There are times when rookie quarterbacks enter the NFL, and the entire deck is stacked against them. Some are able to overcome it, and some really aren’t. Bert Jones of the Baltimore Colts threw four touchdowns to 12 interceptions in his rookie season of 1973, became the only rookie quarterback ever to post a negative and went on to become one of the NFL’s most dynamic passers in the later part of the decade — Jones was John Elway before John Elway to a degree. Terry Bradshaw threw six touchdowns to 24 interceptions in his rookie season of 1970, and it took a number of years before he gained Chuck Noll’s trust and became the Hall of Famer he eventually became. And most of us remember Peyton Manning barfing up 28 picks in his rookie season of 1998 before things eventually turned around in a positive direction.
Rookie yips are pretty common. There are other times when quarterback and coaching staff just don’t work well together, and you get some really bad rookie results. Think of Jared Goff’s 2016 season. The first overall pick was saddled with Jeff Fisher’s coaching staff, including offensive coordinator Rob Boras, and Goff produced some of the worst DVOA (-74.8%) and DYAR (-881) numbers in Football Outsiders’ long history. Not that Goff rebounded to become a Hall of Fame-caliber player, but he did manage to dig himself out of quite a canyon when Sean McVay came calling in 2017.
Moving to the case of Justin Fields, who the Bears selected with the 11th overall pick in the 2021 draft (trading their 2022 first-round pick to move up to do it), we have another situation in which a rookie quarterback was monumentally ill-served by his coaching staff. Fields had to endure all kinds of garbage about his NFL readiness in the pre-draft process — things that are sadly common for most young Black quarterbacks — when his Ohio State tape told a very different story.
Once Fields was past all that, he had to deal with a far more tangible obstacle — the…