The Story That Never Ends

Jun 30, 2008, 4:12:21 AM by Bob Gretz - FAQ

It will be a story line that threads its way through the entire 2008 Chiefs season. Every day, every practice, every game and most especially every post-game will include analysis, dissection and commentary on the performance of quarterback Brodie Croyle.

It is the constant that will hang over the Chiefs for the next six months, and beyond.

As we stand here on the cusp of July ‘08, there is nobody who can say with certainty that Croyle will make it as a successful NFL starting quarterback. The folks at Arrowhead Stadium believe he has the physical, mental and emotional abilities to succeed at football’s most difficult position. Right now, however, that remains an educated guess. Croyle’s six starts at the end of last season provided only a shallow pool of evidence as to his future.

Now, there are fans and pundits who have already made up their mind. They’ve watched Croyle’s few performances and declared him a bust. It’s easy to dismiss those evaluations because they have no basis in reality at this point; they are based on emotion and prejudice. Ultimately, those that feel that way may be correct. They will wag their fingers and say “See, ain’t I a genius!” No, you just guessed right.

Croyle needs more starts, more games, and more performances to make any intelligent decision as to his competence.

But how many games and how many performances? How long will it take to show the world whether he can cut it or not? Will we all know in 2008? Will the Chiefs and their fans have to wait until 2009? Is 2010 a possibility?

2010? I’m sure that shocks some people. That would be two full seasons from now. But it well may take that much time. Every quarterback is different. Every situation a quarterback walks into is different. If there was a standard template, then there would not be the hand-wringing that’s going on around the league in places like Minnesota, Miami, Arizona, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, Green Bay, Washington, Buffalo, Atlanta and anywhere that does not have a proven, successful starting quarterback.

What the past provides, however, are snapshots to study. That’s what we will do over the next two weeks. In a prior missive we compared what Croyle had done in his first six starts compared to other quarterbacks (Six Games In, June 4, 2008).

This time we will look to the future and analyze what other quarterbacks have gone through, what footprints they left in the quarterback sands and how that might translate into judging Croyle’s development as the Chiefs starting quarterback. Possibly, we can come up with a milepost marker in his career when we’ll have the evidence (based on history) to give a thumbs up or thumbs down.

We will focus on contemporary quarterbacks. As they enter the 2008 NFL season, here are the twenty quarterbacks who have roster spots as of June 30th that have had the most starting assignments in the league:

It’s an interesting collection of passers. There are six Super Bowl victories among them (Manning, Johnson, Brady with three and Warner.) There are four other quarterbacks who started for the losing team in the Super Bowl (Collins, McNabb, Hasselbeck and Delhomme.) Of the group, only 11 remain established starters for their teams. The rest are either fighting for the job or are confirmed backup quarterbacks.

For this analysis, we will not use all of these quarterbacks, but only those who began their careers as starters in similar situations as Croyle; he became the Chiefs starter at the end of his second season. So we will consider only those quarterbacks who stepped into the No. 1 chair as a rookie, second or third-year player.

This eliminates Johnson, Green, Garcia, Warner and Delhomme. Johnson did not start a game until his fifth season (1996) in the league with Minnesota. Green did not start a game until his sixth season (1998) in pro football. Garcia played five years in Canada before he signed with San Francisco (1999) and became a starting NFL quarterback. Warner’s story of going from the Arena Football League, to NFL Europe and finally to the St. Louis Rams, took five years before he made his first NFL start in the 1999 season. Delhomme spent his first four seasons in New Orleans, where he started two games as a rookie, but did not become a full-time NFL starter until his fifth season (2003) in the league with Carolina.

We are also going to use as a standard in our evaluation the number 64, or in this case 64 games as a team’s starting quarterback. That’s the equivalent to four full NFL seasons and for the most part that should be enough time to make an evaluation. This would eliminate Frerotte, who was a starter in Washington for only three seasons before beginning his bounce around the NFL (he started 44 games over four seasons with Washington and then in the last 10 seasons, with seven different teams, he’s started 38 games.) Palmer and Pennington have not reached 64 starts, largely due to injury.

That leaves us with a dozen quarterbacks. They range from Manning and Carr, both the first player taken in the NFL Draft, to Kitna who entered the league as a college free agent. Bulger, Hasselbeck and Brady were sixth-round draft choices, Brunell went in the fifth round and Griese was a third-round choice like Croyle. McNabb, Harrington and Collins were first-round picks and Brees went in the second round.

Starting Wednesday, we’ll look at these 12 guys and their early development. We’ll see if there are any common threads and whether history provides us with valid mileposts to judge the development of any starting NFL quarterback.

Like Brodie Croyle.

Wednesday: we’ll look at the development of Peyton Manning, Mark Brunell and Kerry Collins.

The opinions offered in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Kansas City Chiefs.

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A former beat reporter who covered the Pittsburgh Steelers during their glory years, Gretz covered the Chiefs for the Kansas City Star for nine years. He is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Board of Selectors. He has been the senior columnist for the Chiefs web site since its inception.