Inside the league’s newfound embrace of short QBs
Doug Flutie, a quarterback consigned professionally to Canadian glory and journeyman status in his own country, admits he often thinks about how he might fit into the NFL today. He played in the 1980s and ’90s and stood shorter than a standard refrigerator, which suddenly makes him a man born before his time.
Flutie was a jitterbug, 5-foot-10, Heisman-winning quarterback with uncommon arm strength for his size. Kyler Murray, a quarterback who fits that description precisely, might be this year’s hottest NFL draft commodity.
“It just means,” Flutie said, “I was 20 years too early.”
For years, NFL executives turned away undersized quarterbacks like so many you-must-be-this-tall-to-enter-the-ride signs. One year after the Cleveland Browns took 6-foot-1 Baker Mayfield first overall, the Arizona Cardinals may pluck Murray with the same pick in this month’s draft. Murray’s stature once would have been detrimental to the point of disqualifying. As recently as 10 years ago, ESPN NFL Draft analyst Todd McShay posited, teams would have asked a quarterback like Murray to play slot receiver and return kicks.
Height still matters, of course — Murray briefly became the buzziest story in sports simply for measuring 5-10 instead of 5-9 at the NFL scouting combine. But now, as a response to several trends, the league does not only tolerate the package of skills and size Murray presents. It embraces athletic quarterbacks, even if they stand around 6-feet or shy of it. The adoption of shotgun-heavy, spreadreliant systems and prohibitions on how quarterbacks can be hit have cleared a path for humans of average size to play the most demanding position in professional sports.
In 2012, the Seattle Seahawks took 5-foot-11 Russell Wilson in the third round. Coach Pete Carroll called him a “living example” of how the sport has shifted. If a prospect of identical qualities came along now, he would be scooped in the first round, likely near the top. The NFL has changed to accommodate — and, for some teams, even prioritize — the skills of shorter passers.
“I’ve been guilty of this as well,” firstyear Cincinnati Bengals coach Zac Taylor said. “You just put this label on a guy’s size, when what’s important is: ‘Do they elevate the players around him? Do they believe in him? Are they accurate? Do they get the ball out on time? Do they understand what the defense is presenting?’ You’ve seen guys of all sizes excel in this NFL lately. I think that’s becoming less of a qualifier. Now guys are just looking at, ‘Can this guy play?’ ”
Lincoln Riley coached both Mayfield and Murray at Oklahoma. He never prioritized height, because his system — shotgun-heavy and reliant on Air Raid principles — did not require it. He now has even less regard for the importance of height at the position.
“Having them has made me believe, you know what, all these limitations that maybe we’ve had in our mind for years and years, when you’ve got a great player, I don’t think they exist nearly as much as people think,” Riley said. “Yeah, 15 years ago, people were still running a lot of West Coast offense and throwing a lot of three-step drops from under center, would it have been more of a factor? Maybe. Watching the game I’m watching, I don’t see it as much of a factor anymore.”
In the early 1990s, while playing in the Canadian Football League, Flutie watched film of Edmonton quarterback Damon Allen, the brother of NFL Hall of Famer Marcus Allen. Edmonton predominantly used the shotgun, and Flutie studied how Allen would sometimes keep the ball on called handoffs when the defensive end abandoned the edge to crash down on the running back. It wasn’t a read, Flutie surmised, just Allen making an athletic improvisation. Flutie stole the tactic, then added a wrinkle: He would tell an outside wide receiver to run an out or fade route so he could toss him the ball if the end crashed and the cornerback cheated to stop his run.
“It wasn’t in the playbook,” Flutie said. “It wasn’t written out — if this, then that. We were just being athletes. But all this innovation of zone read and throwing routes off of run plays, we were doing that 25 years ago in Canada.”
Those plays complemented the basis of Calgary’s offense: Flutie spreading the field with five wideouts, making a presnap read then delivering the ball quickly, mostly out of necessity: Canadian teams then often used the offensive line to stash requisite Canadian-born players, while taking last-cut pass rushers from NFL training camps.
“We were doing all that stuff even before it got popular at the college level,” Flutie said. “I remember Chip Kelly saying he came up before he was at [New Hampshire], and he came up to Toronto and he watched all our game film, all the stuff we were doing. Then he went back to UNH and lit it up, and then he got the Oregon job.”
There is a crucial moral of Flutie’s history lesson, from a quarterback who won a record six Most Outstanding Player awards in the CFL before getting another shot at the NFL late in his career. Take away the extra acreage of the CFL field and the 12th player, and the offensive environment in which Flutie dominated as a 5-10 quarterback resembles the landscape of today’s NFL: spread-out offenses, rapid-fire pass plays and creative pass-run options, operated primarily out of the shotgun.
The reasons for the rise of those offenses in the NFL have grown familiar. This generation of quarterbacks has grown up playing in variations of the spread from peewee through college, many of them year-round with the rise seven-on-seven leagues. Quarterbacks reach the NFL wired to play a certain way, and limits on practice time instituted in the latest collective bargaining agreement don’t leave coaches enough time to reprogram them.
Even if they did, they’d be sacrificing expertise. By the time quarterbacks reach the NFL, they have played more reps in one style than any generation that came before.
“It’s no different than an NFL quarterback, a Drew Brees or Tom Brady, that ends up in a similar system for a lot of years,” Riley said. “These guys started in this similar system when they were 12 years old, if not younger. They just kind of got a lot of stock built up in it.”
Said Taylor: “You get these quarterbacks, you’re doing these RPOs [run-pass options], and they’ve got better familiarity with it than you do at times.”
Those offenses favor shorter, athletic quarterbacks, or at least equalize the field for them. Playing out of the shotgun mitigates vision problems. More receivers means fewer rushers and wider passing lanes, which leads to fewer batted passes. The success of the 6-foot quarterback is not purely new; Drew Brees, who’s listed at 6-feet but is probably closer to 5-foot-11, won a Super Bowl 10 seasons ago. But the recent success of Wilson and Mayfield has helped open minds to Murray’s prospects.
Coaches and executives have realized a point Carroll makes frequently in discussing Wilson: Short quarterbacks have been short all their lives, and if they couldn’t overcome their height deficiency, they would have been weeded out long before the NFL.
“I’m always the smallest guy on the field,” Murray said last month at the NFL combine. “I’ve said it multiple times — I feel like I’m the most impactful guy on the field and the best player on the field at all times. I’ve always had to play at this height.”