NFL free agency 2018: Best quarterbacks available

Sure, you could draft a quarterback this spring, but why not get a veteran in free agency? Here are the five best free agent NFL quarterbacks of 2018.

Let’s put it bluntly. It’s really hard to win in the NFL, especially if you don’t have a franchise quarterback. Most of the time, a team will want to draft that guy, but seems are better at it than others. Should that not be the case, there is sometimes a chance you can get a decent signal caller on the free agent market.

Fortunately for all of us that enjoy football, there is a better array of quarterbacks this year. When you’re best free agent quarterback from a year ago was former Tampa Bay Buccaneers backup Mike Glennon, you know you’re going to have a bad time. But this year, hopefully it will be better. Why is that? Because 2017 was the year of the backup quarterback. What a glorious year it was for overlooked signal callers.

It all started with Glennon getting overpaid by the Chicago Bears for his greatest skill set being that he is tall. Other players would not only rise to the occasion and win division titles, but one backup quarterback in Nick Foles was able to win Super Bowl LII for the Philadelphia Eagles once Carson Wentz succumbed to injury in early December.

Though these guys are surely to cost a desperate quarterback team a small fortune, maybe these five veteran signal callers can help your favorite team get to a Super Bowl? That includes the Minnesota Vikings, who definitely know a thing or three about the 2018 NFL free agency quarterback market. Here are the five best quarterbacks set to get paid this spring in free agency.

Sam Bradford is the only one of the five that came into the NFL with great expectations. He was a former Heisman Trophy winner with the Oklahoma Sooners in the Big 12. Bradford would be the No. 1 overall pick by the then St. Louis Rams in the 2010 NFL Draft. He was the last rookie quarterback to make a ridiculous sum of money before taking an NFL snap.

Though injuries have derailed Bradford’s once-promising career coming out of Oklahoma, there is still a lot to like about his game heading into free agency. Bradford has shown that he is elite when it comes to accuracy. He has completed well over 70 percent of his throws in his last two seasons with the Minnesota Vikings.

In his only year with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2015, he completed 65 percent of his throws. The curse of Jeff Fisher is very real for NFL quarterbacks, as Bradford completed 58.6 percent of his passes in four years with the Rams. To be fair, he quarterbacked the Rams during their most recent nadir into irrelevancy.

The good news with Bradford is that he throws a beautiful, catchable ball, works hard and won’t be overly expensive as a stop-gap NFL starting quarterback. However, the biggest problem is that he gets hurt all the time. Buyer beware when shopping for Bradford. He is an ideal fit for a team picking high in the draft that doesn’t already have a quarterback, but could end up selecting one to backup Bradford in 2018. He’s good, but can’t be trusted.