NFL QB reclamations: The path to career recovery for free agents..
Spectacular things happen in the NFL all the time. Impossible Josh Allen throws, superhuman Lamar Jackson runs, historic comebacks, smashed records, the Giants letting Saquon Barkley leave in free agency to become a Super Bowl champion with the Eagles — all mind-boggling, highly improbable stuff.
Spectacular things happen frequently enough that our brains become good at normalizing the astonishing. We must yank those surprises back into focus and emphasize just how bananas they really are. It feels very normal now that Sam Darnold was successful for the Vikings and will likely get a big free agent deal in the next few weeks, but imagine predicting such a thing to your friends on a beach last summer. You would have been met with incredulity, laughter and mockery.
What Darnold and the Vikings achieved in 2024 was unbelievable. So too are the quarterback reclamations that came before him. Show me the receipts predicting Baker Mayfield would make consecutive postseason appearances with the Buccaneers back when he was fighting Kyle Trask for the starting job. Who among us still had Geno Smith stock when Russell Wilson was traded out of Seattle?
Quarterback reclamations have become a critical throughline of the past few offseasons. At the time, they were quiet moves — backups signed to one-year deals or trades for Day 3 picks. But those deals have loud repercussions for teams staring down the barrel of long rebuilds and draft day lotteries for their future franchise quarterback, then suddenly being saved by a veteran quarterback who just needed a new home.
I don’t think there’s one cut-and-dried way to suddenly turn a disappointing quarterback into an acceptable starter — no specific offensive system, no clear rubric. But there are enough recent success stories to identify the ideal conditions for a quarterback revival — the reconstructing of a franchise quarterback from some other franchise’s scrap heap. Let’s look at the quarterbacks and teams that pulled it off, and how they did it. Plus, we can pick out a few 2025 free agent passers who could be next in line, and the QB-needy teams that make sense as turnaround landing spots.
The QBs who fit the description
Sam Darnold: Darnold’s career resurgence in Minnesota was one of the biggest storylines of the 2024 season. He averaged 0.09 EPA per dropback and 48.5% dropback success rate — both above-average numbers leaguewide — and kept his interception rate in check (1.9%).
It’s too early to say the recovery is complete, as he still needs to be productive in 2025 and will likely have to do so outside of Minnesota. He’s the most recent and most stark example of a quarterback who looked inept the last time he was a long-term starter (2021 Jets) then looked renewed in his new home (2024 Vikings) a few years later. He’s where this conversation begins.
Geno Smith: The 39th overall pick of the 2013 draft, Smith lost the Jets’ starting job in just two short seasons before filling QB2 jobs with the Giants, Chargers and Seahawks for much of the late 2010s into the 2020s. He looked like a career QB2 until he beat out Drew Lock for the starting job in 2022 (at the ripe young age of 32!) and has since delivered three straight seasons of above-average quarterback play. Of the bunch we’re discussing, he feels like the unlikeliest because of where he was drafted and the amount of time it took for him to go back to being a starter.
Baker Mayfield: The first overall pick of the 2018 draft looked like another struck-through name on the back of a duct-taped Browns jersey. The starter in Cleveland for four years, Mayfield won a playoff game and saw his fifth-year option picked up, but an injury-riddled 2021 season tanked his stock far enough that the Browns swung for the fences with the infamous Deshaun Watson trade. After a bad season with the Panthers (and one wild Thursday night game with the Rams), he landed in Tampa Bay on a one-year deal and looked like a new man. The 2024 season was the best of his career by EPA per dropback, success rate, completion percentage, adjusted net yards per attempt — just about everything.
