The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hardest part is knowing when to say goodbye
Today’s NFL has a new class of player — the nonretiring quarterback.
Ben Roethlisberger finished last season sitting on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ bench after a playoff loss, staring at an empty field with tears in his eyes and his helmet still on. He could have decided he had played his final game. The
Steelers could have chosen to move on. But Roethlisberger had watched peers stiff-arm retirement, and the Steelers had seen his contemporaries finish careers in unfamiliar uniforms. In March, the Steelers announced Roethlisberger, at age 39, would return.
If Roethlisberger is not the worst starting quarterback in the NFL through one month, he’s in the team photo. Pro Football Focus ranks Roethlisberger 33rd out of 34 quarterbacks who have taken 20% their offense’s snaps. Roethlisberger’s average completed pass has traveled 4.3 yards past the line of scrimmage, fourth-lowest in the league. He is a future Hall of Famer and a present impediment. The Steelers are 1-3 this year and 2-8 in their past 10 games.
Advances in conditioning and nutrition, combined with rule changes that decrease injurious hits, have created a new class of NFL player, which Kevin Clark of the The Ringer dubbed “The Forever Quarterback.” They play to the brink of, and sometimes into, their 40s and become closer to civic institutions than names on a roster. Franchises have reaped the benefits of extended quarterbacking careers. They also reap the detriments.
The growing longevity of franchise quarterbacks has created an unknown aging curve teams are still learning how to grapple with, and has led almost without exception to messy decisions and futile ends. By clinging to an old quarterback, teams get a superstar beloved by the fan base, a passer who will sometimes summon greatness and a leader who maintains harmony and standards in the locker room. But they also must cater to a player whose skills are diminishing and needs better players around him while delaying a succession plan.
“Yeah, they’re playing later, but are they playing good enough for you to win?” said Marc Ross, former New York Giants vice president of player evaluation, who is now an NFL Network analyst. “They hit a point where they’re not good anymore, and you hit a point when you’re sacrificing everything for the team to acquiesce for the quarterback. When you start with the excuse-making for the quarterback, that’s when
you know it’s time to go.”
Temptation of the aging quarterback
Roethlisberger and the Steelers provide the most striking example, but far from the only one. The Falcons eschewed taking a quarterback with the fourth overall pick in a quarterback-rich draft so they could add another weapon for Matt Ryan, who at age 36 has the lowest average depth of target of any current starter while playing an immobile style.
The Falcons could be seasoning a rookie quarterback in Justin Fields or Mac Jones right now. Instead, they are 1-3 with tight end Kyle Pitts, a diminished version of Ryan, scant prospects of playoff contention, no Super Bowl aspirations and no clear succession plan at quarterback.
Even successful franchises can be punished by the presence of a Forever Quarterback. Drew Brees excelled in the regular season in his final years, but in the postseason his glaring lack of arm strength, a condition of age, held back one of the NFL’s best rosters until he retired following last season at the age of 41. For all of Brees’s greatness, the Saints won four playoff games in his last seven seasons, even as they ran up salary-cap bills they’re still paying off.
The temptation to stay with an aging quarterback is obvious, for reasons both practical and irrational. It is easier to hope a quarterback can fend off decline than to find a capable replacement. Other quarterbacks have proven it can work — at least one quarterback 36 or older has reached the conference championship round in seven straight years. It is difficult to separate from a player who defines a franchise and engenders admiration inside and outside facility.
“It becomes more of a sentimentality and an emotional decision as opposed to a football decision,” Ross said. “It’s not hard if you make a football decision. You make it hard when you don’t make it a football decision.”
Ross witnessed in New York how the mystique of an aging icon can hold a franchise hostage. Eli Manning won Super Bowls after the 2007 and 2011 seasons, but by 2017, Manning’s age-36 season, he had entered a stark decline. “I had no problem saying, ‘This guy is done,’” Ross said. “He was like a son to ownership. If you [were] critical, it [was] always, ‘He can still do it.’”
Ross said he urged the Giants to cut Manning and use the second overall pick in 2018 — when Josh Allen, Sam Darnold and Lamar Jackson ended up being available — on a quarterback. He was fired in December 2017. The Giants picked running back Saquon Barkley. They went 5-11 and chose quarterback Daniel Jones in the next year’s draft.
Right idea with wrong quarterback
In recent seasons, Tom Brady skewed expectations and warped the decision for other teams. The decision-makers inside franchises, especially owners, fear the vision
of their longtime franchise pillar lifting a Lombardi Trophy in another team’s colors. Brady also remains an elite quarterback at 44, the season after he won Super Bowl MVP, which may convince other teams their late-30s or 40-something quarterback can excel.
Whatever the new aging curve for quarterbacks is, though, it doesn’t apply to Brady. Remove Brady, and no quarterback older than 31 has reached the Super Bowl since 39-year-old Peyton Manning in 2015. In not granting Brady the contract he desired, Bill Belichick may have had the right idea with the wrong quarterback. Teams have studied Brady and, as so often happens in the NFL, mistaken an outlier for a lesson.
Hanging on to an aging quarterback can torpedo future plans as it undermines the present season. Franchises either feel emboldened to make the most of a quarterback’s final seasons or required to provide extra support to a passer with fading skills. The Steelers took a running back, Najee Harris, with their first round pick this year to take pressure of Roethlisberger. Belichick complained last year about the dead money left on the Patriots’ salary cap after years of trying to maximize what they believed would be Brady’s last, best chances to win a Super Bowl. (The effectiveness of the players they signed is a different argument.)
The presence of an aging quarterback can make finding his successor harder. The baseline competence of a legend at quarterback, combined with a team assembled around him with the intent to contend, usually makes it hard to bottom out. The Steelers may luck out and tumble to the bottom of the NFL, but Mike Tomlin may be too good of a coach with too talented a defense to avoid falling beneath mediocrity. Even if they do, the 2021 quarterback class is less heralded than last year. It’s why the Falcons had a rare opportunity with the fourth pick this
spring, and squandered it.
The enhanced longevity of great quarterbacks has also made the end almost always prolonged and untidy. Eli Manning had led the Giants to a 2-9 record in 2017 with an 84.1 quarterback rating. Coach Ben McAdoo’s decision to bench him led to public outcry and hastened his firing. Manning then started every single game in 2018.
Holding on is easier than letting go
The smoothest, most successful pivot from a Forever Quarterback may have been executed by the Los Angeles Chargers. They mutually announced their parting with Philip Rivers after the 2019 season, Rivers’ 16th year with the franchise. Rivers still wanted to play and, it turned out, had enough left to lead the Indianapolis Colts to the playoffs. The Chargers’ disciplined evaluation of Rivers’ skill and their position paid off. With the sixth pick in 2020, they selected Justin Herbert, who is already leading a playoff contender and may be the most valuable asset in the NFL. Rivers retired after 2020.
As teams attempt to figure out how to handle late-30s quarterbacks, more teams will likely follow the Steelers’ path than the Chargers’. Holding on is easier than letting go. Those quarterbacks become the NFL version of a beloved car. It has all your presets. The seat forms to your body. At some point, before you can notice, you’re paying more in repairs that what a new car would cost.
“The stability is comforting,” Ross said. “When you have a franchise quarterback at his peak, doing things for an organization to win is so much easier. Your job is not easy, but you know what you have to do to support that player. When they get older and they decline, you go back to, ‘Oh we just need to support him.’ You don’t want to see the decline and say, we need to make that hard decision to move forward.”