What We Learned From the 2022 NFL Draft


Most analysts agreed that the 2022 NFL draft contained the weakest crop of quarterbacks in at least a decade. But few teams that needed a quarterback expected historically to be nearly unaffected:

  • The Atlanta Falcons entered the draft by signing Marcus Mariota as the starting quarterback. Mariota is so fragile that if she crashes into a porcelain vase, the injured are towed. However, the Falcons did not select a potential replacement for him until Cincinnati’s Desmond Ridder in the third round.

  • Sam Darnold He was rejected by the Jets after the 2020 season and has been losing ground since, but his current team, the Carolina Panthers, waited until the third round before choosing Mississippi’s Matt Corral as a possible successor.

  • The Seattle Seahawks starting quarterback is Drew Lock, who threw in the Denver Broncos’ Russell Wilson trade like an extra pack of honey mustard and an order of chicken wings. With Geno Smith as a backup, the Seahawks chose no other opponents in the position. The Detroit Lions didn’t do it either for Jared Goff, the equivalent of filling a seat at an awards ceremony.

Kenny Pickett of the University of Pittsburgh, selected 20th overall by the Pittsburgh Steelers to replace free agent journeyman Mitchell Trubisky, was the only point guard selected in the first two rounds. The last time the draft had such a quarterback drought was in 2000, when the Jets picked Chad Pennington in the 18th overall pick and the next quarterback (Giovanni Carmazzi of Hofstra) was the 65th pick.

Malik Willis, a first-round talent from Liberty but making it to the third round due to his unpreparedness for small schedules, will apprentice to the Tennessee Titans under Ryan Tannehill because few teams at the top of the draft can afford to invest. A point guard who isn’t ready to play until his coach is fired.

A few teams can be relied upon most years to panic and meet unimpressive quarterback expectations, so it’s unclear why the league is so bad for this group. Perhaps general managers learned their lesson from generally drafting players like Goff, second Mariota and Trubisky, and third Darnold: Reach too high for a quarterback and you’ll reach it again in a few years.

Or perhaps teams found themselves preoccupied with a new problem.

The NFL is running its own theory of chaos: Just as the wings of a butterfly can change the course of a hurricane, a sudden decision by the Jacksonville Jaguars in March plunged the current weekend into a tsunami.

When the Jaguars signed Christian Kirk, a mid-range buyer to a four-year contract worth $72 million, at the start of their free-casting cast, it seemed like a simple case of a poorly run franchise mismanaging its payroll. Instead, it started a chain reaction. All-Pro receiver Davante Adams sought his own top-dollar contract extension, which prompted the cap-bound Green Bay Packers to trade Adams to the Las Vegas Raiders, who signed Adams to a five-year contract for $140 million. Tyreek Hill immediately wanted an Adams-like deal, forcing Kansas City to trade to the Miami Dolphins. Soon, every big name in the league seemed to be demanding either a bigger contract or a trade.

Thursday night, Titans traded AJ Brown The Philadelphia Eagles and the Baltimore Ravens sent Marquise Brown to the Arizona Cardinals in exchange for a first-round pick. Meanwhile, the Detroit Lions and New Orleans Saints traded extra picks to advance in the first round and pick Alabama’s Jameson Williams and Ohio State’s Chris Olave, creating a run on buyers to be signed to lease-controlled rookie contracts.

The spike in buyer salaries is now a first-world problem; Playoff teams like Green Bay and Kansas City may not be able to place their superstar quarterbacks and favorite quarterbacks until the market stabilizes. In that respect, a small change can be a welcome change, as the league’s privileged class has gotten a bit arrogant lately.

Most NFL teams in the early 2020s can be divided into two categories: Forever Rebuilders and Live Fast/Die Broke Contenders.

Rebuilders collect all the picks they can in the early round, then often spend wisely looking for golden quarterback tickets. Meanwhile, jet set contenders try to trade their top picks with well-established veterans so they can take a nap in the early rounds. Fast forward a few years, while Rebuilders often find themselves in the same dampness, while Contestants do a small cap witchcraft and continue to enjoy their lavish lifestyles.

The league’s success gap has reached absurd proportions this year: eight teams entered the draft with more than one first-round draft, while 10 teams broke the record by completely skipping the first. The Jaguars won first and twice in the first round for the second year in a row. (They chose Georgia’s fastest player Travon Walker and Utah’s linebacker Devin Lloyd.) The Jets and Giants chose two of the top 10 picks (each performed uncharacteristically wellno matter how good).

At the other extreme, the brain-confidence of the Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams scorched other teams for their picks, like depraved aristocrats who bet on villagers fighting for bread, at a press conference Thursday night.

Not every team with two picks in the first round was a permanent doormat: Kansas City and the Packers had two picks each after the Hill and Adams trades. For every contender chasing bargains at the thrift store, a team like the Lions are stuck with two best picks in a quarterback-less draft.

The only proven way to escape the cast of rebuilding is to get a franchise quarterback. A handful of successful, like the AFC champion Cincinnati Bengals did Joe Burrow. However, a team that risked too much for such a prospect could be like the low-end Chicago Bears, who traded this year’s first-round pick to take Justin Fields last year and now don’t have the resources to build an adequate offense around him. Bad franchises get the first share of the best leads that fail because they’re trapped in bad franchises, and the depressing metaphor for late capitalism continues.

Similarly, it takes years of corrupt spending and arrogant drafts for a competitor to return to the ranks of the rebuilders. We’ll revisit the New England Patriots for that matter next year.

A team must be both well-managed and somewhat lucky to escape an endless rebuilding cycle that brings us back to the 2000 quarterback class. Pennington led the Jets in one of the rare qualifying periods, and most others failed as expected. The real treasure in this nearly empty barrel was a skinny lad selected by the Patriots in the sixth round.

There’s hardly any Tom Brady lurking at the end of the class of 2022, but in the days after the NFL draft, everyone was allowed to daydream.



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