We Don't Know As Much As We Think We Do About Quarterbacks (or Anything Else, Really)

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

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I.

This is a story that begins with an undertaker getting a hot tip about a quarterback. The undertaker was named Ray Byrne, and he ran a funeral home in Pittsburgh, but he also had a hobby of gathering information about football prospects, which led him to land a part-time job with the local professional football team. Back then, in the mid-1950s, the Steelers were not yet the Steelers of today; the Steelers were, in fact, pretty much the polar opposite of the Steelers of today. They were a perpetually mediocre franchise whose owner, Art Rooney, didn’t seem to care much about altering the status quo, and particularly didn’t care much about the NFL draft.

In January of 1955, the Steelers were coming off yet another 5-7 season. Rooney had hired a coach named Walt Kiesling, who was a friend of his, because at that point Rooney only hired coaches who were friends of his. But his son Dan had begun trying to change things, and both Dan Rooney and Ray Byrne, the story goes, began pushing Kiesling to use a draft pick on a quarterback, a gangly local kid who played his college ball several states away because most other schools weren’t interested. Still, once they got that tip about him, there was something about this quarterback that Rooney and Byrne couldn’t shake, and when the draft got to the ninth round, Byrne and Rooney insisted that Kiesling draft their guy.

In training camp that summer, Kiesling gave all his reps to his other quarterbacks. He found the new guy scrawny and slow. Kiesling said the new guy couldn’t remember the plays; he called him “dumb,” and, even as Dan Rooney insisted to his father that they couldn’t possibly cast aside a guy who was the most accurate thrower he’d ever seen, Walt Kiesling cut Johnny Unitas from his football team.

II.

Every year right around this time, it becomes apparent how everything about football has changed, and yet nothing has changed. Over the course of the 1950s, scouting became a profession rather than a part-time avocation for funeral directors; over the course of the 1960s, the Steelers steadily transformed their organization into one of the most astute in professional football, which led them, in 1970, to use the number one pick to choose a Louisiana Tech quarterback named Terry Bradshaw over Purdue quarterback Mike Phipps. For several years after, it was unclear whether Bradshaw was the guy; in 1974, he lost his starting job before getting it back, and then in 1975, the Steelers won their first Super Bowl and Pittsburgh’s patience with Bradshaw was rewarded1.

We’d like to think we live in a world now where quarterback evaluation, a multimillion-dollar business, has evolved into a more precise science. We’d like to think we’ve gotten better at knowing what we see, at incorporating data and advanced metrics and biomechanics and second-generation cognitive tests; we’d like to think that the narrow path of a quarterback through camps and college and combines has made it that much easier to know what we’re seeing. This flood of information makes us think we know what we’re doing, but then there are those moments that remind us that how little we still really know, and lead us to wonder whether we’ve so completely compressed and pressurized the process that we’ve left no room for uncertainty. Which leads me to the strange saga of the modern-day Minnesota Vikings.

III.

In 2022, the Vikings hired a young coach named Kevin O’Connell, a former quarterback himself, and a well-regarded football mind who might be steadily overthinking his way out of a job. O’Connell won 13 games in his first season with veteran quarterback Kirk Cousins, but then the following year, Cousins got hurt; the Vikings had already hedged their bets on Cousins and essentially allowed him to leave for Atlanta. Then the Vikings did two things: They signed a veteran quarterback, Sam Darnold, who played well in a relief role in San Francisco; and they drafted a rookie quarterback, J.J. McCarthy, with the 10th overall pick in 2024.

McCarthy was slated to start right away, because this is now how it generally works with rookie quarterbacks: They sign relatively cheap contracts for their first four seasons, during which a team has a pressurized period to evaluate whether they’ve drafted a franchise quarterback or a bust. (This is why Darnold was a cast-off in the first place: He had failed in his early years with the Jets, which is sort of like being thrown into a pit of vipers and being blamed for inciting the snakes.) Except McCarthy hurt his knee in preseason, and Darnold led the Vikings to a 14-3 record before losing to the Rams in the playoffs. So O’Connell again had to choose. He chose to stick with McCarthy, figuring the safe bet was to go with the young quarterback who could develop into a franchise player rather than ride with the unsexy veteran who most likely was what he was.

But it turns out McCarthy might not be very good2. And it turns out Darnold is indeed quite good, and led the Seahawks to a Super Bowl victory last season. So now O’Connell has lost Darnold, and he has lost Cousins—who might at least start the season as the Raiders’ quarterback—and he has chosen to bench McCarthy at a watershed moment in his career, when the clock is ticking on his rookie contract, with the presumption being that he might be unsalvageable. Meanwhile, O’Connell has brought in yet another reclamation project, the former Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray, who was kind of like Sam Darnold in that he never quite worked out during his rookie-contract era, either. Which, I mean…

And look, you can make the case that O’Connell did what a coach is supposed to do—you can make the case that there is no room in the modern NFL to slow down and give a guy a chance, and you can make a case that it’s O’Connell’s job to find the guy who could lead his team beyond the playoffs and into the Super Bowl. Except you can also say, in retrospect, that O’Connell already had that guy in Darnold, and he let him go, perhaps because the broader perception of what that guy had done affected his own reality.

Maybe that’s unfair, just as perhaps it’s unfair to quote O’Connell’s own words about organizations failing quarterbacks more than quarterbacks failing organizations against him. But I think the larger question here is whether the Curious Case of the New Men on the Minnesota Vikings is proof that the NFL no longer offers the breathing room to develop quarterbacks in any real way. And that makes me wonder if perhaps it somehow relates to our own societal aversion to uncertainty in an era where narratives congeal faster than they ever have before.

IV.

The most refreshing couple of sentences I read this week came from a political data analyst named G. Elliott Morris. Morris was talking about the current state of Democratic politics, and the notion that people in his line of work tend to presume to know more than they actually know, and he wrote this:

…I’m arguing for uncertainty — for even just a dose of epistemic humility from DC practitioners and media pundits about why voters are voting the way they are. If you take a look at the research on this subject, it becomes clear that we all know much less than the conventional wisdom asserts. And more than that, we know a lot less than pundits say…

I think that’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard anyone say about politics at a moment when it seems pretty clear that no one is satisfied with the status quo, but that no one is entirely certain what the long-term remedy to the status quo might be. But I also think it goes far beyond politics; I think we’ve become so accustomed to subsisting in a hot-take culture that we’re less and less comfortable resting in uncertainty. To some extent, this has always been true, but the more the culture accelerates—the more we think we know, and the more we are forced to think we know—the truer it becomes. There is very little room for humility, epistemic or otherwise. You have to make decisions before you might be ready to make decisions, and then you have to live with the consequences of those decisions even if they prove to be catastrophically wrong—which is why a team like the Vikings can keep casting aside quarterbacks in the hope that they find the right one, and which is why they let the right one walk away without giving him the time to prove who he actually was.

Weeks after the Steelers cut Unitas, the story goes, Rooney and Kiesling were driving around town and saw Unitas walking on the street. He was working on a road construction crew and playing semi-pro football, biding his time until another NFL team might give him a shot, and Rooney asked Kiesling to roll down the window.

“Johnny!” Rooney shouted. “I hope you become the greatest quarterback in football!”