Is the End of the NFL's Quarterback Era Nearly Here?

By any objective measure, Ryan Tannehill is a mediocre quarterback. He finished 2014 in the middle of the pack (or worse) in every major passing metric. While capable of winning games with athletic derring-do, he's also capable of losing them with raw, sloppy play.

Yet the Miami Dolphins happily inked him to a $96 million contract extension, securing his services through the 2020 season. Why give a young, erratic signal-caller such a huge payday? Because we're in an era of unprecedented importance for quarterbacks. The very few great ones are priceless, and having a decent starter is a requirement to even be competitive.

In today's NFL, if you don't have a good signal-caller, you don't have anything—but football fans old enough to pick up a six pack on the way to watch a game remember when the opposite was true.

Doug Mills/Associated Press

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, franchises didn't win Super Bowls with big-time quarterbacks, but bruising running games and powerful defenses took the ultimate prize.

A graying, diminished John Elway rode tailback Terrell Davis to two straight titles in 1997 and 1998. Scrap-heap wonders like Tom Brady and Kurt Warner were right-place, right-time miracles who blossomed into league MVPs. Even mediocre retreads like Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson won NFL championships.

For a time, this was the new model for success: Rather than waste first-round picks and precious salary-cap dollars on a big-time quarterback, teams beefed up the trenches and put a game manager under center.

This period was a transition between two generations of great quarterbacks: From Elway and Dan Marino to Peyton Manning and Brady. Quarterbacking took a steep hit as the legends of the 1980s and 1990s bowed out but players like Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Tony Romo and Drew Brees hadn't emerged as stars.

Here's a chart of the NFL passer ratings of every year's top 10 quarterbacks from 1992 to 2009, broken out into three-year average periods for clarity:

Credit: Ty Schalter/Bleacher Report

The position's improvement is near perfect, with all but one three-year period clearly better than the last—and, with just a few exceptions, that superiority goes all the way down from one through 10. 

The 1992-1994 period, by far the lowest rated, also has Steve Young single-handedly blowing out the curve at No. 1, putting up numbers far ahead of his time. The 1995-1997 period is significantly better, especially from Nos. 4-10. Players like Drew Bledsoe, Jim Everett and Jeff Blake buoyed that group.

Then there's a massive jump up to the 1998-2000 period. Warner and the like caught fire as Marino, Warren Moon and Brett Favre enjoyed renaissance years. There's another big jump to 2004-2006 and a smaller one to 2007-2009.

The linearity of this is inescapable, and the trend is accelerating. Look at Pro-Football-Reference.com's year-over-year passing stats: The five most efficient passing seasons in NFL history are the last five seasons, in order.

But what about 2001-2003? The dark gray line in the chart above should be nestled between the green and yellow lines of '98-'00 and '04-'06. Instead, it's intertwined with the light blue of 1995-1997. This three-year stretch was a trend-bucking step backward in league-wide quarterbacking ability. 

BILL KOSTROUN/Associated Press

Though Brady and Manning were playing, they were far from the statistical machines they'd become. The NFL's best-rated passers were unimpressive names such as Rich Gannon, Jeff Garcia and Chad Pennington. Effective triggermen, yes—but hardly offense-carrying legends. You didn't need a great quarterback to win, because there weren't many great quarterbacks around.

There were other factors at work: Defenses had widely caught up with the misnamed "West Coast" offenses throughout the league, and the shotgun revolution hadn't started. Quarterbacks were completing shorter passes, but not more often—and they were throwing fewer interceptions, but not more touchdowns. Offenses ceded defenses the deep ball.

2001, 2000, 1997 and 1996 are ranked 69th through 75th out of 83 NFL seasons in touchdown rate, per Pro-Football-Reference.com. When it comes to average yards per completion, the entire decade of the 2000s fits into the bottom 22 years. The current passing-stat boom is partly driven by pass-happy offenses with very high completion rates.

Of course, it's also driven by talent. For all of Tannehill's faults, he's stuck underneath a historic pile of fantastic passers. Warp him back to 1999, when Jeff George was the third-most efficient quarterback in the NFL, and Tannehill looks like a star.

This was the overriding story of the 2015 draft class: The demand for quarterbacks is insatiable. Every team without a decent starting quarterback—every franchise below the Tannehill Cutoff—was scrambling to get its hands on one of the only two viable prospects in the draft: Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota.

The Titans drafted Mariota even though he doesn't fit neatly into Tennessee head coach Ken Whisenhunt's offense—and the team reportedly turned down jaw-dropping offers to do so. Why? Because the gap between the haves and have-nots is just that huge.

What happens, though, when the haves turn into the have-nots?

Taking 2014's top 20 passers, adding three years to their recorded age and deleting every quarterback who'll be 37 or older for the 2017 season (and those who don't project as starters for 2015) turns our top 20 into a top 10: 

Name	PER Rk	Age +3	Rate ▾
Aaron Rodgers*+	2	34	112.2
Ben Roethlisberger*	3	35	103.3
Andrew Luck*	7	28	96.5
Russell Wilson	10	29	95
Matt Ryan*	11	32	93.9
Alex Smith	13	33	93.4
Ryan Tannehill	14	29	92.8
Joe Flacco	16	32	91
Jay Cutler	17	34	88.6
Colin Kaepernick	20	30	86.4

The average passer rating of this hastily projected 2017 top-10 ranking is 95.3, which turns back the clock to the mid-2000s.

It's no wonder two of three second-tier quarterback prospects went to teams with established stars: Neither the Green Bay Packers without Aaron Rodgers, nor the New Orleans Saints without Drew Brees, would scare anybody.

As many, including Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal, have pointed out, the NFL has a serious quarterback problem: Colleges running exotic one-read and read-option offenses aren't producing polished dropback passers. There simply aren't enough good pro-style quarterbacks for 32 NFL teams to run traditional offenses well.

One solution to this problem, as the Philadelphia Eagles have chosen, is to hire these collegiate offensive architects and deploy their systems. The other? Win games with defense.

As hard as it is to find a good quarterback, the last few draft classes have teemed with talented edge-rushers. Many, like the Houston Texans' Jadeveon Clowney, don't fit neatly into traditional 4-3 defensive end or 3-4 outside linebacker molds. Yet increasingly, as the Atlanta Falcons did with Vic Beasley, teams are drafting these athletic freaks first and figuring out how to deploy them later.

Sacks and pressures don't take the place of quality pass coverage. They do, however, disrupt drives, prevent points and can force offenses to shorten dropbacks and routes—causing them to abandon the deep ball, just as the great Ravens and Buccaneers defenses of the late 1990s and early 2000s did.

The cat-and-mouse cycle between offenses and defenses will never end. But with so many great quarterbacks about to disappear from the league, so few coming in to replace them and an unprecedented crop of freaky pass-rushers and hybrid defenses, defense could again reign supreme.

In a league with very few great quarterbacks, a player such as Tannehill could easily be the next Brad Johnson—and that's exactly what the Dolphins are betting on.