Why history suggests Lamar Jackson won’t help teams build a dynasty

Recent history suggests that acquiring Lamar Jackson might not be the best path toward a multi-year Super Bowl run.

It’s hard to build a Super Bowl-winning team. It’s even harder to build a team that wins multiple Super Bowls within an era.

If you define an “era” as one NFL franchise led by the same quarterback, since the year 2000 really only the New England Patriots, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs have accomplished that elusive multi-Super Bowl honor.

There’s one commonality between all of those franchises and the quarterbacks that defined those eras: They were drafted by that same team. Tom Brady was taken by New England in 2000, Ben Roethlisberger by Pittsburgh in 2004,  Eli Manning in 2004, and Patrick Mahomes by Kansas City in 2017.

Historically, Lamar Jackson looks poised to struggle for Super Bowl on new team

Several one-off quarterbacks have made it to the Super Bowl and won that were acquired by trade or signing. In a recent column for The Athletic, James Boyd reminded readers that only four quarterbacks have won a Super Bowl in the last 20 years (subscription required) that weren’t drafted by the team they won it for: Drew Brees (Saints), Peyton Manning (Broncos), Tom Brady (Buccaneers), and Matthew Stafford (Rams).

Two of the QBs on that list (Brady, Manning) brought over Super Bowl knowledge from other teams they had won them with, so one could even consider them aberrations.

It paints an interesting picture as far as why Jackson and whatever team he ends up on could struggle to build a Super Bowl team, and will struggle even more to build a repeat winner.

That’s not to say Jackson isn’t talented or capable of leading a team to a title. He’s a former MVP winner and talented as heck. But there is a logistical hurdle that comes with being a quarterback acquired by trade or free agency vs in the draft, and a simple reason why drafted quarterbacks have had so much more success than those acquired any other way.

If you’re a starting QB good enough to be traded for or signed, chances are you are going to come with a high cost. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be sought after in the first place. So naturally, those players come with a salary cap hit that is higher and makes it more difficult to build the rest of the roster competitively around.

On the other hand, when you draft a quarterback, you get the luxury of paying them on a rookie-scale contract for the first several years. Especially when those quarterbacks perform well out of the gate, that’s a massive luxury. You can spend on areas that teams paying quarterbacks massive amounts of money might not be able to.

Then, the rich get richer in this regard, because even once those teams have extended their quarterbacks, they have talent on other aspects of the roster locked in and have established a winning culture. At the very least, they can focus their scouting efforts on non-quarterback areas when they know who will be under center. That makes drafting easier, and it creates space for teams to scout with more precision.

Simply put, a drafted quarterback buys teams runway in ways that traded-for or signed quarterbacks just doesn’t.

Can Jackson be the one to shake up that mold? Quite possibly. He is just 26. Manning was 36 when he went to Denver. Stafford was 33 upon arrival in Los Angeles. Brady was a whopping 43 years of age when he got to Tampa. One could argue time, not logistics, ran the clock out on those eras.

Brees is the only comparable in terms of age of those Super Bowl-winning QBs to Jackson. He got to New Orleans at 27, and though the team only won a single Super Bowl with him at the helm, they did have the longest competitive leg of any of those aforementioned quarterbacks. But he also was coming off an injury, and the Saints weren’t paying even close to the equivalent of what Jackson’s next team will be giving him.

We might find out soon enough if Jackson can help create a new blueprint for building around quarterbacks in the NFL. It looked like the Rams had created a new route to success, but that has quickly faltered. Can a team motivated to try with Lamar create a multi-time winner?