How Successful Are First-Round NFL Quarterbacks?

When your favorite NFL team doesn’t have a solution at quarterback, it’s one of sports’ emptiest feelings. In the modern NFL, without competent quarterback play, virtually every franchise is automatically doomed. 

Thus, the common consensus is: Find a quarterback, figure the rest out later.

More often than not, teams will want to use major draft capital to find a young, cheap quarterback. That means directly deploying a first-round draft pick or trading a set of picks to move up into the first round. Hopefully, the use of such heavy draft capital solves the problem.

But here’s the problem with that strategy.

Are we even sure first-round quarterbacks are good?

How Successful Are First-Round NFL Quarterbacks?

As it turns out, maybe the entire premise of drafting a first-round quarterback is overrated. Drafting a guy in the first-round has turned out to be, for the most part, a 50/50 proposition. 

Let’s go through an exercise. My colleague Nick Hennion recently outlined all the NFL Draft first-round quarterbacks that have been selected since 2019. 

Let’s ignore the 2024 picks and sort the rest into three buckets. I’ll try to be mildly conservative with my prognostication here, but you still might disagree with where I slot some of these guys. Let’s just go with it. 

Bucket 1: Young Quarterbacks Who Look Like They’ll Be Successful:

• CJ Stroud (Texans, 2023)
• Trevor Lawrence (Jaguars, 2021)
• Joe Burrow (Bengals, 2020)
• Tua Tagovailoa (Dolphins, 2020)
• Justin Herbert (Chargers, 2020)
• Jordan Love (Packers, 2020)
• Kyler Murray (Cardinals, 2019)

Bucket 2: Busts & Backups

• Anthony Richardson (Colts, 2023)
• Kenny Pickett (Steelers, 2022)
• Zach Wilson (Jets, 2021)
• Trey Lance (49ers, 2021)
• Mac Jones (Patriots, 2021)
• Dwayne Haskins (Commanders, 2019)

Bucket 3: Your Mileage May Vary

• Bryce Young (Panthers, 2023)
• Justin Fields (Bears, 2021)
• Daniel Jones (Giants, 2019)

As I’ve accounted for things, that’s 16 first-round quarterbacks taken from 2019-23. Seven look like they’ll be successful, while six appear to be busts. 

And that’s being pretty generous with the bust tag, mind you. I would label Jones as mostly a failure despite his career stats, since no team other than the Giants would have continued to let him start that many years in the turnover-prone modern NFL. 

Young came on strong in the latter part of the 2024 season and may have turned a corner for his professional career.

Fields still has a lot of defenders and shouldn’t be fully saddled with the fatal sins of the Bears and Steelers’ offenses. (Bad news for him: The Jets’ offense probably won’t be much better this year.)

If you take the sample size back further than 2019, you’ll see similar results. Drafting a quarterback in the first round is essentially a 50/50 proposition. And sadly, the odds are probably even worse if you’re a bad organization with bad talent evaluators. 

None of this means you shouldn’t draft a quarterback at all, mind you, or that you’d be better off trying to make something happen with some kid from Central Arkansas State that’s available in the seventh round. 

But if your favorite squad is burning its first-round pick on a quarterback, maybe wait a beat before getting too attached. About half the time, he’ll probably flame out in about three years.