How do you get winning quarterback play in the NFL?
The question that dominates conversation after every Super Bowl and before every NFL Draft...how do you acquire a Super Bowl quarterback?
The Ringer’s Ben Solak, one of my favorite football analysts in the business, has been very defensive of Kyle Shanahan in the wake of the San Francisco 49ers loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.
I myself have a few more critiques of Shanahan and the 49ers than Solak seems eager to get into, but amidst his various commentaries on the Ringer NFL Show (a Spotify podcast) are two important acknowledgements.
Patrick Mahomes might be the greatest quarterback who’s ever lived and he makes it possible for the Chiefs to do a lot of things.
Brock Purdy is not the greatest quarterback alive and there are things the 49ers cannot do very well because of his limitations.
It feels like NFL analysis and Draft analysis is always veering back and forth between “you just gotta Draft a stud so you can hitch your wagon to him” and “get a rookie scale quarterback and then you can use the savings to build the rest of your roster!”
The 49ers certainly benefit within their roster construct from the fact they paid Purdy just under $1 milly for this season whereas the Chiefs have to fork over around $45 milly per season for Mahomes’ services. The 49ers have more flexibility and fewer limitations on who they put around Purdy from a financial perspective, yet the on-field issues always seem to matter more.
It seems impossible that Mahomes’ abilities would be worth the loss of $40+ million in cap to acquire other players to share the field with him and serve in the other 10 roles on offense or 11 roles on defense. Clearly they are worth that sum and perhaps more.
What do we make of the fact that such an expensive quarterback helps his team THAT much more than a cheap but still good quarterback? And how does that help us answer the question of how to get the kind of quarterback who can win a Super Bowl onto a given NFL team?
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