The Decline Of The White Quarterback?

Steve Sailer

09/12/2023

From San Francisco Gate (which I think is the SF Chronicle):

New evidence shows how badly NFL teams discriminate against Black QBs in the draft

From 2010 to 2022, teams were chronically underrating Black quarterbacks in the draft, a new statistical analysis from SFGATE shows

It could be that white quarterbacks are in decline relative to black quarterbacks, but if so, is that due to white QBs getting worse or black QBs getting better? I could imagine arguments for both assertions.

By Marc Delucchi
Updated Sep 11, 2023 12:53 p.m.

The NFL presents itself as America’s most cutthroat meritocracy. And yet evidence continues to show that teams screw up the single most important decision they make due to racial bias.

From 2010 to 2022, teams were chronically underrating Black quarterbacks in the draft, a new statistical analysis from SFGATE shows.

QBs selected in those drafts had four times better odds of reaching at least one Pro Bowl if they were Black.

OK, but that seems like a fairly tendentious single metric to choose: why obsess over guys who make one Pro Bowl when over the last generation, the NFL has been dominated by QBs with huge multiples of Pro Bowl appearances: Tom Brady 15, Peyton Manning 14, Drew Brees 13, Brett Favre 11, and Aaron Rodgers 10?

Clearly, the biggest payoff in the draft is to draft a massively valuable quarterback who will pass for at least 40,000 yards. They don’t come along every year — there have been 23 in pro football history, with Johnny Unitas being the first. Two have been black: Warren Moon and Russell Wilson.

Reaching the Pro Bowl isn’t a bad metric for evaluating draft choices. You could look at passing yardage or touchdown passes or whatever, but high picks tend to get more playing time than longshots even if they aren’t playing well. Back in 2009, when Malcolm Gladwell confidently declared in the New Yorker that there is “ no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft … and how well he played in the pros,” I did a reality check on him by looking at all the quarterbacks chosen in the NFL draft in the 1980s and 1990s and how many Pro Bowls they’d been selected for. (This led to a big spat between Gladwell and Steven Pinker that punctured Gladwell’s then overly inflated reputation.)

I thought about using total yards passing, but I decided that wouldn’t be fair to Gladwell because sometimes high draft picks turn out to be lousy but they still get a lot of yards passing because they are given a lot of opportunities to prove themselves before being finally cut. So I went with total number of Pro Bowls as my metric: e.g., the 7 #1 picks overall averaged 4.1 Pro Bowls each, while the 110 picks who went #200 or lower averaged 0.1 Pro Bowls each.

But this guy in San Francisco goes with counting everybody who made at least one Pro Bowl the same rather than counting total number of Pro Bowls. I suspect he rationalize this curious choice on the grounds that he’s looking at rookies in 2010-2022, so the latter ones haven’t had enough time to rack up a lot of Pro Bowls.

But when I did my somewhat similar analysis in 2009, I didn’t look at draft choices in the 2000s, I looked at draft choices in the 1980s and 1990s, so I could tell roughly how well their careers turned out because now even the youngest were in their 30s. Similarly, this guy could have looked at draft picks from, say, 1995-2014 and compared them to average total Pro Bowls so far in their careers. If he’s really measuring NFL racism, surely it hasn’t gotten worse in recent years, now has it?

Still, making the Pro Bowl is not that high an honor. Last year, six quarterbacks were chosen, but four couldn’t play because they were in the Super Bowl or injured, so four more were added for a total of ten in a 32-team league.

But, counting everybody who makes it just once as your acid test is racially biased because young black quarterbacks are usually better runners than young white quarterbacks. So they can reach Pro Bowl–level earlier in their careers because when they can’t locate their 4th and 5th option receivers the way Brady could, they can tuck the ball under their arms and run for daylight.

For example, in 2012, Robert Griffin III was offensive rookie of the year and was chosen for the Pro Bowl, throwing for 20 touchdowns vs. only 5 interceptions, and rushing for over 800 yards. But he got badly hurt, as running quarterbacks often do in the brutal NFL, and for the rest of his career his TDs to Ints totals were only 23 vs. 25.

But Griffin did get selected to that one Pro Bowl, so he counts as a success under this metric.

SFGATE’s analysis found a statistically significant gap between the rate that Black quarterbacks reached the Pro Bowl relative to their peers despite controlling for draft position.

At every stage of the draft, the average Black quarterback outperformed their non-Black peers. In fact, the analysis found that the average Black quarterback was more likely to receive at least one Pro Bowl selection than the average non-Black quarterback selected 66 picks (roughly two rounds) earlier. The evidence strongly suggests that racial bias is blinding teams in the draft process, leading them to prefer inferior quarterbacks as long as they’re not Black.

In other words, Black quarterbacks are penalized in the draft solely for being Black, our analysis suggests, and it’s a penalty that reverberates years into their professional careers.

Then again, few black quarterbacks have lasted as long as productively as Brady, Rodgers, Brees, the Mannings, Favre, Roethlisberger, or even Rivers or Ryan.

A simple statistic for quarterback career greatness is to look at career touchdowns thrown and career interceptions suffered and rank players by the difference. Not surprisingly, Tom Brady is number one with 649 regular season touchdowns to only 212 interceptions for a difference of 437 (and in the playoffs he threw another 88 TDs vs. 40 Ints), well ahead of Aaron Rodgers’ 370 and Drew Brees’ 328.

Rodgers is in first place with a 4.5 TD/Int ratio followed by Patrick Mahomes at 3.9, Russell Wilson at 3.2, and then Brady at 3.1.

The ratio of TDs to Ints has been climbing over the decades (due to passes intercepted per game falling steadily). Here’s a graph from Football Perspective:

When I was a kid watching the NFL in 1968, the height of sophisticated offensive strategy tended to be, “Let’s try heaving the ol’ pigskin way down field. Maybe something good will happen.” And when a bomb got intercepted, nobody much cared because that was about the same as a punt.

Here’s my table of the top 50 all time ranked by TDs-Ints.

It’s heavily biased toward recent decades due to the long improvement in this ratio: e.g., Johnny Unitas, the greatest quarterback of his prime 65 years ago, ranks only #70 by this measure (290 TD — 253 Int = 37). Broadway Joe Namath was -47 for his storied career: 173 TD — 220 Int.

(The worst TD — Int stat I’ve found was for 1996 GOP vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp: 114 — 183 = -69. One of the weirder coaching decisions of all time was the 1969 Buffalo Bills. They’d drafted O.J. Simpson #1, but they decided to build the offense instead around 34-year-old Kemp’s arm, despite him missing all of 1968 with an injury. Kemp must have had an appealing personality.)

So this bias in favor of recent quarterbacks gives blacks a pretty fair shot. The last extremely blatant case of discrimination against a black quarterback for being black was Warren Moon not being drafted in the late 1970s, so he went to the Canadian Football League, dominated, and then had a fine career in the NFL.

Counting Patrick Mahomes and Dak Prescott as black rather than as half-black, I find ten out of the top 50 QBs of all time by TD-Int are black, or 20%. Blacks are about 50% over-represented among the best NFL quarterbacks relative to their share of the population. On the other hand, blacks are even more over-represented at most other positions, so being only 50% overrepresented at quarterback is proof that NFL teams, which aren’t known for being competitive, or something, are irrationally discriminating against blacks just for grins.

A couple of decades ago, Rush Limbaugh got canceled from his side gig as a TV football color man for pointing out that the press was constantly hyping black quarterbacks beyond their accomplishments in order to claim racism in the NFL. Rush was proven right, though, as the next decade and a half or so saw white quarterbacks compiling astonishing career statistics, especially after rules were changed to make the game less brutal on its biggest stars.

But it could be that the era of white quarterbacks dominating is starting to fade out. Many of the big names retired in recent years, like Brady and Matt Ryan over the winter, Roethlisberger the year before, and Brees and Rivers two years ago. Rodgers got hurt seemingly pretty bad on Monday night and could be done for the season and maybe for his career. That would leave Matthew Stafford as the dean of white quarterbacks. There are a number of highly promising young white quarterbacks like Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, and Justin Herbert, but not quite the awesome lineup of the last decade.

Quarterbacks tend to be raised either as football coaches’ sons, or in fairly affluent families as the sons of driven guys with some cash to spend on all the tutoring it takes to claw your way to the top of the American sports pyramid. Concerns over concussions started to be a big deal about 10-12 years ago, so the flow of young white quarterbacks might be diminishing. I wouldn’t be surprised if tall, athletic white kids are focusing more on baseball or tennis and less on playing quarterback than 15 years ago.

In a perfect world, there should be no disparity between the rate that Black quarterbacks drafted at any point reach the Pro Bowl compared with non-Black quarterbacks drafted at the same point.

It’s not uncommon for there to be racial differences in career profiles. It’s hardly irrational for NFL teams to learn from Tom Brady, the most valuable player in NFL history, falling to 199th in the draft to take more chances on white quarterbacks in the hopes of finding a guy who will pass for over 50,000 yards.

These findings are not a reflection of the players selected but a reflection of the scouting departments and executives who made decisions during the draft. Despite persistent claims otherwise, there is no evidence that a player’s race has any impact on their [sic] athletic ability.

There’s NO EVIDENCE!

Rather, these results reinforce longstanding claims that Black quarterbacks face double standards, leading NFL teams to undervalue them in the draft.

The NFL is so uncompetitive that teams are leaving million dollar bills on the astroturf out of irrational bigotry.

Dating back at least three decades, well more than half of the league has been made up of Black players,

But there’s no evidence that a player’s race has any impact on his athletic ability.

although that number has slightly dipped in recent years. But less than a fourth of QBs drafted from 2010 to 2022 were Black.

“Black quarterbacks probably aren’t getting in the pool unless they’re amazing,” David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University who has extensively studied the effects of race in the NFL, told SFGATE. “White quarterbacks are getting in the pool when they’re not amazing. That’s why you see this.”

The data backs up Berri’s point. While nearly 1 in 3 (32.4%) signal-callers drafted between Round 1 and Round 3 were Black, less than 11.7% of quarterbacks drafted between Round 5 and Round 7 were Black.

Perhaps black quarterbacks who don’t have a strong shot at playing QB in the NFL tend to switch to other positions where they have more NFL potential, while white quarterbacks don’t have as many options (What else are they going to play? Tight end? Punter?), so it’s QB or nothing for them?

Say you are a fine black athlete, an All-State quarterback in high school. But you’ve topped out at 6’0″. You sign with Alabama and your college coach, Nick Saban, says that in his considered opinion, if you switch to another position he has in mind for you, you could likely start for him for two or three seasons and would project to being a second-round NFL draft choice. But if you stay at quarterback, you project as a practice team quarterback imitating the upcoming opposing QB on Tuesday and Wednesday, and maybe by your senior year you’ll be the second-string QB. If the first-stringer goes down, you could get some playing time in your 5th year at Alabama and go in the last or next to last round of the NFL draft. But you’d be lucky to ever throw a pass in an NFL game.

Coach Saban knows a lot about football. What do you do?

You switch positions.

Say you are a white quarterback, the son of a coach, who was all-state in high school. Coach Saban tells you that he sees you as the practice team QB and maybe his second-string QB when you are in your 5th year at Alabama. You ask about other positions. “You’re not really a Crimson Tide tight end. … How is your punting? I need a second string punter in case my Aussie Rules punter gets locked up on a DUI.” What do you do?

You look into the transfer portal to starting at North Dakota St.

Yet even though NFL teams have dedicated so many more picks to non-Black quarterbacks in the later rounds, the last non-Black quarterbacks selected after the 102nd pick (when Kirk Cousins was selected back in 2016) to go on to reach a Pro Bowl were Derek Anderson and Matt Cassel back in 2005. Over that span, Dak Prescott (135th), Tyrod Taylor (180th) and Tyler Huntley (undrafted free agent), a trio of Black quarterbacks, have all earned at least one Pro Bowl selection despite their limited draft pedigree.

Well, backup Tyler Huntley went to the Pro Bowl last winter for flukish reasons after throwing 2 TDs and 3 interceptions in 6 games. Tyrod Taylor was a starter for three seasons in the middle of his career. Dak Prescott is pretty good.

The trend is visible throughout the draft: Generational talent Patrick Mahomes slid to the 10th pick. Future MVP Lamar Jackson went 32nd overall. (You may remember one ex-NFL GM saying before Jackson’s draft that he should play wide receiver.) All-Pro Russell Wilson wasn’t drafted until the third round.

Besides Brady going 199th in the 2000 draft, Drew Brees went 32nd in the 2001 draft in which Michael Vick, perhaps the best athlete to ever play QB, went #1 overall.

… Berri recently co-authored a paper on the determinants of Black quarterback pay in the NFL that found highly drafted quarterbacks tend to receive more opportunities than those selected later in the draft, even when controlling for performance.

But they were just complaining about blacks not being selected in the lower rounds enough.

“Black quarterbacks seem much more likely to be evaluated in terms of ‘what have you done lately?’” Berri and his co-authors, Alex Farnell and Robert Simmons, wrote. “The halo effect from being a top draft pick seems to vanish much more quickly for the Black quarterback compared to White counterpart. The difference in rate of decay of early draft pick pay premium is substantial. Whereas it takes around 10 to 12 years for the early draft pick pay premium to vanish for White signal callers, a comparable Black quarterback sees his early round pay premium only last for 6 to 7 years.”

Warren Moon played into his mid-40s, but black quarterbacks tend to burn out faster. Colin Kaepernick went to the Super Bowl in his third season but lost 16 of 19 starts in his 5th and 6th seasons and was done.

It’s hard not to tie these findings to the San Francisco 49ers quarterback room. The Niners drafted Trey Lance, a Black quarterback, with the third overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft. According to the team, the Niners planned to have Lance sit behind Jimmy Garoppolo as a rookie before handing him the keys the following year. But after Lance suffered a season-ending injury in Week 2 of last season, he was usurped by then-rookie seventh-round pick Brock Purdy.

Purdy, a white quarterback, was undeniably good across his eight starts (five regular-season games, three playoff games), but he also suffered a serious elbow injury, and during the offseason, he had an elbow surgery that is rarely performed on football players. (He did look excellent in Sunday’s win.)

Beyond concerns about his health, there are reasonable questions about Purdy’s ability to sustain this success.

But the 49ers did not simply choose to roll with Purdy, leaving Lance ready to take over if he faltered. They also signed Sam Darnold, the third overall pick in 2018, to compete with Lance to be Purdy’s backup.

Lance is still a bit of an unknown; Darnold has unquestionably struggled in his 55 starts, debatably playing worse in a large sample size than Lance did in a tiny one. But Kyle Shanahan telegraphed all offseason that he preferred Darnold to Lance, and he made it official last month, naming Darnold the backup and shipping Lance to Dallas.

Darnold was a big star at USC but I wasn’t surprised he didn’t set the NFL on fire: he has a laborious wind-up that telegraphs to the defense: Get ready, here comes the pass!

The Wonderlic ‘excuse’

Both a 2007 study by Berri and Rob Simmons and a 2022 study published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics found evidence that Black quarterbacks were drafted lower than white quarterbacks with comparable college production and scouting combine performances. However, both papers found that the gap was no longer statistically significant present but not large enough to draw academic conclusions — when including Wonderlic test results. The Wonderlic is an intelligence test that academic research has found to have an anti-Black bias since the 1970s.

Or blacks have an anti-IQ bias.

Were teams actually heavily influenced by Wonderlic test results, or was this simply a convenient excuse?

Or maybe IQ does matter for playing quarterback in the NFL? And off the field, it definitely correlates with not getting yourself killed in a car crash, not getting yourself in a sex scandal, and not getting arrested on a domestic violence charge.

The NFL stopped giving prospects the Wonderlic test in 2022, and the past two drafts have had some positive developments, suggesting that perhaps a part of the problem in the past amounted to NFL teams refusing to ignore an antiquated test.

“Antiquated” is a dysphemism for “replicated.”

… In the 2023 NFL Draft, Bryce Young (Alabama), C.J. Stroud (Ohio State) and Anthony Richardson (Florida) became the first trio of Black quarterbacks in NFL history to be selected in the first 10 picks of the same class. Moreover, it marked the first time in NFL history that multiple Black quarterbacks were drafted in the first round and between Round 5 and Round 7.

… Persistent stereotypes

A pair of analyses published in 2009 and 2010, respectively, found that NFL teams and NFL media consistently described players in ways that emphasized racist stereotypes. White players were more often credited for their work ethic and intelligence than their Black counterparts. Black players, on the other hand, were often lauded for “innate” and “natural” athletic abilities, a backhanded compliment that discredited their work ethic and intelligence.

But obviously, football men never pay much attention to football. It’s not like coaches watch game film over and over and over. …

What? Really?

[Comment at Unz.com]

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