Found this awesome bit of writing from my favorite NFL writing on the difficulty of predicting star quarterbacks:
Imagine a Fortune 500 company with 32 regional branches, all of which are locked in a Darwinian struggle to be the most profitable branch. Underperforming CEOs get the Glengarry Glen Ross treatment at the end of each year. Headquarters then dips into the college ranks for replacement CEOs, where they find dozens of qualified applicants for a handful of wide-open positions.
Three-to-five young hotshots – magna cum laude MBA graduates with glowing internships who were also Greek Council presidents – are given the reins to the worst branches, the ones which were recently restructured and/or have a depleted, demoralized workforce. Perhaps a dozen others are hired into the bean-counter department, where they have a slim chance of working their way up through the ranks. Occasionally, one newcomer earns an “heir apparent” opportunity behind some Cornelius Vanderbilt-type, though such captains of industry remain in power for so long that the heir might end up withering in obscurity.
The rookie CEOs sometimes get a brief grace period or some mentorship. By their second year on the job, however, they must start producing bottom-line results. Otherwise, the branch might splurge to lure a veteran CEO from another branch or dip back into the collegiate pool. If a bean counter or a creaky former CEO steps in during a crisis and outperforms the rookie, it could spell the end of his executive career: it’s really hard to come back from a demotion to bean counter.
Under those circumstances it would be weird if many of the top CEO candidates did not end up victims of circumstance, crack under the pressure or discover that earning an A-plus in macroeconomics and earning actual money require two different skill sets. These young execs don’t have to “fail” to fail; they can do so by not succeeding enough, quickly enough.
Every top five pick is expected to quickly become a top ten quarterback, but that math simply does not work out. The 25th-best quarterback in the NFL is objectively very good at his job – compare Daniel Jones or Gardner Minshew to, say, a UFL quarterback – yet he’s also in danger of being replaced. If the replacement also maxes out as the 25th-best person on earth at his profession, he will suffer the same fate.
Seen from that perspective, the NFL does a pretty good job of identifying quarterbacks! Utter stumblebums rarely take the field. Come-from-nowhere success stories like Tom Brady, Kurt Warner and now Brock Purdy are also rather rare. But the competition is brutal, the stakes perilous, the variables numerous and complicated, the gestation periods brief, and the price of failure – for the franchises and the prospects – absolutely staggering.