he has strong weapons and a solid coaching staff that is stable. Now he's flourishing and through four weeks and the Vikings are one of the hottest teams in the league.
People will often say stuff like "great quarterbacks will find a way to win regardless of their team." Then they'll point to Patrick Mahomes as if there's just a bunch of guys like him out there. Great quarterbacks are awesome to have, but good ones work too. Teams have spent way too much time giving up on the good ones in their never ending search to find the great one.
Guys like Jared Goff, Baker Mayfield, Geno Smith, Derek Carr and Justin Fields were all thrown away by their previous team or teams and are now showing why each of those teams were wrong for getting rid of them.
Goff led the Lions to the NFC championship last year and the Lions are currently expected to be contending for a Super Bowl. Baker Mayfield is playing the best football of his career in 2024. He's been balling out lately. Geno Smith, another guy the Jets gave up on, is the most accurate and poised quarterback in this league. Derek Carr and Justin Fields both have their teams in the driver seat of their respective divisions.
NFL teams need to stop being in a hurry and using stats that don't make sense to evaluate their quarterback. If the Jets had maybe put more time into Darnold and got him some solid receivers and a stable coaching staff, we might be talking about the Jets being 4-0 right now. Instead we watched that team do the same thing all over again with Zach Wilson before selling their soul to Aaron Rodgers so they could be a .500 team.
It's time to get rid of this stat and build around your guys instead of giving up on them too quickly. That's the biggest takeaway from the 2024 season so far.
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