The Bottom of the NFL's Quarterback Conundrum
Five teams, five messy quarterback rooms and a whole lot of reasons to start scouting the 2027 NFL Draft.
There are plenty of places you don’t want to find yourself in the NFL. You don’t want to be old, expensive and watching a championship window slowly close around you. You don’t want to be rebuilding without enough young talent to make the rebuilding part exciting. And you certainly don’t want to be entering a season with a coach everyone knows is probably going to be fired by Thanksgiving.
But I’m not sure anything feels quite as hopeless as looking around your quarterback room and realizing the answer probably isn’t there.
That is the unfortunate reality facing a handful of teams as the 2026 season approaches, and perhaps the cruelest part is that many of them have nobody to blame but themselves. Years of bad draft picks, failed development, questionable contracts, ill-advised trades and veteran Band-Aids have left some of the NFL’s least inspiring operations in exactly the place you never want to be: desperately trying to convince themselves that maybe this quarterback situation isn’t as bad as everyone else thinks it is.
There is hope on the horizon, at least. The 2027 NFL Draft could feature an absurd collection of quarterbacks, with Arch Manning, Dante Moore, CJ Carr, LaNorris Sellers and Julian Sayin among the headliners before we even get to names like CJ Bailey, Trinidad Chambliss, Jayden Maiava, Darian Mensah and Drew Mestemaker. Who knows how many will actually declare or remain highly regarded by April, but the possibilities are tantalizing enough that fans of quarterback-starved teams might spend quite a few Saturdays dreaming about the future.
Because the present?
Oh, buddy.
New York Jets: We’ve Somehow Ended Up Back at Geno Smith
There comes a point when you just have to throw your hands into the air and ask, “What are we doing here?”
Geno Smith returning to the Jets as their starting quarterback more than a decade after the franchise drafted him almost feels too perfect. Smith famously revived his career after leaving New York, emerging as a legitimately good slinger of the pigskin in Seattle before things took a turn for the worse last season in Las Vegas. Now he’s back where everything started, playing for a franchise that has spent the intervening years providing increasingly compelling evidence that perhaps Geno Smith was never really the Jets’ biggest problem.
Just look at the journey. Sam Darnold was supposed to lift the franchise out of the abyss, only to eventually find considerably more success elsewhere. The Zach Wilson experience followed, and that was somehow even more depressing. Aaron Rodgers arrived amid Super Bowl aspirations before his tenure became memorable for almost everything except winning football games. Justin Fields got his opportunity. Mike White had his “Linsanity” moment, becoming the most important man in New York for approximately 15 minutes. And now, after all those years searching for an answer, the Jets have somehow circled all the way back to Geno.
Perhaps this works. Smith has played good football before, and I suppose there is a universe where he turns back the clock and drags this team to eight or nine wins. But when the rest of the room consists of Cade Klubnik, Brady Cook and Bailey Zappe, there isn’t exactly an obvious succession plan waiting behind him.
The Jets are going to Jet, and Geno Smith starting in 2026 is simply the latest chapter.
Cleveland Browns: How Many Quarterbacks Can One Franchise Possibly Try?
I don’t particularly want to touch Cleveland’s quarterback situation with a 10-foot pole, but somebody has to do it. Deshaun Watson and Shedeur Sanders are currently battling for the starting job, with Watson getting the first crack in Cleveland’s preseason opener before Sanders starts the following week. Watson appears to have the advantage for now, which means the Browns may once again turn to the quarterback at the center of one of the most disastrous trades in recent NFL history.
