The QB Nonsense Index: A Banner Year for Absurd QB Storylines
What is quarterback nonsense?
It's the praise we heap on low-expectation quarterbacks who engineer 13-10 victories, and it's the criticism we level at high-expectation quarterbacks for 37-34 defeats.
It's three months of speculation about a quarterback's contract negotiations, followed by two weeks of either: A) decrying him as overpaid; or B) tutting that the team "won" the negotiations.
It's the out-of-context press-conference quote, the body language after the interception, the not-so-thinly-veiled phrases like "proven leader" and "athletic young quarterback." It's the quarterback's personal life, social life, number of commercials and presence on Instagram. It's a never-ending argument about whether he is "elite."
Quarterback nonsense is make or break and put up or shut up, winners just win and kid doesn't get it, pay the man and all the other cliches handed down by our football reporting forefathers. It's the form-fitting mold we place over a quarterback's performance or career, like we're screenwriters hammering the unique elements out of a sci-fi epic so it sounds more like Star Wars.
It's the atmosphere we breathe, like the smoky miasma at a Phish concert. It keeps us from thinking clearly or logically, but it provides a giddy rush.
And it can be measured, which is what happens here, in the third-annual Quarterback Nonsense Index.
Here we rank quarterbacks on their ability to generate narrative regardless of how they perform on the field. The rankings are based on a complex formula that factors in everything from recent playoff "chokes" to wearing a towel on sidelines or having "too many" tattoos.
This has already been a banner year for nonsense. And if the last two weeks are any indicator, the best is yet to come!
Unranked: Tom Brady, New England Patriots
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Never before in human history has there been a source of nonsense so pure, powerful, bold and overwhelming as Deflategate. It is a black hole of nonsense that crushes logical thought about Tom Brady, the NFL, professional sports and American society into a subatomic particle with the weight of a trillion suns.
While most quarterback nonsense is good for laughs, there is nothing redeeming about a seven-month (and counting) scandal caused by a minor rule infraction in a lopsided game.
The fact that some of you are getting ready to angrily type, "THERE WAS NO RULE INFRACTION BECAUSE IDEAL GAS LAW BLAH BLAH BLAH CONSPIRACY THEORY BLAH BLAH" proves my point. We passed the event horizon of civil discourse on this topic months ago.
That's why we have to leave Brady out of this Nonsense Index altogether. Deflategate will someday blow over. The other types of nonsense on this countdown are eternal.
31. Drew Brees, New Orleans Saints
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Few 21st century athletes have enjoyed as much nonsense immunity as Drew Brees. Phil Mickelson may be the most obvious comparison. Just as Lefty has spent his career in the Goldilocks Zone beneath dynamic, controversial Tiger Woods but above just about every other golfer on the planet, Brees has allowed polarizing superstars Tom Brady and Peyton Manning to sweep loony narratives into their orbits while remaining one of the NFL's best quarterbacks for a decade. It's a delicate balance: successful enough to be respected, but not so transcendentally successful that it creates a silly backlash, plus general likability.
Brees even gets to grow old gracefully, with Peyton Manning carrying most of the burden of the old quarterback has lost his fastball narrative. Brees says he wants to play until he is 45, but it takes a pretty dedicated snark-meister to squeeze nonsense out of that. Har har. Drew Brees loves his chosen profession and wants to pursue it as long as possible. Can you believe that guy?
Even Brees' 2014 vasectomy storyline provoked empathy instead of ridicule (once we got through the first layer of gentle genital one-liners). He never did provide a follow-up—it's the public's right to know, darn it—so we are left with an image of Brees sprawled on the couch this spring with a bag of frozen peas on his cargo shorts, watching The Masters and cheering. "Great shot, Jordan Spooooowwwwwwwch!" OK, so we aren't quite done with the one-liners. But compared to images of Tom Brady twirling an imaginary mustache and stuffing his cellphone down the garbage disposal, it's downright dignified.
Maybe Brady and Peyton are better. But when it comes to winning championships while dodging the dumber elements of NFL superstardom, Brees is the real GOAT.
30. Blake Bortles, Jacksonville Jaguars
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Good luck getting mileage out of criticizing a Jaguars quarterback. It's like kicking sand on a kid at the beach who is already covered in sand. Not only is the Jaguars fanbase puny, but it has a resigned fatalism about the team. Maybe this will be the year, but probably not. Maybe Blake Bortles is the guy, but maybe we just aren't meant to ever have "the guy." Sigh. Say, have you seen our stadium swimming pool?
Bortles told ESPN's Mike DiRocco that his arm deteriorated last season because he went straight from Central Florida to the exhausting predraft process into the Jaguars huddle with no breaks. A 23-year-old quarterback with a tired arm would have the New York media growling and yelping like a kennel in a thunderstorm, but in Northern Florida, the attitude is, Welp, the Jaguars will do that to ya.
So at least Bortles has minimal nonsense going for him. Half of the football public still has him and the last Jaguars quarterback merged together in its mind as a person named Blank Bortlebert.
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29. Tyrod Taylor, Buffalo Bills
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It takes time to build a nonsensical quarterback narrative. Construction usually begins when the quarterback is in college (he becomes a "winner" or a troubled mega-talent—or doubles down like Jameis Winston), then continues through the draft process (when we rate his combine press conferences and pretend to be able to interpret pro days), then goes to the custom detailing garage when he wins an NFL starting job and starts winning or losing games—or smiling or cowering beneath a towel after interceptions.
A quarterback who was not famous in college, generated no draft buzz and hid on the bench behind an established starter arrives in the spotlight as a blank slate. We haven't figured out what to do with Tyrod Taylor yet. Most "career backups who win starting jobs for desperate teams" are creaky thirtysomethings. Similarly, most "mobile young scramblers" haven't spent several seasons on the bench for a Super Bowl winner/contender. Throw in Taylor's late rise to the starting lineup and the size of the Buffalo market, and the easiest way to spin a storyline around Taylor, at least for now, is to ignore him and make fun of Rex Ryan instead.
The last quarterback to catch us this off guard this late in the NFL news cycle was Russell Wilson. That's good news for Taylor and good news for us. If Taylor fails, Ryan will take the heat. If he succeeds, we can look forward to contract disputes and quack remedies for years to come!
28. Teddy Bridgewater, Minnesota Vikings
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After providing shockingly high nonsense levels during the 2014 predraft-hype season, Bridgewater is enjoying a brief window of anti-nonsense.
Anti-nonsense is the blowback from previous nonsense that was unfounded. For Bridgewater, it started with acknowledgements that prior storylines about a terrible pro day or tiny hands were misguided and overblown, and it has grown into an increasingly gleeful and smug (I HAD IT RIGHT! YOU HAD IT WRONG! NYAH-NYAH) condemnation of all Bridgewater's forgotten/anonymous/made-from-straw critics, eventually reaching a crescendo of positive press that will likely collapse like a souffle the moment the quarterback suffers a three-interception afternoon.
Nonsense and anti-nonsense are like matter and anti-matter from Star Trek: They cause galactic explosions when large amounts of each collide. For now, Bridgewater is an exciting young quarterback we are eager to see develop into something special. If that development meets any setbacks, get ready to break out the hand measurements again.
27. Marcus Mariota, Tennessee Titans
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Marcus Mariota does not yet have a national personality of his own. He is still:
• The Non-Jameis Winston: Being known as "the guy who doesn't throw as many interceptions or have any legal problems" is very different from really being known.
• The Second-Best Quarterback Prospect: A huge portion of the football public reflexively adopts the second-best quarterback prospect in the draft as "the guy" because the best quarterback prospect is automatically overexposed, overrated or over-something. You probably know someone who has endorsed the second-best quarterback in every draft since Ryan Leaf yet thinks each time he (it's probably a dude) has made some carefully considered new decision rather than just selecting the guy who is on fewer magazine covers.
• The Scrambling/Spread-Offense Prospect: Mariota also has many detractors because he is a mobile quarterback from a spread offense, meaning he's a gimmick-gadget guy who will never learn the stationary pocket skills required to succeed in a league where Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson have gone to the last three Super Bowls. For every fan who has fallen in love with every second-best quarterback since Heath Shuler, there's another who has been dismissing spread-option quarterbacks as doomed to failure since Drew Brees.
Mariota plays in a tiny market and is as compelling to interview as the voice telling you to stay on the line for tech support, so he will remain the second-best non-Jameis, scrambly-gimmick-gadget guy until he does something really great or really terrible. Frankly, he dodged a bullet. If Chip Kelly had traded a truckload of draft picks for him, Mariota would have become the scrambling second-best prospect who went to a big East Coast region with a nutty fanbase with insanely high expectations because of a blockbuster trade. Can you think of the last guy who fits that description? Do you think that guy is at the top of our rankings (and the bottom of his team's depth chart)? Keep clicking.
26. Derek Carr, Oakland Raiders
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We haven't taken the narrative training wheels off Derek Carr yet. He still gets credit for finding his way into the huddle without needing directions, looking plucky while throwing short passes in 31-13 losses and not resembling JaMarcus Russell in any way.
What little nonsense Carr generates comes in the form of comparisons to Teddy Bridgewater. Some Raiders fans, who haven't watched a decent quarterback since Rich Gannon and probably don't scour Vikings game film in their free time, have a vested interest in shouting that Carr is a better quarterback then Bridgewater whenever Bridgewater receives national praise. For nonsense purposes, it's important to perceive praise of one quarterback as automatic criticism of the others, turning quarterback conversations into a zero-sum game.
Carr versus Bridgewater remains the most compelling NFL quarterback debate you can have after already discussing:
• Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning
•Russell Wilson versus Andrew Luck
• Jameis Winston versus Marcus Mariota
• Cam Newton's salary versus Eli Manning's salary versus everyone else in the world's salary
• Every quarterback controversy around the league
• Joe Flacco versus the Republican presidential field
25. Nick Foles, St. Louis Rams
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Nick Foles wriggled out of what would have been a make-or-break, last-year-of-the-contract narrative in Philly when Chip Kelly loaded all of Andy Reid's old offensive players into a trebuchet and flung them around the NFL. Expectations and attention are much lower in St. Louis. Foles just has to remain upright, hand off and not say things like "Boy, I love Los Angeles" to avoid controversy. The Rams even gave Foles a new contract just for getting through the summer without an injury.
Foles looked like an up-and-coming nonsense generator when he threw just two interceptions in 2014 and everyone pretended we thought he could keep that turnover rate up forever. Now, he's just another ingredient getting liquefied in Jeff Fisher's offensive slurry.
24. Alex Smith, Kansas City Chiefs
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As psych-outs go, the one that Utah devised for Jim Harbaugh in his debut as Michigan coach requires a little psychoanalyzing: giant Alex Smith signs, depicting the former Utes quarterback in his Fiesta Bowl heyday, which was more than 10 years ago.
Now there's a way to get Harbaugh quivering in his khakis. Oh no, images of the quarterback who…I finally turned into a playoff-caliber starter! Whose subsequent benching forced me to…reach the Super Bowl with his replacement, then an NFC championship game, then accept this cushy college gig! And the quarterback I benched who went on to…prove that he was a capable-but-obviously-limited starter elsewhere! Be still my trembling hands!
Poor Alex Smith. He finally gets the "head-on-a-stick" treatment, but only inexplicably and ironically. Smith is among the worst established starters in the NFL, but conversely he is by far the best of the gritty, mobile Matt Cassel-Ryan Fitzpatrick breed of veteran journeymen. He's a bad steak but a delicious hamburger. Our disdain for disappointing starters and our love of hard-working journeymen cancel themselves out with Smith, leaving us to wonder what would happen if he ever tried to throw the football farther than 20 yards. Harbaugh knew better than to ask him to try.
23. Carson Palmer, Arizona Cardinals
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Watching Carson Palmer play quarterback is like watching The Who try to get through a concert in 2015. No one goes to see The Who expecting to hear Quadrophenia played to perfection or "My Generation" performed with the punky energy of the mid-1960s. Watching The Who is all about celebrating the fact that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend can still drag themselves on stage and find their way through a concert. Daltrey changes keys and octaves to save his voice for a few melodic screams, Townshend has a few credible guitar solos left and the old guys can still sound sorta-OK if the 29-piece side band does its job.
That's Palmer's game in a musical metaphor. He can still string together a handful of beautiful deep passes or tight-window throws. Mix those with some savvy veteran moves and the Cardinals' opportunistic defense, and Palmer can muster some wins. It's hard to fault the guy for battling through injuries again and again to give the fans one more show; so that keeps the nonsense-mongers away from Palmer. You have to respect him, even when he is so clearly a fraction of what he was a decade ago. It's a feeling inside that you can't explain.
Watching Drew Stanton is like watching Fooled Again: the only officially licensed cover band for The Who in the McKean-Elk-Cameron County region!
Watching Logan Thomas is like listening to your nephew butcher "Baba O'Riley" on a ukulele.
22. Matt Ryan, Atlanta Falcons
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The Falcons passing game has been the only thing keeping the team out of the ACC for the last two years, making it hard for even the hardest-core winning-quarterbacks-win adherent to single Matt Ryan out for blame. It helps that Ryan plays for a small-market team that generates minimal drama even when going 4-12.
Ryan gets one more year of nonsense immunity as Dan Quinn rebuilds the Falcons defense. In 2016, his cap numbers shoot up to $23.75 million (via Spotrac), which should prompt renegotiation discussions, which should lead to people asking, "Is he worth it?,” which could lead to Ryan taking a long overdue turn at the bottom of the well. Nobody gets by on good stats, good behavior and actual merit in this business forever, buddy.
21. Ben Roethlisberger (and Michael Vick), Pittsburgh Steelers
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Ben Roethlisberger and Michael Vick on the same roster—that would have been a heck of a story about seven years ago. You know that old joke about dudes preparing for a wild night on the town? Hide your daughters and lock up your animals? That would have been sound advice.
But Roethlisberger's days as the NFL's baddest bad boy belonged to a long-ago era when values were different and we were less enlightened as a culture (it was 2010; people didn't even drive cars back then). Vick has reinvented himself at least three times since his dog fighting incarceration. These two famous men have put their youthful indiscretions behind them and are now aging gracefully into their respective roles—Big Ben as veteran superstar enjoying a late-career renaissance, Vick as an eager backup for whichever starting quarterback is least likely to get hurt.
It only goes to show that today's nonsense—or in this case: today's horrifying allegations or convictions—become tomorrow's fuzzy memories. And that's just in football. It's best not to think about politics.
20. The Houston Texans Quarterbacks
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Brady Babies (sung to the tune of “Picture Pages")
Brady Babies! Brady Babies!
Time to watch the Brady Babies!
Time to grab your Hoyer and your Mallett!
Brady Babies! Brady Babies!
Time to watch the Brady Babies!
What will Bill O'Brien do?
He's a Brady Baby, too!
If you fell asleep on the Texans' latest attempt to waste the prime of J.J. Watt's career by proving that Bill O'Brien is some kind of quarterback guru because he turned Tom Brady from a Hall of Famer into a slightly better Hall of Famer, here's a summary:
Brian Hoyer, who lost his job to Johnny Manziel last year because his throws have the velocity of a helium balloon on a still day, beat out Ryan Mallett for the starting job. Mallett celebrated his demotion by oversleeping and missing a team practice. Tom Savage looked on and wondered what happened to all of his 2014 predraft hype, and HBO generated more attention by acquiring Sesame Street than it got from broadcasting the entire quasi-controversy.
Until the Texans invest more than a fourth-round pick in the most important position in professional team sports, the role of the disappointing quarterback we all castigate for never reaching his potential and "not getting it" will be played by Jadeveon Clowney.
19. Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Packers
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Aaron Rodgers and actress Olivia Munn sure do enjoy making lip-sync videos, don't they? The videos are cute, amusing and would be age appropriate if Rodgers and Munn made them in a bowling alley after a junior high dance, not during breaks between shooting X-Men movies and trying to get the Packers back to the Super Bowl.
Isn't that awful? If quarterbacks are boring, we nail them for being boring. If they are silly, we get them for that. If they act like they are enjoying wealth, health, fame and the ability to enjoy some wholesome canoodling with Psylocke herself, well, forget about it. Rodgers is probably the NFL's best quarterback right now, he's a proven champion and he can lip-sync all the Mariah Carey videos he wants. Who cares what the smart alecks think?
18. Ryan Tannehill, Miami Dolphins
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One of the variables I use to calculate quarterback nonsense—yes, I really try to quantify it—is called the Four Year Linger. If a quarterback is in the same city for four years and doesn't reach a Super Bowl, a switch flips in the collective consciousness of fans and the media. The make-or-break storylines go mainstream, coinciding neatly with either the negotiation of the quarterback's second contract or his first season under that new contract. (He's getting paid; now it's time to get it done).
Ryan Tannehill has one year left before the Four Year Linger kicks in, and you can see how the system works by looking at his career so far. Tannehill was a pretty solid rookie, so there was little pressure or nonsense. The bullying scandal kept the spotlight off him in 2013, but a not-enough-weapons or other teammates-let-him-down angle would easily have done the same job. The pressure after 2014 is on Joe Philbin, not Tannehill, because coaches get shorter honeymoons than quarterbacks, especially when they call timeouts to stop the clock for the other team.
So the flowchart for assigning blame goes No Expectations—>Teammates—>Coach—>Quarterback. It's not usually this neat. But then, Tannehill is a rare quarterback who keeps a starting job for four years yet does almost nothing interesting, good or bad. Tannehill now has a beefed up supporting cast, a contract extension and a coach on the hot seat. Expect him to shoot up these rankings and into the mouths of the national talking heads if the Dolphins don't leap forward this season.
17. Philip Rivers, San Diego Chargers
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Too old to be as cocky as he is, too cocky to be as old as he is, Philip Rivers is on pace to become Jack Nicholson by age 45. Only one thing stands in Rivers' way: his reported unwillingness to live or work in Los Angeles. C'mon Philip, Los Angeles would love a tall, handsome, talented and slightly off-putting guy like you. Ian Ziering can't anchor those Sharknado movies forever.
Fans and the media kicked up as much Rivers dust as we could this offseason by overdramatizing his contract negotiations and using Ken Whisenhunt to generate some connect-the-dots trade rumors to Tennessee. But San Diego is the place where narrative goes to die. It's just big enough to produce one or two sports superstars per generation, just small enough to be protective about those superstars instead of flogging them New York-style, too remote to fit squarely into editorial deadlines and too beautiful for anyone to sit around a computer and obsess about how much money the quarterback makes.
Rivers made some preseason news when Seahawks rookie defender Frank Clark tried to take a cheap shot at him during a pileup. Clark didn't see the sign in the locker room with Geno Smith's face on it and the caption: "Quarterbacks must be at least this unpopular to sucker punch." Clark also didn't know that Rivers was voted Quarterback Most Likely to Jump a Defender in the Parking Lot WWE-Style seven years in a row.
16. Matthew Stafford, Detroit Lions
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Kenny Chesney brought Matthew Stafford on stage during a concert at Ford Field in mid-August. Chesney—who spends so much time sniffing around the NFL that he could be a Giants safety by the time you read this—had Stafford sign a helmet for him. Then, as Edward Pevos brilliantly put it on MLive.com, "The two then walked around the stage in search of a fan."
There's something existential about the image of Chesney and Stafford, at a Chesney concert in Stafford's home stadium, wandering around unable to find a fan.
Just kidding. Chesney has lots of fans. Who doesn't love a shirtless mor cowboy? And Stafford has lots of fans. Everyone loves a bazooka-armed quarterback who changes throwing motions like he changes sweat socks and always seems to be one weapon away from stardom, no matter how many weapons the Lions acquire. Stafford's game is like Chesney's music: It may not have impact or lasting significance, but it's professional enough, and it sure does pay the bills.
Ndamukong Suh absorbed an awful lot of the nonsense in Detroit that would otherwise have stuck to a well-compensated former first-overall pick who has yet to win a playoff game. Suh is gone. Just sayin'.
15. Johnny Manziel (and Josh McCown), Cleveland Browns
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Johnny Manziel did the right thing by entering a substance-abuse rehabilitation program in the offseason. It was the right thing because:
• Young people with substance-abuse problems should get professional help to work through their problems so they can live longer, healthier, more-fulfilling lives. Old people too.
• Rehab effectively flips the script on the celebrity-parties-on-an-inflatable-swan storyline, forcing everyone from the TMZ gotcha-gang to ordinary snark-peddlers like me to back off. In other words, it slammed the brakes on last year's runaway nonsense leader.
As a human being whose heart has not yet blackened into a lump of charcoal, I applaud Manziel for sobering up and rededicating himself to achieving his enormous potential, and I genuinely hope to see him grow into a successful/interesting NFL quarterback. As someone who tells quarterback jokes for a living, however, I must admit that if other young quarterbacks start finding therapeutic reasons for their setbacks, it will dry up the schadenfreude market and make my job a lot harder. If I have to think twice before calling young quarterbacks lazy, immature or arrogant after they make mistakes, I may have to (shudder) research and report interesting and factual new stories!
Manziel is the Browns backup, of course. Josh McCown is the starter. Try not to lose consciousness.
14. Peyton Manning, Denver Broncos
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When Peyton Manning suffered messy playoff losses in his mid-20s, he was called a choke artist. When he suffered one last year, he was called a broken-down veteran with a worn-out arm. Progress, maybe?
Manning is in the nonsense Hall of Fame. He and Brett Favre practically invented modern quarterback nonsense; the Internet sports culture that makes slideshows like this possible is built on the ruins of pioneer blogs that hurled nonstop criticism at Mr. Gunslinger and Mr. Chokety-Choke, players who would have been universally revered a generation earlier.
We've come a long way, and Peyton has accomplished enough to earn the grudging respect of just about everyone outside of Massachusetts. But Manning can still bring the nonsense. This offseason featured a fired head coach, some trade/release/retire rumors and a pay cut, plus the usual overexposure in commercials and lots of hand-wringing about his health. Of course, it can be argued that for a sports figure of his magnitude, the details of his push toward a final championship really are news, not silliness.
Manning told Peter King that he can no longer feel his fingertips since the surgery that wiped out his 2011 season. His old rival wishes he thought of that one. "There's no reason to give you my cellphone, Commish. I cannot text message anyone, because (fake sob) I CANNOT FEEL MY FINGERTIPS."
13. Jay Cutler, Chicago Bears
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Nonsense, like topical comedy, has an expiration date. There's nothing worse than hearing some mediocre morning radio jocks try to rehash has-been humor targets—Hey folks, guess who's at it again: Snooki!—and there's something desperate about milking jokes/scorn/criticism from a quarterback who has already been run through the wringer a few dozen times in the last five years.
You can practically feel the anti-anti-Jay Cutler backlash on the Internet: Oooh, you photoshopped a Cutler picture into a meme. How edgy. (Eye roll). Cutler is so unpopular that he is ironically sympathetic.
Bears fans have adopted Cutler fatalism: They are just hoping for production that approaches 75 percent of his talent level until the golden handcuffs of his most recent contract can be sawed through. Everyone else is just looking for a criticism target that doesn't have quite so many holes in it. Congratulations, Jay, you may not have proven your doubters wrong, but you at least you got them to punch themselves out so they were too tired to keep fighting.
12. Eli Manning, New York Giants
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A study in the anatomy of 98-octane quarterback nonsense:
• A quarterback due to make $17 million in 2016 (via Spotrac) begins contract extension negotiations with his mega-media-market team.
• Due to the automatic escalators built into the salary cap and franchise-tag rules, any reasonable extension would make that quarterback the highest-paid player in the NFL in 2016.
• A media insider duly reports the facts. Because "highest-paid player" is both A) an accurate detail and B) a juicy tidbit integral to the "media" element of being a media insider, the "highest-paid player" element of the story is highlighted.
• The "highest-played player" demand is ripped from its context and exposed to gamma radiation until it sprouts green muscles and starts threatening to smash puny humans.
• A full news cycle is spent debating whether the quarterback is greedy, arrogant or delusional for banging his shoe on the table and demanding to be paid more than, say, the Yankees' fourth starter.
• The quarterback and his agent eventually take to the airwaves to deny making any unreasonable demands.
• A full news cycle is spent accusing the quarterback of backpedaling and spin-doctoring.
Eli Manning's August contract kerfuffle was such vintage nonsense that it should be bottled and blasted on a deep space probe to the far reaches of the cosmos to warn advanced cultures what they are in for when they reach Earth. It was an otherwise quiet year for Eli, but just being the one starting quarterback in New York who won't get socked in the jaw by a teammate exposes him to some high-level baseline nonsense contaminants.
11. Colin Kaepernick, San Francisco 49ers
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If you told me last year that Colin Kaepernick would generate less nonsense than Russell Wilson in 2015, I would have muted you on Twitter. Wilson was a Super Bowl champion with a Q-rating in the rafters. Kaepernick had been nonsense catnip since the day he won the 49ers starting job: the tattoos, the gadget-quarterback angle, the hinky contract and even some brushes with a seedy tabloid situation. Kaepernick took a big step backward in 2014, while Wilson reached another Super Bowl. It wasn't going to be close.
But then Jim Harbaugh left, 49ers veterans started leaping out windows and hiding in laundry trucks to escape the organization and Kaepernick became, if not more sympathetic, at least one of the less-compelling characters on the team. With decreased expectations comes decreased nonsense.
Meanwhile, Wilson became the topic of endless summer contract squabble fanfic, plenty of not-worth-the-money beehive kicking and a mover and shaker on the magical-water-cures-serious-injuries circuit.
Kaepernick still has his haters, and not just among tabloid tattlers who don't realize that Kaepernick's celebrity profile is becoming a dried-up riverbed. I watched one of his early-August press conferences in a back country bar full of locals while covering another team's training camp.
"Turn your baseball cap around. You look like a complete idiot," the man next to me, who made Uncle Si Robertson look like a bank manager, said to the television screen.
"Look at them tattoos," he continued. "Boy, aren't those tattoos going to look great when you are lying in a nursing home with tubes coming out of your arms?"
Remember kids: Make all of your fashion choices based on how they will look decades from now when you are lying in a nursing home with tubes coming out of your arms. You'll really be worried about your appearance then.
10. The Philadelphia Eagles Quarterbacks
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Still doubt that Chip Kelly is a genius? Kelly:
• Traded for a former Heisman-winning quarterback with a history of knee injuries and a 2015 salary that would make an oil baron blush.
• Re-signed a former Jets quarterback so universally maligned and lampooned that he nearly invented the Internet meme industry.
• Signed another Heisman-winning quarterback famous for being Tim Tebow.
• Yet, through it all, made himself the center of attention.
That's like standing among Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift yet having everyone pay attention to you. That's genius. Maybe he should change his name to Chip Kanye.
Tebow brings baseline nonsense wherever he goes, and there have been many efforts to stoke Sam Bradford's injury, contract status or some potential controversy with Mark Sanchez over the starting job into something juicy. But making sense of Kelly's Eagles is like trying to navigate a cornfield maze while blindfolded, so any attempt to manufacture nonsense collapses into a mixture of disorientation and amazement. Look for the successes or failures of the Eagles quarterbacks to be laid at Kelly's feet.
9. Jameis Winston, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
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Jameis Winston keeps roommates awake because he stays up studying his playbook (though he doesn't snore), according to ESPN's Pat Yasinskas. He has a "goofy" leadership style that teammates find inspiring, according to ESPN's Coley Harvey. He is dedicated, hardworking and clean-living. Why can't we all be more like him?
Isn't young-quarterback love adorable? In the honeymoon after a first-round rookie is drafted, everything he does is positive. Even the interceptions are learning experiences.
Of course, "goofy leadership" becomes "immaturity" right around the first two-game losing streak, and late-night playbook arguments become "friction among teammates" after the first dozen interceptions or so. The top of these nonsense rankings is filled with quarterbacks who were fun-loving and playbook-memorizing in their youth but now only bring shame to those around them.
Enjoy the honeymoon, Jameis. You arrived in the NFL with plenty of baggage, some of it serious and some of it silly. Develop quickly and stay out of trouble, and it will be a while longer before we start unpacking.
8. Tony Romo, Dallas Cowboys
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Tony Romo spent years in the Nonsense Index Top Five. Now he's an aging veteran who will always be reviled in the I-95 corridor but has outlasted the jokes about what his last name rhymes with (har, har, wasn't that a fun couple of years?), his romantic life, his vacation habits and the late-season and playoff failures that had a lot more to do with the organization around him than with him, give or take a fumbled extra-point hold. (And what starting quarterback other than Romo still held for extra points in 2006?)
To put a decade of Romo nonsense in perspective, here is an except from this year's Football Outsiders Almanac.
"Romo has given up golf in the offseason in an effort to keep his back healthy. What a depressing thought: a wealthy, successful, athletic 35 year old giving up even the occasional round of golf to save himself for his grueling profession. If a corporate manager gave up moderate-intensity outdoor recreation because it was eating into his effectiveness in the boardroom, you would stage an intervention. But we expect our quarterbacks to give up everything in the name of entertaining us.
There's a deep, disturbing metaphor for approaching middle age in the first world coded within the saga of offseason Romo:
Age 27: Trip to Cabo at the height of "busy season!" Why not?
Age 28: Watching American Idol contestants and thinking: Got her, got her, need her, got her…
Age 30: Carrie Underwood is writing whole albums about you. Time to settle down.
Age 31: Marry Candice Crawford. We said "settle down," not "settle."
Age 32: High-altitude jogging: a healthier way to get a head rush than jetting off to Cabo.
Age 34: No carousing, less mountain jogging, more getting your butt kicked around a golf course by a kid 12-years younger than you. Granted, he's Jordan Spieth, but still…
Age 35: No more golf. Time to start trolling the early-bird dinner specials for mashed potatoes and applesauce.
"
Thanks for the nonsensical memories, Tony.
7. Joe Flacco, Baltimore Ravens
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Joe Flacco is more than just an elite quarterback, which is not necessarily saying he is an elite quarterback. He's a symbol.
Flacco—regular guy with the personality of unbuttered toast, former Super Bowl MVP, longtime resident of the second tier between the Brady-Manning-Brees demigods and the unwashed hordes of quarterbacks who cling desperately to their starting jobs—has become the human embodiment of quarterback nonsense itself, thanks to the mysterious PFT Commenter and his photobombing star turn at the Republican presidential debate last month.
"Is Joe Flacco a elite quaterback," indeed? Like questions about immigration or social justice, it's an unanswerable dilemma, an intractable riddle whose answer reveals the values, prejudices and anxieties of the person doing the answering. When we ask if Joe Flacco is elite, we ask what it means to be elite and what it means to be a quarterback, but we never ask whether clamping a meaningless title and a yes-no judgment on a complex issue is reductive, trivializing or silly. Maybe we are asking all of the wrong questions in political, cultural or quarterback debates. Yet we still crave answers.
Now a political figure as well as a quarterback, Flacco remains successful, highly skilled, durable, non-controversial in most respects and about as quotable as the fine print on a hairdryer warranty. A career second fiddle who makes a great punchline and doesn't scare you when he takes the reins at crunch time, Flacco will be a heck of a vice president someday.
6. Andrew Luck, Indianapolis Colts
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Andrew Luck only looks like a phenomenal young quarterback if you actually watch him play, look at his stats or place his accomplishments in meaningful context. If you start with reasons to criticize him and work backward—and really, who doesn't?—he's a nonsense factory. A former first-overall pick who throws too many interceptions and always chokes in the playoffs? Geez, when is the spin control on this goober going to stop?
Luck could stand to cut down on the turnovers, though Football Outsiders Almanac reports that 18 of his career turnovers occurred when the Colts trailed by 17-plus points. In other words, Luck takes extra risks in desperate situations instead of embarking on long, slow drives against prevent defenses to pad his stats. (Yes, Ryan Fitzpatrick, we're looking at you).
That is no reason to explain away the turnovers, though. Luck is a 25-year-old quarterback with three-straight 11-win seasons, three playoff victories and a 40-touchdown season on his resume. Still with a first-pick pedigree, great stats, an Indianapolis address, a less-heralded peer hogging the Super Bowl glory and a pair of postseason Patriots losses on his resume, Luck appears destined to follow Peyton Manning straight into the Nonsense Hall of Fame.
Luck is also all alone among young quarterbacks right now in terms of historic-new-contract storylines. We should probably start creating some imaginary deadlines now so we can properly overreact when they pass. Oh no, the Colts didn't negotiate with Luck on Groundhog Day! Maybe they plan to franchise him two straight years, then trade him straight-up for Russell Wilson! After all, neither of them are worth it!
5. Russell Wilson, Seattle Seahawks
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Cached in article archives around the Internet are late-summer musings that read roughly like this:
"Here is my hunch about how the Russell Wilson contract situation will play out. It is not based on inside information or any understanding of the salary cap—just a sense of how the negotiations are starting to shape up on my TweetDeck.
Wilson will play out his 2015 contract, unless the federal government increases the minimum wage to give him a modest raise.
The Seahawks will franchise Wilson in 2016 and again in 2017.
Wilson will then sign a $175 million contract to play shortstop for the Rangers, who will by then be desperate for a nearly 30-year-old middle infielder who long ago batted .229 in their low minors.
While winning multiple World Series, Wilson will file a lawsuit challenging the franchise tag system, the NFL's collective bargaining agreement and Roger Goodell's fitness to govern a league (Roger Goodell is very, very bad as we all know). He will settle out of court for $63 million in back pay and a promise that Paul Allen will build a time machine so he can get a do-over on that last play of the Super Bowl.
Meanwhile, the Seahawks will win two Super Bowls with Cardale Jones, proving that Russell Wilson wasn't so special anyway.
"
After months of inspiring emo-kid poetry about his contract, Wilson signed a hefty but entirely reasonable contract that gave the Seahawks ample cap clearance to build a team around him while still granting Wilson both gobs of cash and the chance to hit the market again while still in his prime. Faced with a sheer, smooth wall of professionalism and fiscal sanity, those of us forced to wring controversy out of every contract negotiation adopted pincer strategy:
Some pretended that contract negotiations are games with winners and losers and declared Wilson the "loser" for not demanding so much money that we could declare him "overpaid." Others pretended that the contract wasn't obviously more team-friendly than other recent quarterback contracts and declared that Wilson has crippled the Seahawks' chance to remain competitive.
Wilson fueled his own nonsense by informing the world (via Rolling Stone) that some overpriced bunk-science water helped him prevent head injuries. It's always dangerous to promote quack medicine in a society more likely to listen to a quarterback or faded starlet on the talk-show circuit than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it's hard to fault a young athlete for being ignorant about science when we just spent seven and a half months misapplying and misunderstanding the Ideal Gas Law we all learned in 10th grade.
Welcome to the inner sanctum of sports superstardom, Russell. Everything is now fair game: your personal life, your belief system, your sideline facial expressions. Just be thankful that you arrived with a Super Bowl ring already on your finger. It's like a Green Lantern ring that can generate a force field to deflect the nuttiest of the criticism. But it is far from foolproof.
4. Geno Smith and the New York Jets Quarterbacks
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Geno Smith is a quarterback nonsense game-changer. He was always prime grist for the criticism mill, the greatest target in history for secondhand character assassination attributed to anonymous sources. But before Smith, even the most unpopular and unsuccessful quarterback was still a human being, entitled to basic rights and protections under the law. Smith changed all of that, because:
It is now 100 percent OK to punch unpopular quarterbacks in the face.
Now, don't try this with Tom Brady or even a borderline quarterback like Matthew Stafford or some old journeyman like Matt Cassel. But if the quarterback is disliked enough, he can now be safely assaulted in his own workplace, and it will be his fault! Just make sure you have a justification that fits the quarterback's overall storyline, like he owed you a little money or was being "smug."
I.K. Enemkpali's locker-room punch of Geno Smith—which resulted in Enemkpali moving on to a better team while New York tabloids stalked Smith at home and took gotcha pictures of him playing catch with a buddy—begot Jay Gruden leaving Robert Griffin III in a preseason game until he suffered a concussion, then turning the concussion into a convoluted morality tale. Coming soon: Jay Cutler climbs into his car, only to discover that it is filled with venomous snakes. The public's response? Good leaders find a way to avoid snakes.
Until Smith returns and climbs back down the well, Harvard hipster Ryan Fitzpatrick and rookie Bryce Petty give the Jets a Mumford & Son quarterback tandem. When Fitzpatrick plays well, it's because he's a plucky smart guy from Harvard who tries his darnedest. When he fails (which is nearly always), well, what did you expect from a plucky smart guy from Harvard who tries his darnedest? Fitzpatrick knows how to make nonsense work for him. In other words: Do not try to punch Ryan Fitzpatrick in the face.
3. Andy Dalton, Cincinnati Bengals
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Overheard on sports-talk radio many times over the last eight months:
"HOST: Mike Tanier of Bleacher Report joins us now. Mike, break down the AFC North. The Steelers are always tough, the Ravens lost some pieces but nearly beat the Patriots in Foxborough last year, the Browns might be starting to turn the corner and the Bengals, Andy Dalton, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—what a mess. That guy's lucky he doesn't trip over his own shoelaces when he leaves the tunnel, amirite? (Cue: toilet flushing sound effect.)
ME: Um, well, he has a 40-23-1 lifetime record as a starter, has made the Pro Bowl twice, never misses a start and did a pretty solid job leading the Bengals to the playoffs last year even though his top receivers late in the year were Mohamed Sanu and Brandon Tate.
HOST: Yeah, well, uh-huh. Moving on to Russell Wilson. How obvious is it to you that he is a greedy, overrated pretender who would be nothing without the Seahawks defense?
"
And so on.
Dalton began his career as the lovably gutsy leader who found a way to win games back in 2011. The problem with lovably gutsy leaders who find ways to win games is that the best way to win games is to be supremely talented and capable of making extraordinary plays, but if you are supremely talented and capable of making extraordinary plays, you aren't categorized as a lovably gutsy leader who finds ways to win games. So the same attributes that made Dalton likable four years ago now make him a punchline.
Former Alabama star AJ McCarron had a great preseason, and Bengals fans are warming to McCarron. He's a lovably gutsy leader who finds ways to win games. And so the circle of life turns and turns.
2. Cam Newton, Carolina Panthers
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Imagine if Tom Brady flipped his truck three times after a December highway accident, spent 20 hours in the hospital, returned to the lineup after just one week and led the Patriots to two critical victories, then a playoff victory. Why, New England fans would petition the pope to make Brady a saint before Brady even died. The whole incident would not only be portrayed as miraculous, but as further proof of Brady's toughness, leadership, resilience, dedication, integrity, masculinity and overall superiority to the rest of us mere earthlings.
Cam Newton is not Tom Brady. So when he survives a scary accident, pushes himself to get back on the field quickly and takes a team with approximately three other identifiable NFL players on an unlikely playoff run, we criticize him for relying too much on the read-option.
What makes Newton such a nonsense factory is the fact that his career appears to be in the hands of some cosmic, all-powerful message-board hater. He's like Daffy Duck with Bugs Bunny at the animator's table, except that Bugs keeps putting a towel over his head instead of drawing him into cowboy costumes. (And yes, Newton's own Hugh-Hefner-meets-Kanye-West fashion sense fuels the nonsense flames.)
The Panthers keep taking away all of the playmakers around Newton—ACL injuries also do their part—and linemen in front of him. When Newton cobbles together something close to a functioning offense out of people like Corey Brown, Fozzy Whittaker and an offensive line full of practice-squad discoveries, his coaches respond with passive-aggressive praise and a loud anti-Cam chorus points to his passing statistics and wonders why he can't complete 60 percent of his passes with weapons like Brenton Bersin at his disposal.
And while the Seahawks unapologetically use the read-option to reach the Super Bowl every year, the Panthers insist on treating the tactic like a badge of offensive shame.
Newton just got a lucrative new contract and lost Kelvin Benjamin, guaranteeing that he will look like an overpaid underachiever in designer menswear this year. That's just the way quarterback nonsense goes. Ain't we stinkers?
1. Robert Griffin III and the Washington Redskins Quarterbacks
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The Redskins quarterback saga is the closest thing science will ever create to a perpetual motion machine. It just keeps spinning faster and faster, despite not having any new input.
Robert Griffin III has given the world three-plus seasons and offseasons of the most concentrated idiocy we have ever encountered. It would not have been possible without help, though. Griffin has shared the stage with a meddlesome owner, a pair of coaches better at mind games than game plans, a backup selected in the same draft (Kirk Cousins arrived with a blinking yellow sign that read, "This is the guy everyone will fall in love with at the first sign of trouble") and a fanbase addicted to a binge-purge cycle of anointing and executing would-be saviors.
Before you assign all of the blame to Griffin for his failure, which is the fashionable opinion at presstime, ask why he is playing an almost note-for-note cover of the Donovan McNabb swan song. Mike Shanahan gave Cousins a ringing endorsement during this week's Griffin dirt-piling seminar, when all of us pretended we never liked Griffin anyway (after following him with hearts floating around our head for the entire 2012 calendar year); Shanahan has developed dozens of media confidantes over the years, but we are still waiting for him to develop his first quarterback.
Griffin's time near the top of the Quarterback Nonsense Index is nearly through. He will slide to the bottom of the ratings during his second career as a damaged-goods quarterback bouncing around the NFL in search of a second chance that has about a 6 percent chance of ever arriving. So let's take this moment to remember it all: the predraft tizzy, the Herschel Walker-style trade everybody thought was a great idea for some reason, the theme socks, the Hope posters, the time when fans sent him wedding gifts, the weird little medical shed at FedEx Field that was used as Griffin's playoff examination room but never existed before or since (Dr. James Andrews' TARDIS, maybe?), daily updates of Griffin's "superhuman" recovery, the hoopla over his return and the long, slow, tortuous unraveling of his career, which the Redskins were helpless to stop but many other organizations could probably have solved with a few candid conversations.
Griffin may be gone when we do this next year, but the Redskins will be here. Good luck, Cardale Jones.
Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.
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