Rookie QB Advice: Don't Be One.

There's a reason you suddenly became the starter

Sep 09, 2024

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Caleb Williams (that’s him up there in the jersey) has good company when it comes to bad rookie NFL quarterback debuts. Williams absolutely did stink on Sunday, let’s be clear about that: He compiled a 55.7 passer rating, which is not only pungently awful but actually ranks as the 11th worst such rating among all QBs since 1970 who got drafted No. 1, as Caleb did.

However!

Rookie QBs stink a lot, it turns out — even those who were drafted first overall. Here are a few of the 10 NFL signal-callers who’ve actually had worse first starts than the one Williams logged for the Chicago Bears:

Eli Manning (45.1 passer rating)

Troy Aikman (40.2)

Matthew Stafford (27.4)

Terry Bradshaw (19.3)

and

John Elway (0.0).

That is correct: John Elway Blutarsky’d his NFL debut for the Denver Broncos. This occurred on Sept. 4, 1983, against the Steelers at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Elway started, went 1 for 8 for 14 yards and a pick, got sacked four times, and was benched at halftime by Denver coach Dan Reeves. Rating: Zero point zero.

It worked out okay. The Broncos won the game with Steve DeBerg behind center, went on to a 9-7 season, and made the playoffs, no thanks to Elway, who was 4-6 as a starter. But Elway got better, and — spoiler alert — became a Hall of Famer and multiple-times Super Bowl winner. The ending was not the beginning.

As you can see, quite a few very good (and even HOF) quarterbacks have had lousy debuts. Here’s what Elway and a bunch of those others have in common with Caleb Williams: They were mostly playing on terrible teams, or at least on terrible offenses.

There’s a reason they got picked first and then thrust directly into starting roles, and that reason usually was that the team which selected them is/was awful (hence the No. 1 slot in the draft). The worst teams pick first, and they usually or often draft quarterbacks, and then those quarterbacks become starters way before they’re ready, because the team blows, and they wind up playing behind hopelessly fouled-up offensive lines or throwing to a bad receiving corps or completely lacking, say, a running game that might direct the defensive attention away from the QB once in a while.

It’s great to be wanted. Being wanted by a washed team is a mixed blessing.

So Caleb Williams completed 14 of 29 passes for 93 yards and, you know, blech. It wasn’t much, and it was part of a Chicago offense that produced 148 yards total. Fortunately for Williams and the rest of the offense, the Bears’ defense rode to the rescue and overcame a 17-0 halftime deficit to beat Tennessee, in part by creating 17 points off turnovers.

“It was a frustrating game,” said Williams, the former Oklahoma and USC quarterback. “But the most important thing is that it shows a bunch of the personality of this team, I would say — the fight, the resiliency that we had.”

Hey, better than nothing. I should also note that, although he struggled mightily, Williams became the the first quarterback drafted first overall to win his initial start since 2002. (David Carr led Houston past Dallas in his debut that year, only to go on to get pounded into the turf repeatedly, absorbing a career-changing 76 sacks en route to a 4-12 record. I told you: Bad teams draft quarterbacks, who are then playing on bad teams.)

The past 15 No. 1 picks before Williams, dating back to Carson Palmer in 2003, went a a combined 0-14-1 in their first starts. So we got that out of the way. We also know that Caleb Williams is pretty good, with a chance to be really good. Can a pretty- to really-good quarterback overcome being drafted by a team that went 10-24 over the past two seasons? That’s why we watch the games.