Quarterbacks are to the NFL what a duck bill is to a duck. Without them, even if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it even a duck?

I am in the tippy-tippy top of quarterback-obsessed NFL writers — if you do not have a quarterback I do not respect, I do not respect your team. I watch too much football each week to think you can get away with a mid-to-terrible QB; this season, I’ve written diatribes about how Drake Maye being good is the single thing that makes the Patriots watchable, about how Matthew Stafford being so much better than Jared Goff invalidates the trade for the Lions. Wins are totally a quarterback stat, and so are losses.

The NFL agrees. Teams draft quarterbacks so often, you’d think they were addicted. When you have a chance to acquire a good one, you trade the farm, the farmhouse, all your chickens, ducks, and maybe even the family cow.

The league just went through a massive quarterback transition. Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Ryan, and Phillip Rivers (though, I guess he’s back despite being a literal grandfather) were all the leaders of their age. Some hangers-on include Aaron Rodgers and Stafford, but the new age arrived in earnest a few years back. Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow — all big-time replacements. You could even throw Dak Prescott in there as a bridge between eras.

But now… are we already shifting things up again? The best teams in the league are captained not by that group but by an even newer cohort: Drake Maye, Bo Nix, Caleb Williams, Jordan Love, C.J…. Stroud? Trevor Lawrence?! Bryce Young?!!?

Every single one of those quarterbacks I just listed has a better record this season than Mahomes, Jackson, and Burrow (though he has been injured), while Allen remains 9-4 but two full games behind Maye and the Patriots in his own division. And these teams aren’t winning despite their QBs — all those guys are making serious plays in serious spots. Bryce Young straight up beat the Los Angeles Rams two weeks ago, while Maye and Nix haven’t collectively lost in a million years. Lawrence and Stroud, who were terrible to start the year, are now in pole position and are a huge reason Mahomes and the Chiefs are basically cooked.

So we have two options here: either this is an aberration that we shouldn’t take too much stock in, or the era of Mahomes-domination is completely over, and the Bills and the Ravens are going to have a lot more trouble locking in 13 wins every year on their way to the divisional round. To answer that question, I’m going to bring up the guy that I’m sure someone from the greater Philadelphia area was screaming about a few paragraphs ago.

Conspicuously absent from either list, past, present, or future, is the reigning Super Bowl MVP that I think explains our situation perfectly: Jalen Hurts. He has become the single most polarizing player in the NFL this year; the Eagles won the dang Super Bowl last year and are going to make the playoffs easily this year, but the vibes could not be worse. Hurts has been awful, refusing to throw over the middle and having some Tua Tagovailoa-esque body language where if he scrambles out of the pocket the play is over. His receivers look dejected, the fans are losing it, and nobody can credibly say he is a top-tier quarterback anymore.

But he won the Super Bowl!! None of the guys I am mentioning as “next” can say that, nor can Allen or Burrow or Jackson. It just looks so bad right now that we are all forgetting the success that he use to have. It reminds me of Ben Simmons in the NBA — he has been such a disaster since 2021 that people forget early career Ben Simmons was like… LeBron James. Hurts was a special player for a little bit there, but now I don’t know what I’m looking at.

Hurts was “next,” and then he was “now,” and now it’s “over.” If it’s “over” for the rest of those guys (which I can’t responsibly say it is), it would be a real departure from the history of good quarterbacks. Mahomes was in GOAT conversations, and now he’s just going to miss the playoffs? Pretty sweet 7-year run there man. You other three, this better not be a 5-year flash in the pan where you just lost to Mahomes for half a decade and called it a career.

Quarterbacking in the last 25 years was an institution. On the career passing yards list, every good QB I listed in the “past” category is on there; putting up season after season because the distance between them and everyone else was staggering. But the position has changed, and maybe become more transient. It’s more physical, more demanding. Defenses are better, you have to run more. Maybe QBs in the modern era won’t have the shelf life of the pure pocket passers of yesteryear, leading to far more rapid era transitions.

I don’t necessarily think this class of QBs dominating the older guys is sustainable. But the ability for Bryce Young to have a better season than Patrick Mahomes is staggering, and lends itself to the chaos the league has embraced. The NFL is literally a zero-sum game, and so the rise of the new guys has battered the old ones. This year, at the very least, has been a new class of quarterbacks. Whether or not it becomes a new age will be up to them and their forbearers.