Every NFL team wants a good, young quarterback. Drafting one is the hard part.

At this week’s NFL draft, the 32 teams in the world’s most profitable league will be searching for its most valuable commodity: a young, difference-making quarterback.

Talent is only part of the appeal as new draftees enter the league on bargain, cost-controlled contracts. In a league in which offenses rely heavily on passing and the highest-paid veteran quarterbacks command $60 million annually, paying a starter a fraction of that amount makes it easier to build a championship-contending roster under the salary cap.

Teams devote countless hours and resources toward what amounts to perhaps the highest-pressure job search in professional sports, all in hope of uncovering the next Jalen Hurts, Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow or Brock Purdy, each of whom has led his team to a Super Bowl appearance while on a rookie deal since 2019. 

Yet all the investment in and spotlight on identifying a franchise’s next great quarterback don’t mean teams have gotten any better at picking them.  

Of the 75 quarterbacks selected in the first round since 2000, 35 earned at least one Pro Bowl appearance. Twenty-one did it multiple times. Just six went on to start and win Super Bowls, and five have been named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player. For every 2004 draft class that produced future franchise cornerstones Philip Rivers, Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger, there is also a 2011, when the first round included future MVP Cam Newton but also three other quarterbacks who lasted less than 69 career games apiece.

“Player development and quarterback development is circumstantial, and there are different trajectories of development, and how players develop is really impacted by the circumstance and the village surrounding them,” said Scott Pioli, an NFL Network analyst who worked in NFL front offices from 1992 to 2019, including winning three Super Bowls with New England before spending three years as general manager in Kansas City. 

“Just because someone has immense talent doesn’t mean that they’re being brought into a circumstance or a situation that has all the right people, meaning coaches, front office. They don’t necessarily have the right infrastructure.”

That variable makes it impossible to create a foolproof hiring process for any job in any NFL franchise, from the general manager to the nutritionist, said a longtime NFL scouting executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships within the league. Still, the executive acknowledged that quarterbacks endure a different, and deserved, level of scrutiny.

“It’s really hard to put all this on the players. The environment is critical,” the person said. “You’re taking a big, giant step in terms of the ability and talent level of guys that you’re playing against. Combined with less time to practice the things that you need to practice, along with an impatient fan base, impatient owner, impatient everybody, it’s a difficult world all around to really excel in.”

Quarterbacks have been sought-after for as long as football has existed, but the 2011 collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and its players union made good, younger starters even more valuable by lowering their cost. As the No. 1 pick in 2010, quarterback Sam Bradford earned $50 million guaranteed on a contract with a maximum value of $86 million. The next year, with new rookie-scale contracts in place, Newton went No. 1 on a deal paying him $22 million over four years. Last year’s No. 1 pick, quarterback Caleb Williams, signed a four-year contract worth $39 million with the Chicago Bears.  

Purdy is the most recent and extreme example of a low-cost, high-reward draft pick. The 262nd and final pick of the 2022 draft, Purdy earned $870,000 while leading San Francisco to the Super Bowl in his second season — less than many of his starting-QB peers made in just a half of one game, according to ESPN calculations.

That kind of potential upside often leads teams to “overdraft” quarterbacks, said Chris Simms, an NBC Sports analyst and former third-round selection at quarterback. A prospect might be ranked 45th among all players on a team’s draft board yet be selected in the top 10 because of what he called a combination of the position’s importance and a team’s desperation.

This year’s quarterback draft class could offer a fascinating test case. Though Miami’s Cam Ward is reportedly Tennessee’s target at No. 1, at least one team’s grade of Ward would have made him just the seventh-best QB in last year’s class, and another team didn’t give any of the available quarterbacks a first-round grade, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter. Seattle Seahawks general manager John Schneider cautioned people in February to be “careful” not to describe this QB class as “weak.”

“I think it depends on the team, the player, the quarterback, how you’re going to acquire him, where you’re going to acquire him,” Schneider said.

The foundation of a quarterback evaluation in 2025 looks similar to one from 50 years earlier. The first priority, Simms said, is whether a player has the physical tools. To Pioli, arm strength matters, but it isn’t as dependable an indicator as accuracy and decision-making. 

“You could be really smart at the quarterback position, but can you make a good decision under duress when you’re getting punched in the mouth?” he said. “Those things are very, very different.”

Over the decades, however, a data revolution has armed teams with more data than ever about draft prospects. Yet it hasn’t moved them closer to cracking the code of how a particular player will perform in a team’s particular environment, the longtime NFL scout said, because teams can interpret statistics, interviews, background checks and measurements in wildly different ways depending on the preferences or biases of an owner, a general manager or a coach. 

From 2000 to 2015, 15 quarterbacks drafted in the first round became franchise fixtures, starting at least 100 games in their careers. Yet in the same span, just as many first-rounders played fewer than 60 games. As recently as 2023, when four quarterbacks were taken in the first round, one (Houston’s C.J. Stroud) has become a bona fide starter, while three others have struggled to establish themselves.

Some teams lean more heavily on impressions from scouts, while others are driven by analytics departments. Teams can fall into the trap of overanalyzing a player’s performance during the pre-draft process from January to April more than their on-field production. Simms believes an overreliance on analytics “has actually confused people more.”

“The great ones have great talent, and they have a charisma about them in the locker room,” Simms said. “We’re talking [John] Elway, [Dan] Marino, Peyton Manning, of course, Tom Brady, [Aaron] Rodgers, to where they can talk to anybody in the locker room and get them to follow and get the energy up on a daily basis in the locker room. And that’s what the great ones have. And I think sometimes that gets lost in translation a little bit with all our other analytical tools we’re talking about.”

The longtime NFL scouting executive said, “It always comes back to competitive confidence that I believe I can compete with anybody.”

Believing it would lend insights into the NFL draft, Pioli liked to learn how teams in other sports and corporations hired, too. With quarterbacks, he came to believe it was a numbers game. 

“Smart teams realize, rather than hubris, there’s humility, and they understand that they’re going to get it wrong,” he said. “So you better take as many swings at it as you can.”

Pioli was in New England’s draft room in 2000 when the Patriots took arguably the greatest quarterback swing in draft history by selecting Tom Brady with the 199th overall pick. Brady went on, of course, to author the most decorated career of any NFL quarterback. What stood out about Brady?

“We had a lot of people involved in the process, but a couple of the things that I do remember coming up consistently was ‘why does it seem that every time that Michigan wins, this is the guy that’s playing quarterback?’” Pioli said. “That was pretty consistent. When Tommy played, they won. And that seems like a very simple thing, but it mattered. 

“The other thing was a group of people thought he was pretty darn accurate. Everyone that interfaced with him also felt like, you know, his work ethic and his overall makeup as a person was exactly what we wanted in our culture.”