Nothing Revives a Football Fan’s Soul Like Hitting on a Quarterback in the Draft

The greatest quarterback in modern Chicago Bears history is Jay Cutler, a man whose ultimate legacy may be as a meme more than a player. While he was a good quarterback at his peak, having him as the best Bears quarterback since Sid Luckman entered the league in 1939 says a lot more about this moribund franchise than Jay Cutler. Even though this year’s number one overall pick Caleb Williams has had plenty of struggles so far in the NFL, he has made enough high-level plays in the last few weeks to convince many Bears fans that Cutler’s spot at number two on their very small podium is seriously under threat, and some even dare to dream about Williams supplanting Luckman one day and truly bringing the Bears into the 21st century.

While Chicago showed everyone on Thanksgiving why they are the way that they are as Matt Eberflus invented a new way to mismanage the clock in what is likely the last NFL game he will ever head coach, Caleb Williams still did enough on the road against the juggernaut Detroit Lions (still a weird phrase to type) to push the game to overtime had he remembered how long seconds take at the end of it. This was another gutsy drive with the game on the line for Williams, who has had late wins snatched away from him by his special teams in Green Bay and the NFL’s greatest When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong moment in Washington on a Hail Mary. If the Bears can ever figure out a way to get out of their own way, they’ve got something really interesting brewing here.

Washington is another franchise who had long been mired in quarterback hell, although with a much prouder tradition since their all-time great who helped invent the downfield pass, Sammy Baugh. Sonny Jurgensen made the Hall of Fame after his career began in the late 1950s, and in the 1980s and early 1990s, Joe Theismann won a Super Bowl and Doug Williams became the first Black quarterback to win one in the last moments of national relevancy for Washington D.C.’s football team until this year. Like Chicago, Washington has been stuck playing a litany of retreads, also rans and nobodies ever since (save for one year before Robert Griffin III blew his knee out), until drafting Jayden Daniels one spot after Caleb Williams and watching him open the season by setting a litany of NFL records. Washington absolutely has a guy on their hands, and up until the Bo Nix revelation, Daniels looked to be a lock to win NFL offensive rookie of the year.

This kind of hope can even extend to truly hopeless teams like the Carolina Panthers, who have one great quarterback to their franchise’s name (Cam Newton), and who looked to have made the worst pick in recent NFL history with Bryce Young last year, drafted one spot ahead of C.J. Stroud who rejuvenated a Houston team defined by mediocrity and Deshaun Watson’s sexual assault lawsuits. After getting benched for Andy Dalton playing for his 5,000th NFL team at that point, Young made it back into the starting lineup after Dalton got injured and he has looked pretty good since, as Pro Football Focus has given him a grade of 77 or higher in three of his five starts since the benching, which would put him right around the 14th best quarterback this year in their rankings. This has given Panthers fans hope to a degree (at least the ones I know), as a reason to watch has emerged in the midst of yet another lost season.

A quarterback is hope. There is no other position like it in sports that can elevate an entire team. Playing quarterback is like doing open-heart surgery in the middle of a demolition derby. It’s a psychotic amount of information to process where you must instantly read coverages of anywhere between three and eight players while anticipating the movements of some of the most athletic humans alive and hitting your guys in stride on a pass—all while never looking at the group of 300-pound men directly in front of you attempting to kill you, and anticipating all the ways they will try while navigating away from them with your eyes downfield the entire time. There’s a reason there are so few truly great quarterbacks, and it’s because it takes the right combination of talent, intelligence, bravado and sheer insanity to excel at this preposterous position.

Which means that getting one when your team doesn’t have one fundamentally changes your outlook as a football fan. No longer must you put up with the tyranny of Patrick Mahomes, as your team finally has someone who at least can delude you into thinking your team has a snowball’s chance in hell against the inevitable. I have watched plenty of mediocre and anonymous quarterbacks demonstrate varying degrees of competence for my Denver Broncos ever since Peyton Manning retired, but I haven’t seen any of them make a throw like this on 3rd and 11 from their own endzone. To quote the Big Airstotle, Bo Nix is the mother fucking truth and there’s a reason he’s almost caught Jayden Daniels as the betting favorite for offensive rookie of the year.

wake up babe the end zone angle just dropped

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— Brett Kollmann (@brettkollmann.bsky.social) December 3, 2024 at 6:43 AM

I was seated above that endzone he threw from last night and felt myself ascend to a higher plane of existence when that laser landed in Marvin Mims’ hands. There are throws, and then there are throws. I have watched practically every minute of every Broncos game this century and nothing made me feel all tingly inside since Manning retired like that throw from Nix did. My take earlier this year suggesting the Broncos rookie might be a bust is the most wrong thing I have written on the internet since I predicted that Joe Biden had no chance and I should never be allowed to live it down. I am so Nix-pilled at this point I am even going all in on the cringey Bo-lieve Ted Lasso memes and there’s nothing you can do to stop me from posting Bo cringe.

I don’t know what the rest of the season portends for my plucky Broncos threatening for a playoff spot, nor for Jayden Daniels’ Commanders threatening to give theirs away, or for Caleb Williams’ Bears who can only get to the postseason if the NFC wants to get real weird with these final weeks, but I do know that us fanbases have a level of hope in the future we haven’t had in at least a decade if not more, all because it sure looks like these three teams have a guy under center who can make things happen that many others can’t. Even if these rookie quarterbacks don’t wind up panning out the way their fanbases hope, just having that hope to hold on to is a massive upgrade of a fan experience over having to watch the Case Keenums of the world throw ducks over the middle in yet another pointless season that makes you wonder why you even watch in the first place.