Whether or not you believe that the quarterback is the most important player on the field, you can't deny that he garners the most fan and media attention.
With the NFL draft almost upon us, I, like many others, decided to take a look at the success (or lack thereof) of quarterbacks drafted in the first round.
As plenty has already been written on quarterbacks taken at the top of the first round, I focused on quarterbacks taken in the second half of the first round (picks 16-32).
Since 1990, here are the players who met the criteria (pick-year drafted)
Dan McGwire (16-1991)
Todd Marinovich (24-1991)
Tommy Maddox (25-1992)
Jim Druckenmiller (26-1997)
Chad Pennington (18-2000)
Patrick Ramsey (32-2002)
Kyle Boller (19-2003)
Rex Grossman (22-2003)
JP Losman (22-2004)
Aaron Rodgers(24-2005)
Jason Campbell(25-2005)
Brady Quinn (22-2007)
Yikes.
Obviously the jury is still out on our last three QB's. Neither Rodgers or Quinn has played enough for us to get any real idea of what kind of careers they might have.
While we've seen a fair amount of Campbell, he's still young enough that his career could go in almost any direction from 2008 on.
So if you toss those three that leaves us with nine guys. Not the greatest sample size, but it does represent at the entire Jeff Feagles era of the NLF.
Of the nine I think it's fair to say they were all disappointments. McGwire, Marinovich, Duckenmiller, Ramsey, Boller and Losman were huge busts.
Maddox had one good season a decade after he was drafted. Pennington is probably the best quarterback on the list, he had several good years, and I think he would be a clear exception if he could have stayed healthy.
Grossman has "led" a team to the Super Bowl, but I don't think we could call him even an average starting quarterback.
Losman has had some nice moments but looks like he might end up backing up Trent Edwards moving forward.
While this really isn't enough data to call the mid to late first round quarterback a bad pick, if Brian Brohm and Andre Woodson become the newest members of this group, I certainly won't be the first in line for their replica jerseys.
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