Exploring processes for successfully drafting a QB. Is there a right or wrong way?

Yesterday's mock draft created some good conversation in the comments and the forum, and that's to be expected when the topic is quarterbacks and the direction the team should take, especially when your current starter is Derek Carr and you have no sure answers beyond him, and he just basically spent an offseason trying to find his way out of the building.

This is a very, very bad place to exist, and the crazy thing is it might look worse a year from now. You should be scared. You should feel angst. You should hate it here. And here's the thing: I have no idea what the right answer is to get out of this. People will tell you they know the way. They don't. No one does. This very problem has perplexed the league for decades.

Drafting the right quarterback is hard.

And because of that, I can't really tell anyone their philosophy on finding the answer is wrong. I know I fall into the camp of doing your scouting, trusting your board and only drafting players early on that you love or at least really, really like. In the later rounds, draft a plus trait and be willing to accept exceptions for those traits. But I can't tell you that your opinion is wrong if you want to go another route because, again, I don't think anyone knows what the hell they're doing at that position — not all the time. Everyone is just trying to eliminate negative possibilities.

There was one line of thought that popped up a few times that I did disagree with, though. There were a bunch of comments about how you should "reach*" to get your "franchise QB." I think we need to define what reaching is. Reaching shouldn't be part of the conversation if you think someone is your franchise QB.

*We have no idea where Cam Ward or Shedeur Sanders or Jaxson Dart or Tyler Shough are ranked. And, again, I hope one of them is in the top 10-15 and is available at Pick 9. I want the Saints to have a longterm answer at QB.

Bo Nix wasn't a reach for Sean Payton just because Mel Kiper* or whoever else disagreed with the value. Sean believed in Bo. In fact, I saw Sean recently, and he walked right up and the first thing he said was, "I'll tell you what. This kid is special. I was right." It took me a minute to catch up. "About what? You talking about Bo?" He goes, "Yes! Bo!" and scoffed like it should have been on the forefront of my mind. It wasn't. But it was clearly on his and probably has been since draft night. He believed something, graded accordingly and was right. If he didn't think Bo was that type of player, he wouldn't have drafted him.

*How many people do you think use Mel as the default name and face of draft coverage with offhand remarks? What an awesome position to be in … but also, that has to stink to constantly be accused of saying things you didn't say. I have zero idea where Mel had Bo Nix ranked*, and I have no idea if he hates the pick, but I dropped his name because Mel as Sean's imaginary enemy because he owns the industry.

** I looked it up. He had Nix 31st on his big board and as his sixth QB. So, it was a reach by those rankings. He had Penix 24th.

I think we need to define a reach or reaching as going after something you think is a maybe. A shot at maybe hitting on something while being accepting of the increased risk of missing. In other words, a calculated risk where you're willing to stretch outside your rankings a bit, like taking a player ranked way lower at nine.

However, if your school of thought is that if you're picking at nine and you don't see J.J. Watt on the board and you think the team should just say, "Eff it, nothing works anyway. I'm taking the best available QB in the first round every year until I hit because nothing matters until I find one"… Well, I disagree with that process (even if I get the philosophy behind the thought), and I think it'd be nuts to blindly spend premium assets on lottery tickets when you can bet selectively using information and scouting, but I couldn't sit here and say for sure it wouldn't work or even blame you for not believing in a process that doesn't offer enough protection against busts.

Most of the league liked Zach Wilson and RGIII coming into the league. And most of the league didn't love Jalen Hurts. There were more doubts about Patrick Mahomes* than Mitch Trubisky**. Sometimes it feels like everything misses until someone passes on C.J. Stroud and he lands in your lap.

*All the Air Raid QB doubts seem even dumber now. I won't lie. I sort of wondered, too.

**I had heard about some analytics system the Saints were using to test quarterbacks that year and was told that the system hated Trubisky. I hope they're still using it.

But now I'm curious … what would happen if you went back 25 years and gave the Browns the next quarterback picked in every draft they didn't pick a QB (or the next QB taken after their pick in years they traded it)? They currently have Deshaun Watson, Kenny Pickett and Joe Flacco on their depth chart. A random rigid process vs. whatever they've been doing for years.

Let's find out!

2000: Chad Pennington

2001: Drew Brees

2002: Patrick Ramsey

2003: Rex Grossman

2004: Ben Roethlisberger

2005: Aaron Rodgers

Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. How did the NFL let this happen? How was everyone missing on these guys? I do think Rodgers and Drew needed to be overlooked and doubted to become the assassins they became, to become so dedicated to the process. But this is nuts.

Let's keep going and see if it gets a little more normal.

2006: Kellen Clemens

2007: Brady Quinn

2008: Brian Brohm (traded in 2007 to pick Brady Quinn)

2009: Pat White (Stephen McGee if you don't want the Wildcat QB)

2010: Tim Tebow (Jimmy Clausen as next if you don't want to count Tebow)

2011: Andy Dalton

2012: Ryan Tannehill

2013: EJ Manuel

2014: Johnny Manziel

2015: Garrett Grayson (I had no idea he was the third QB selected)

2016: Paxton Lynch

2017: Mitch Trubisky

2018: Baker Mayfield (missed)

2019: Drew Lock

2020: Jordan Love

2021: Kyle Trask

2022: Kenny Pickett

2023: Will Levis

2024: Spencer Rattler

Man, what a strategy this would have been at the start of the century! Even Chad Pennington would probably be the team's best QB ever since the original team moved to Baltimore. Derek Anderson might be the only real competition. If the Browns had started this after it became clear Tim Couch wasn't going to hit, they would have ended up with either Brees, Roethlisberger or Aaron Rodgers. Using that stretch would be insane cherry-picking and incredibly out of context, but it's the ultimate trump card if you want to make an argument about just picking the best QB every year to someone who isn't a NOF member. See what membership gets you?

After that amazing start, it certainly gets dark. There are a lot of misses. A lot of bad QBs, some of them picked by Cleveland. You'd end up with Andy Dalton and Ryan Tannehill, who could maybe be fine starters or at least bridge guys, but they both probably would have struggled on bad rosters with no other viable first-round talent. The Browns got Baker Mayfield and it didn't work, so can't rewrite history there. And maybe that means other guys would have failed, too. But you do end up with Jordan Love at the end.

Is this a real strategy? Of course not. The GM would for sure get fired if he started this at any point after 2006. The team would be awful unless you kill it on the rest of your picks and have an outstanding pro scouting department that keeps cheap talent rolling through. But I doubt this strategy gives you a roster that could nurture a player like Love. The only way it really works in a real-world situation is if you find an Andrew Luck or Patrick Mahomes — super rare talent that elevates everything.

But the question as it pertains to this—would the Browns have found a quarterback faster by picking the consensus best available one every year since 2000 than by using their own process—seems to have a clear answer, even if you start in 2006.

What if the Saints had started this after Drew Brees retired? Let's look!

2021: Kyle Trask

2022: Kenny Pickett

2023: Will Levis

2024: Spencer Rattler

Nothing there for them other than the Rattler lottery ticket, which they still have. Everyone knows they should have done more for Mahomes or taken Lamar in 2018. Keep it going from there and you end up with Love in 2020. A lot of teams should have picked him, too.

Last one. I want to see if we can fix the Jets. Let's work backward on this one.

2024: Bo Nix

2023: Will Levis

2022: Kenny Pickett

2021: Zach Wilson

2020: Jordan Love

2019: Daniel Jones

2018: Sam Darnold (missed on Josh Allen)

2017: Patrick Mahomes

If you're picking in the top 10, it looks like there's more of a case for taking the best QB on your board … but, again, you can't actually do this every year. And what if the year you decide to start drafting the best QB regardless of how you feel about him is the year Daniel Jones is there and you have to spend a few years seeing if it works? The flip side is what if it's the year Mahomes or Love or Allen are there?

So, I think the point swings both ways. If you're just taking a swing without aiming it, are you in one of the years where everyone is sleeping on someone? I still believe you hire good scouts and trust them (and I think the Saints have good scouts), but you can't really tell someone who thinks you should just take the best one whenever you need one that they're wrong because some years, they're not. And some of those those years have been the biggest hits in recent history.

No matter what, there are more false paths than true paths. We see teams try and fail every single year. It's a horrible place to exist. You can't be scared of failure, but you also have to try to answer the question without compounding the problem over and over and over, which might be the hardest thing to do in sports. You want to be the team that sees it right and, drafts Lamar Jackson and gets out of QB hell after a short stay. You don't want to be the team that makes 25 years of mistakes and has Deshaun Watson, Kenny Pickett and Joe Flacco to show for it.

The only right answer is the one that works, and there isn't a person alive who can tell you how to find that without enduring some amount of pain, unless you get really lucky and take the chance no one wants to take — like Green Bay. Twice.

Just like all of you, I try to put myself in that seat every year and see which hands I'd play at quarterback. It all feels so random. Same thing this year. I believe in Ward. I think Shedeur has a special way of seeing the game and tools that could make him a good starter if you support him. I like Shough as a bridge guy. Dart — I'm mixed on. I'll probably be wrong on all of them, and that's why I usually just like to share an opinion, get out of the way and then wait and see. I have enough failed evaluations to know it's fruitless — especially at QB. And if you don't have those QB misses, well, you just aren't deep enough into the draft community yet. Ultimately, though, my hope is that the Saints will like one of these guys enough to draft him, and we will get to watch it unfold up close.

Even if they don't we're just going to evaluate, talk and share what we hear and give best guesses and opinions, but that's about it. A few years ago someone commented on one of our podcasts that our takes on the draft prospects weren't strong enough. On the next show, me and Kevin were joking about it and said the tagline for NOF should be, "That's interesting. Let's see how it turns out."

That hasn't changed, and I think this weird rabbit hole we just went down (and I hope it all connects and makes sense because I'm just rolling at this point) just shows how random things can be. Once you know that, the hot takes seem wild. We're all wrong sometimes … and we're all right sometimes. Just depends on the year. If you stand on something long enough, you'll hit. Ultimately, we're going to evaluate the results. And if the team takes a quarterback or doesn't take a quarterback, we're going to watch that and see if their thought process was right and decide if the choice was right.

QB Buzz

I reached out to six teams who are already set at quarterback this week to get a feel for where they think the quarterbacks will get drafted and how they have them ranked to get a feel for the market. The top of the list is no surprise. The consensus is that Cam Ward will go first and Shedeur Sanders will be picked second. But the third guy for of these teams wasn't Jaxson Dart. It was Louisville's Tyler Shough.

The breakdown: Three teams had Shough ahead of Dart, two other teams called it a push, and a sixth team had Dart ahead of Shough. Does this mean that Shough will be the third QB off the board? Not necessarily. All it takes is for one team to see it differently and make the call. But it does feel like maybe the public consensus is different from how teams see it — we know it is, at least in a few buildings.

I've heard from a few people who have said the way people have the quarterbacks ranked from building to building and there is no real consensus. All of this is setting up for some major intrigue on draft night.