The Washington Redskins, Indianapolis Colts and Seattle Seahawks can be thankful they landed their franchise quarterbacks a year ago.
The year of the rookie quarterback in pro football is being followed by a year of quarterback-needy teams crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, with far less excitement being generated by this group of passers going into tonight’s opening round of the NFL Draft.
“You’ve got a lot of questions,” said Charley Casserly, the former general manager of the Redskins and Houston Texans. “I don’t know that there’s any one guy that you can point to and say you know he will be an NFL starter.”
When Andrew Luck, the can’t-miss prospect from Stanford chosen first overall by the Colts, and Robert Griffin III, the Heisman Trophy winner from Baylor taken second by the Redskins, walked across the stage at Radio City Music Hall last April, expectations had been raised that theirs might be a memorably great quarterback class. Yet the history of quarterbacks going first and second in NFL drafts suggested that one or the other would fail to live up to his considerable draft-night promise.
Luck and Griffin were everything they were advertised to be - and perhaps more - as rookies last season. Then when Russell Wilson, a less-celebrated third-round selection by the Seahawks out of Wisconsin, joined them in the NFL playoffs, the league had possibly one of its best seasons ever for rookie quarterbacks. Each set a rookie standard. Griffin had the highest passer rating ever, while Luck had the most passing yards and Wilson tied the record for touchdown passes.
So that is the standard by which this year’s less glittery rookie quarterback class, headed by West Virginia’s Geno Smith and Southern California’s Matt Barkley, will be judged.
Good luck with that.
“Compared to last year with all the guys at the top, I don’t think there’s anybody like that,” former NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst Tim Hasselbeck said. “But that doesn’t mean that nobody will go there.”
The current debate is whether any of the available quarterbacks is worthy of going in the first round tonight.
“Barkley is the most ready to play,” Casserly said. “With most of them, you could be talking about guys who end up being backup quarterbacks.”
The group does have its defenders.
“I’ve said from day one this quarterback class is better than everybody thinks it is,” Buffalo Bills General Manager Buddy Nix said. “It’s better than the publicity that they get, and by that I mean there’s about five or six of those guys, maybe seven, that do a lot of things good and do them good enough to win
“I’ve said this from the start that two or three of these guys will be franchise quarterbacks. I believe that.”
Nix pointed out there was relatively little pre-draft adulation, at least by quarterback-hype standards, last year for Wilson or the year before that for Colin Kaepernick, a second-round choice by the San Francisco 49ers in the 2011 draft from Nevada who took the team to the Super Bowl last season as a second-year pro.
“Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick, right now if you were drafting, you’d take them first,” Nix said. “You’d take them first in the top five. So the jury’s out on this group. But they do enough good things that if you do what they do best, you can win with them.”
Sports, Pages 20 on 04/25/2013