4 days ago
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The 2000 NFL Draft took place on April 15 and kicked off at noon New York time. As every year, the early rounds were broadcast in a special ESPN event, with every pick analyzed, dissected, and explained down to the smallest detail.
About 30 hours later, with the 199th pick, Tom Brady was selected. A quarterback who did not particularly impress most teams, and who received the news via a phone call at his parents’ home in California. Twenty three years later, when Brady retired, he was the greatest football player of all time. Seven championships. Ten Super Bowl appearances. Three league MVP awards. Records that may never be broken.
So how did this happen?
How did every team pass on the Michael Jordan of football?
To understand that, we need to ask two questions.
What is the most important position in football?
And how do teams try to recruit it?
Let’s start with the first.
What is the most important position on an American football team? The answer, according to almost every serious analytical study over the past twenty years, is the quarterback. Not the head coach. Not the GM. Not even an elite defensive player.
The quarterback’s impact on wins, playoff appearances, and championships is simply far greater than that of any other role.
Models like EPA and WAR, which try to measure how much a player increases a team’s expected points and how many wins he is worth compared to a reasonable replacement, show that an elite quarterback adds between three and seven wins per season compared to an average one. For comparison, even a great defensive player or a top running back barely moves the needle over a full season.
That is why teams can survive weaknesses almost anywhere. Just not at quarterback.
The same pattern shows up when you look at championships. The overwhelming majority of Super Bowl winners in recent decades either had an elite quarterback in his prime or a very strong young quarterback on a rookie contract. There are exceptions, but they are rare and usually require extreme conditions like a historic defense or an unusual chain of events. Exceptions do not make a strategy.
And then comes the really interesting part.
If the quarterback is so important, why is it so hard to find one?
I do not really know. So I asked Shiran Danoch, PhD, founder of Informed Decisions, to help answer that question. For those unfamiliar, Shiran and her company help organizations hire better by focusing on data and capabilities.
The league spends enormous resources trying to identify quarterbacks. Advanced analytics. Film analysis. Cognitive tests. In depth interviews. And yet, failure rates at this position in the draft remain consistently high. The problem is not a lack of data, but structural limits on what data can actually tell us.
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The transition from college football to the NFL is one of the biggest gaps in professional sports. Most college systems are designed to maximize athletic advantage, not to train complex decision making. Reads are simpler. Throwing windows are wider. The pace allows mistakes that simply do not exist in the league. In the NFL, defenses disguise intent, time is far more limited, and every mistake is punished immediately.
If none of that made sense, that is fine. At a high level, it means that impressive college statistics do not automatically translate into professional ability, especially for quarterbacks.
Beyond that, the traits that truly separate a good quarterback from a great one are barely measurable in advance. Processing speed under pressure. Split second decision making. Mental resilience after mistakes. The ability to learn on the fly. These are extremely hard to quantify before a player is placed in a real competitive environment.
And this is where environment comes in.
A young quarterback is not an off the shelf product. System stability, fit with the offensive scheme, offensive line quality, and organizational patience dramatically shape career trajectories. The same player can fail in a chaotic environment and thrive in a stable one.
The classic examples are well known. Tom Brady was drafted in the sixth round, did not stand out physically, and entered a stable organization that allowed him to learn and develop gradually. Patrick Mahomes was a rare talent, but sat for a year behind Alex Smith and received an almost perfect setup before becoming a starter. Aaron Rodgers, once projected at the very top of the draft, fell to the end of the first round and spent three years behind Brett Favre before taking over.
Three very different careers. One shared pattern. Stability. Time. Patience. And championships. Lots of championships. Tom Brady, for example, has more titles than any other franchise in the league.
And that is the core paradox.
The quarterback is the most valuable asset an NFL franchise can have, and also its riskiest bet. Not because of ignorance or lack of investment, but because success at this position is the outcome of a complex interaction between talent, context, time, and pressure.
There is another element as well. Studies show that roughly 50 percent of quarterbacks selected in the first round fail. One major reason is what is known as panic reaching. Teams are so desperate for the position that they select a player with second round talent in the top ten, just to avoid being left with nothing.
The parallel to the organizational world is fairly obvious, and not just a private hallucination of mine. At least that is how Shiran sees it.
In organizations too, certain roles are non linearly critical. Not all roles are created equal. Not all have the same impact. The number of people who can truly excel in these roles is small. Their influence is massive. And our ability to predict success in advance is limited.
Just like with quarterbacks, these roles require a rare combination of “super capabilities”. High cognitive ability. Decision making under pressure. Mental resilience. And human skills of leadership and influence. A combination that is extremely hard to find in one person.
And again, context matters. An outstanding leader in one organization can fail in another. A successful product manager in one company will not necessarily succeed in a completely different environment. Just like college versus the NFL, the conditions are not actually comparable.
Shiran raises an important question. Is this only a hiring challenge, or also a development and onboarding challenge? Do we expect immediate performance, or do we allow time to learn the context? A period of incubation in a stable environment, where one can observe, learn, experiment, and make mistakes.
As in the NFL, in organizations the hardest part is often not finding talent, but creating the conditions in which real potential does not break before it has a chance to become reality.