Writers of Pro Football Prospectus 2008  Most Recent FO Features
» Scramble for the Ball: A Representative Pro Bowl Roster   08
Dec 2010  Scramble: Pretty Good Quarterbacks  by Tom Gower and
Mike Kurtz  The Best of the Second-Best?  Tom: I read something,
I can't remember what, about the NFL salary cap era, saying that
the introduction of the salary cap didn't really make individual
years more competitive. You still had roughly the same number of
dominant teams in a year and the same number of bad ones. This
is pretty much true, but misses the point. The difference is,
those teams aren't the same every year. The common denominator
of great team success seems to me to be good quarterback play.
So, I thought I'd do a little experiment. Who's the best
quarterback to begin his starting career in the salary cap era
who never made the Super Bowl? I'm trying not to eliminate too
many guys, so I looked at all quarterbacks who started their
career 1990 or later. I did a Pro Football Reference search of
every quarte