Football Bytes: When the Franchise QB Goes Wrong
Football Bytes: When the Franchise QB Goes Wrong
What Deshaun Watson, Dak Prescott, Trevor Lawrence and Justin Herbert have in common. Plus, Derrick Henry keeps on running.
Welcome to Football Bytes — a spin-off of my baseball column that I’m experimenting with, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various football spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Football Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏈 Can Franchise QBs save us anymore?
For the longest time, the prevailing wisdom of the NFL was that teams ought to do anything and everything within their power — beg, borrow, steal, back up the Brinks truck, etc. — in order to acquire a franchise quarterback. Since the QB is the most important player on any successful team, and passing the ball has only grown in significance over time, it made sense that acquiring a star field general would be the most straightforward step toward winning a Super Bowl.
That theory, however, has run into some trouble recently.
For one thing, it’s been well-known going back to the 2011 NFL CBA that a QB’s value relative to his cap hit is the real competitive value of a productive passer — hence, the dominant tactic of aiming to compete while a QB is still on his rookie contract. But even if we move past that caveat, the idea of simply getting any elite QB as the main item on a championship checklist has faltered, in the sense that we don’t seem to be able to know who will actually be an elite QB.
Take the latest chapter in the pathetic saga that is the Cleveland Browns.
After decades with a revolving rolodex — or more accurately, an ever-lengthening jersey — of names at quarterback, the Browns made a desperate and much-criticized trade to acquire Deshaun Watson from the Houston Texans for six draft picks (including three first-rounders), then signed Watson to a 5-year contract extension with a record $230 million in guaranteed money. The deal was immediately a moral disaster, since Cleveland knew Watson was accused of forcing himself on dozens of women during his time in Houston — though the Browns didn’t seem to mind as long as Watson wasn’t suspended for very long and continued to play at the level he did for the Texans, when he was one of the NFL’s top QBs.
But the trade has since become a football disaster as well, on the same scale as the infamous Cowboys-Vikings Herschel Walker trade that helped build Dallas’ 1990s dynasty. Rather than playing at an elite level, Watson has been horrendous when he did play — checking in at 18.4 points of QB EPA value below replacement level since 2022 — and he has been injured for much of that time anyway.
Watson’s latest, a season-ending ruptured Achilles suffered last Sunday against Cincinnati, put him out of everyone in Cleveland’s misery for the foreseeable future, if not longer. But the damage was already done in terms of his performance, which saw one of the biggest dives off a cliff by a QB in modern NFL history:
That’s an extreme example, maybe the worst trade/contract combo in the history of football. But there are other recent cases of established veteran QBs falling off after teams bet big on them to be The Franchise™.
For instance, Dak Prescott is also having the worst season of his career after the Cowboys signed him to a 4-year $240 million extension in early September. Granting that Jerry Jones may not exactly be the best general manager in the league, the Cowboys (who are perpetually in win-now mode) clearly felt like Prescott was the guy to lead their Super Bowl hopes. Few could have predicted that a still-prime-aged Dak would be hovering around replacement level on the season through six games.
Then there are the young “generational” QBs. Trevor Lawrence and Justin Herbert were often described as being the most talented prospects at the position since Andrew Luck or Peyton Manning, yet both have been highly inconsistent throughout their careers — and downright mediocre in 2024 thus far.
I’m not sure if this is the most unpredictable QB season in recent memory, but even Patrick friggin’ Mahomes is sitting below the league average in Adjusted Net YPA and EPA per action play. It’s just been a weird season for quarterbacks since the very beginning, and it continues unabated — even if I’m sure Mahomes will end up just fine by season’s end.
So too may Herbert, Lawrence and perhaps even Dak. (Watson won’t, though at least he can’t hurt the Browns anymore for now.) But their cases should cause us to further question the idea that getting a Franchise QB is the only thing that matters to a team — or if we can even count on our Franchise QB to reliably play like one.
In a season when the best at the position have been a bizarre mix of established talents we knew were good (Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow), surprise rookie sensations (Jayden Daniels), guys viewed as “system QBs” (Jared Goff, Brock Purdy), wild-cards with only 1 season of prior performance (Jordan Love) and resurgent guys we had all previously laughed at and written off (Kyler Murray, Baker Mayfield, Justin Fields, Geno Smith, Sam Darnold), the long-standing philosophy that you get your generational QB first — then the rest takes care of itself — is looking questionable at best.
Because, yes, sometimes the Franchise QB leads your team on the path to glory. But other times, you pay Deshaun Watson $230 million guaranteed and breathe a perverse sigh of relief when he suffers yet another season-ending injury.
🏈 King Henry still reigns
Derrick Henry has long been a marvel at the running back position, but this year he’s completely outdoing himself.
The two-time NFL rushing yardage and TD champ is yet again leading the league in yards gained (873) and touchdowns scored (8) on the ground. But this time, he’s doing it at age 30 — practically Methuselah-like by RB standards — and after an offseason where the Tennessee Titans, for whom he was the longtime face of the franchise, let him walk away in free agency.
Those aren’t exactly the circumstances from which you might expect one of the greatest rushing seasons in NFL history to arise.
But joining the Ravens this season has breathed new life into Henry’s game. In an offense long regarded for its success running the ball — Baltimore has finished no lower than No. 3 in rushing yards in any season since 2018 — playing alongside Lamar Jackson, the greatest rushing QB the sport has ever known, Henry is totally obliterating the usual RB aging curve.
Instead of peaking in his mid-20s and fading away like so many of his peers at the position — even great ones — Henry is near a new career high for yards per game and his 6.5 yards per carry is blowing away his previous career high of 5.4 from 2020. This is simply not supposed to happen with running backs in their 30s… but Henry is just a different kind of player.
We can see just how different by looking at the ages of the other seasons on the all-time highest YPG list:
Out of all 25 player-seasons to yield 115+ rushing YPG, only two — Henry in 2024 and Tiki Barber in 2005 — came at age 30 or older. And as good as Barber was that year (a fact often overshadowed by his feud with Eli Manning and the Giants’ subsequent Super Bowl victory), Henry is averaging significantly more YPC this season.
(In fairness to Tiki, only Henry, Jim Brown, Barry Sanders, O.J. Simpson and Adrian Peterson are in the chart above with a season of 6 or more YPC.)
To me, this season really adds to Henry’s case as one of the most dominant running backs of all time… if he stays healthy and keeps up the pace, that is.
While he sits surprisingly low (just 30th) on the all-time rushing yardage list, Henry could potentially have four seasons of 1,500+ yards — and maybe even add a second 2,000+ yard season — by the end of 2024. Doing his work in an era of diminished emphasis at the position, Henry has still managed to thrive and put up numbers that would stand out even in the RB’s earlier eras of glory. That should probably count for something, as should the sheer ridiculousness of his numbers at such an advanced age (by RB standards) this season.
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes
Regarding RB aging, I've never bought into the notion of using chronological age. Chronological age works only if the RB starts immediately - but many do not. This ironically includes Derrick Henry who for some inexplicable reason (a topic for some other long form piece) was in the Tennessee building for more than two seasons before the coaching staff decided to finally give him a shot at the starting job. That historically awful discretionary decision has arbitrarily pushed his aging curve out according to chronological age.
The better metric is touches. This make sense, since you don't age as fast blowing out birthday candles while sitting on the bench. In fact, if you look at touches, RBs begin to seriously decline after 1,500 to perhaps 1,800 touches. 1,500 touches is a sort of running back wall that can be extended for perhaps an additional year, but no more in the vast number of cases. Age works as a proxy for touches only for starting/star running backs who start right out of the gate. However, in the modern era these types of running backs are increasingly rarer and the need to look at touches instead of age is even more essential.
For example, I warned my fantasy football playing friends that taking the just turned 28-year-old Christian McCaffery this year was a huge risk since he was at 1,806 touches. Some listened, some unfortunately did not. Same with Saquon Barkley currently sitting at 1,489. His story as a pickup for Philly won't be fully revealed until next season when his $13MM per year comp could look mighty expensive as he hits the wall. I'm betting the Eagles paid 3 years for 1. Early warning for that 2025 fantasy draft night.
But what about Henry's touches? They are impressive. Outside of a freak foot injury in 2021, he's been remarkably healthy for the position. His touches currently stand at 2,326 and counting. Well over the RB 1,500 wall. For this reason, publications, like this one, almost reflexively note his performance as being almost superhuman.
But is it really?
One trend I've noticed is to view time in sports according to certain arbitrary cutoffs that are not analytically, but psychologically driven. Consider how often you hear the phrase "since 2000..." Why is the year 2000 an appropriate cutoff for any analysis? It's not but is used solely because of the way the human brain experiences time as a flow and has built calendars to capture that experiential flow. Consequently, year 2000 "feels" significant to us and a legitimate cutoff for analysis - but it isn't really.
Take RBs. How does Henry compare to the greats at that position - not ever - but just over the past 30 years? Not a particularly long look back really. Well, Barry Sanders ended an abbreviated career at 3, 414 touches. Emmitt Smith over a 15 year career had 4,924 touches. Henry isn't halfway to Smith.
Go back a bit further and you'll stumble upon Walter Payton at 4,330 touches over 13 years. Better yet, how about the bizarrely ignored accomplishments of Frank Gore in this century - 4,219 touches in a 16-year career. I guess to the sports media, it's not all about the U after all.
Henry is not quite as impressive now, is he? That's a large part of why he sits low on the all time rushing yardage list.
Look, Derrick Henry is certainly an outlier - a terrific player worthy of discussion - but not a superhuman one just yet. He has a lot of work to do to simply catch the likes of Sanders, Smith, and Gore. This is something that everyone seems to have forgotten about because most of the use cases aren't captured by the trendy artificial cutoff of "since 2000..."
Henry is certainly outstanding at his position, but superhuman only from our misleading use of chronological age as a marker and our unrecognized recency bias that misleads us.