The NFL has become a very quarterback-dominant league, where quarterbacks get a ton of credit when their team wins and most of the blame when they lose.

Around the league we’ve witnessed countless teams bench their highly touted young quarterbacks the moment things aren’t going well. Bryce Young and Anthony Richardson are the more recent examples, but this issue has gone on for quite a while now. And it’s posed the question as to whether or not the league has a quarterback development issue.

Obviously, there are a lot of factors that go into why playing quarterback in the NFL is hard, including a lack of continuity. Changes to the coaching staff happen every year whether a team is very good or very bad and that can make it difficult for young quarterbacks to adapt when there’s a new philosophy year in and year out.

NFL teams also rush rookie quarterbacks to start, which can stunt their growth as a player because some players need time to grow. Lastly the NFL is just a much faster game than college, which forces players to be a lot quicker in their decision making.

Players like Kenny Pickett, Trey Lance, Justin Fields, Zach Wilson and others have all been benched, and it doesn’t feel like this issue is going away anytime soon. But we’ve also seen a surge of quarterbacks who were written off as young players, being picked up by other organizations and thriving with the talent teams saw before they were drafted. Players like Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, and Geno Smith were all high draft picks but didn’t produce in the early parts of their career. They have now found success elsewhere without the pressure of having to live up to expectations.

But maybe this issue is happening throughout every level of football, and it’s only magnified once these quarterbacks get to the NFL.

In today’s era at all levels, quarterbacks play in pass heavy offenses where they’re asked to play in the shotgun and throw the ball a ton. What you don’t see, even at the youth levels, is quarterbacks playing under center utilizing play-action or using personnels with two running backs and a tight end.

Everybody uses a spread offense with four to five wideouts and maybe one back with the mindset of passing. And maybe that strategy works from youth football to college because of the talent gap. But once you get into the pros, everybody is a good player so you must have nuance in your offensive playbook to keep defenders honest. It’s hard to win when you ask your quarterbacks to go through their progressions and make the right reads when half of these guys have never experienced what it’s like to play within an offense that doesn’t ask you to sit in the shotgun and throw the ball every down.

So maybe the development of quarterbacks isn’t solely on the NFL but rather the culture shift of the game at all levels.

Another overlooked factor of why young quarterbacks are being benched so much is because the pressure ownership puts on head coaches to win in the NFL. Coaches decide to bench young quarterbacks who are struggling in large part because they feel veteran quarterbacks give their team a better chance to win. And that’s probably true, but the coaches only do that because they feel the pressure from ownership to win games. And if they don’t win they can potentially lose their job.

So, I think it goes a little bit deeper than the development part but rather coaches are afraid of losing their jobs if they’re not able to win games right now. 

Which poses the question to NFL ownership of whether the development of a young quarterback is or isn’t more important than immediate team success.