History has a brutal warning for J.J. McCarthy and Anthony Richardson

There comes a point with every struggling young quarterback when patience starts to look a lot like stubbornness.

For J.J. McCarthy, the Vikings have finally reached that point. A season ago, Minnesota was still trying to figure out exactly what it had in the former No. 10 overall pick, and even after a rough start to the 2025 campaign there were enough flashes to make the conversation more about development than the search for the next franchise QB. Now McCarthy is heading into Year 3 with just 10 NFL starts, and the Vikings have named Kyler Murray their starter.

Meanwhile, Anthony Richardson has reached an even more precarious point in the conversation in Indianapolis. Three years after the Colts selected him fourth overall, Daniel Jones is entrenched as the starter, and Richardson has spent this summer battling Riley Leonard for the backup job. Richardson is still only 24 years old and remains one of the most physically gifted quarterbacks in football, but the organization that drafted him is no longer willing to wait for those gifts to turn into consistent quarterback play.

Which raises a much more interesting question than whether McCarthy or Richardson can still be “fixed”: What does history say happens after an NFL team decides a first-round quarterback’s talent is no longer worth waiting on?

The answer, after going through more than a decade of quarterback data, is not encouraging. The NFL frequently gives former first-round QBs another opportunity; it almost never gives them another franchise. And while McCarthy and Richardson have arrived at essentially the same career crossroads, the data suggests the problems they need to solve from here are very different.

The NFL will give you another chance — that’s the easy part

To get some idea of what McCarthy and Richardson are up against, I went back through recent first-round quarterbacks and looked for players whose original teams had effectively stopped treating them like the franchise saviors by the end of their third NFL season. This wasn’t about missing games because of injury or getting benched for a week. The organizational decision had to be obvious: replace him, trade him, release him or otherwise enter the following season with somebody else as the intended starter.

Seven recent quarterbacks fit the mold: Josh Rosen, Dwayne Haskins, Sam Darnold, Zach Wilson, Mac Jones, Justin Fields and Kenny Pickett. Trey Lance and Paxton Lynch are useful supporting examples, but neither established themselves as their team’s starter long enough to really answer the same question.

So what happened next for those seven QBs is a good reminder that effectively being declared a bust by the team that drafted you in the first round (and often in the first 10 picks) doesn’t necessarily mean your NFL career is over.

Five QBs eventually started another game. Darnold, Jones and Fields each accumulated at least 10 more starts, and Fields got two different organizations to give him meaningful opportunities after Chicago decided to move on. 

NFL teams don’t suddenly forget why these guys were first-round picks; the arm talent, athleticism or college production — many of the reasons the player was a high selection to begin with — coupled with the belief that you are the GM or coach to fix this mess often lead to second, third and sometimes fourth chances when common sense and the eye test might dictate otherwise. Actually becoming a franchise quarterback again is another matter.

Only Darnold and Mac Jones subsequently produced a top 16 season in EPA per dropback with at least 200 dropbacks, and Jones’ case requires some context. He was legitimately good filling in for Brock Purdy in San Francisco in 2025, posting a +0.07 EPA per dropback — 12th among qualifying quarterbacks — along with a 76.0 PFF passing grade. That’s a real statistical rebound, but it hasn’t yet turned him back into somebody’s unquestioned QB1.

That leaves Darnold as the one clear success story, and even his career arc shouldn’t put McCarthy and Richardson at ease about their NFL futures. Darnold didn’t leave the Jets and immediately turn into the quarterback we saw in Minnesota. He posted a -0.16 EPA per dropback with Carolina in 2021, made six starts the following year and then spent 2023 backing up Purdy in San Francisco.

His breakthrough finally came in 2024, four seasons after his final year with the Jets. Darnold finished 14th among qualifying quarterbacks in EPA per dropback, earned an 80.3 PFF passing grade and subsequently turned that season into another starting opportunity in Seattle — and at $105 million over three years, it now looks like one of the best bargains in the league. Darnold’s career shows that a former first-round QB can rewrite his story, but his path looks much more like an exception than a blueprint — and it took years to get there.

That’s the first lesson for McCarthy and Richardson. The NFL gives failed first-round quarterbacks second chances. It just doesn’t give them many second careers.

The quarterbacks who do recover don’t fix everything

The more interesting part of the exercise came from looking beyond who survived and asking what actually changed for the quarterbacks who managed to turn things around after failed first chances. That’s where the data become more instructive than simply pointing at Darnold or Baker Mayfield and declaring that quarterbacks sometimes need a change of scenery.

The successful reclamation projects didn’t suddenly become different players; more often, they found ways to improve — sometimes dramatically — the one or two weaknesses that had been holding them back.

* EPA/DB = EPA per dropback; TWP = turnover-worthy play rate; P2S = pressure-to-sack ratio

Darnold didn’t eliminate turnover-worthy plays or suddenly become much better at avoiding sacks. He became more accurate, his big-time throw rate increased by 3.3 percentage points and he started generating far more production from those throws. It’s also worth remembering just how bad the situation had become around him by his final season in New York: Darnold played through a shoulder injury while a Jets offense short on weapons and offensive line help sputtered through the final year of the Adam Gase era.

Jones followed a different path. His big-time throw rate barely changed between his disastrous final New England season and his 2025 run with San Francisco, but his adjusted accuracy improved by nearly eight percentage points and his turnover-worthy-play rate fell by 2.8 points. 

Jones certainly contributed to his own demise in New England, but the environment around him didn’t help: he played in three different offensive systems in three seasons, including the ill-fated Matt Patricia/Joe Judge arrangement in 2022, before Bill O’Brien took over in 2023. The Patriots also paired a pocket-dependent quarterback with a shaky offensive line and one of the league’s least productive passing offenses. Jones didn’t suddenly become a more dynamic quarterback in San Francisco; he became a much more consistent one.

Mayfield, who falls outside the strict Year 3 cutoff but is too relevant as a reclamation success to ignore, offers yet another path. His adjusted accuracy barely moved between his ugly 2021 season in Cleveland and his resurgence in Tampa Bay, and neither did his big-time throw rate. But his pressure-to-sack rate improved by nearly 11 percentage points, eliminating one of the problems that had consistently put Cleveland’s offense behind schedule.

That’s the encouraging part of this exercise. Reclamation doesn’t necessarily require rebuilding a QB from scratch, and the circumstances surrounding the original failure matter, too. Sometimes a healthier quarterback, a better supporting cast or a more stable coaching situation can help, but the successful reclamations still required the player to improve in the one or two areas that had previously held him back. And that’s where the cases for McCarthy and Richardson begin to diverge.

McCarthy: There are great throws buried in a lot of bad QB play

McCarthy’s 2025 season produced one of the strangest statistical profiles over the last 11 years of data I looked at. His overall numbers were bad enough that there’s no point in trying to sugarcoat them: -0.15 EPA per dropback, a 60.1 PFF passing grade, 71.0% adjusted accuracy and a 4.8% turnover-worthy-play rate. His EPA and turnover-worthy-play rate both ranked in the eighth percentile among qualifying quarterback seasons over that span, while his passing grade and adjusted accuracy were in the 17th percentile.

And while you had to squint, there was a silver lining: McCarthy managed a 96th-percentile big-time throw rate to go along with that eighth-percentile EPA per dropback. That’s a remarkable combination, and it gets at why evaluating his future is more complicated than simply looking at how poorly he played.

In fact, among qualifying quarterbacks from 2015-25, only four combined a big-time throw rate of at least 6% with EPA per dropback of -0.10 or worse. McCarthy not only made the list, he had the highest big-time throw rate of the group.

There are a couple ways to read that list, and neither offers an easy answer. Fields is probably the most uncomfortable comparison because his rookie profile looks remarkably similar to McCarthy’s: -0.18 EPA per dropback, a 6.1% big-time throw rate and a 23.8% pressure-to-sack rate. Fields improved enough to get starting looks in Pittsburgh and New York, but through 2025 he still hadn’t produced a qualifying top-16 EPA season. The obvious high-end traits kept teams interested; all the negative plays kept him from becoming the long-term answer.

Richardson — who we’ll get to shortly — represents another version of the same high-variance problem. But the larger point with McCarthy is that the high-end throws aren’t theoretical; they’re already happening at an unusually high rate. The question is whether he can eliminate enough of the misses, sacks and turnover-worthy plays between them to make those throws matter.

We’ve seen reclamation quarterbacks improve those things. Jones made a huge jump in accuracy and ball security. Mayfield became dramatically better at navigating pressure. Darnold became more accurate without sacrificing the aggressive throws that made him interesting in the first place.

McCarthy also has something most of the failed first-round quarterbacks in this study didn’t: a tiny NFL sample. Darnold made 38 starts for the Jets before they moved on. Zach Wilson made 33. Fields got three seasons in Chicago, while Pickett started 24 games in Pittsburgh.

McCarthy has made just 10 starts, and that cuts both ways. Maybe Minnesota interrupted his development and he hasn’t had enough time to figure it out. Maybe McCarthy looks like a very different quarterback after another 300 or 400 snaps. Or maybe Kevin O’Connell has seen enough to know that McCarthy ain’t the guy, at least in Minnesota, and he needed just 10 starts to come to that conclusion.

Either way, the path forward is straightforward; McCarthy doesn’t need to find a superpower. He needs to stop letting all the other stuff overwhelm what he already does well.

Richardson: What if the thing that needs fixing almost never gets fixed?

Richardson’s profile is just as fascinating as McCarthy’s, but for a much different reason. His 2024 season included a -0.11 EPA per dropback, a 59.8 PFF passing grade and a 4.7% turnover-worthy-play rate, which put him near the bottom of the data in all three categories.

There were also some reminders why Indianapolis drafted him fourth overall: Richardson’s 6.8% big-time throw rate ranked in the 94th percentile, and his 12.2% pressure-to-sack rate was in the 89th percentile. For a quarterback with his athletic profile, avoiding sacks at that rate while continuing to generate high-end throws gives a coaching staff a lot to work with, at least in theory. But then you get to the accuracy, and that’s where Richardson’s profile goes from concerning to historically unusual.

Richardson’s adjusted accuracy in 2024 was 60.2%. Among every quarterback season from 2015-25 with at least 200 dropbacks, that ranked dead last — and not by a little.

Richardson wasn’t just the least accurate QB in the data. There was a 4.5 percentage-point gap between him and the next-worst season over 11 years, which is where the inevitable Josh Allen comparison becomes a lot less comforting.

Allen really did fix his accuracy; his adjusted accuracy went from 64.7% as a rookie to 79.1% during his first elite season. His PFF passing grade jumped from 58.0 to 89.8, his turnover-worthy-play rate fell from 5.1% to 3.4%, and he went from an incredibly talented but erratic young quarterback to one of the best players in football. We haven’t sniffed any such transformation — or the hint of one — from Richardson who was benched in his second season.

Like Allen, Lamar Jackson made a similar leap. His adjusted accuracy went from 66.7% as a rookie to 75.9% during his first elite season. Those are the success stories Richardson needs. They’re also a reminder of just how much improvement we’d need to project.

Allen began 4.5 percentage points ahead of Richardson. Jackson began 6.5 points ahead. Richardson needs roughly a 10-point improvement just to reach 70% adjusted accuracy, and even that would leave him slightly below the number McCarthy posted during a season in which McCarthy finished in the eighth percentile in EPA per dropback.

There’s another important difference: Buffalo let Allen make those mistakes while starting, while Baltimore built its offense around Jackson and allowed him to develop through meaningful reps. Richardson no longer has that luxury, at least in Indianapolis.

The Colts have Daniel Jones atop the depth chart, and Richardson is now trying to make the type of accuracy improvements that only Allen has managed in the last 11 seasons — and doing it without the starting reps Allen and Jackson were afforded as they made their leaps from projects to superstars. The physical traits will convince another NFL team to take a chance when the Colts move on, if only because history says former top five quarterbacks don’t simply disappear after 2-3 seasons.

But getting another opportunity isn’t really the question; we already know NFL teams are willing to recycle talented QBs. The question is whether Richardson can fix the one thing that has cast a shadow over almost everything he does well.

Same crossroads, very different problems

Put McCarthy and Richardson next to each other and the similarities are striking until, suddenly, they aren’t. Both have been bad by EPA and PFF grade, both have put the ball in danger too often, and both have produced big-time throws at an elite rate. But McCarthy’s pressure-to-sack problem and Richardson’s accuracy problem send them down different paths from here.

McCarthy’s worst problems have precedents for meaningful improvement among quarterbacks who rebuilt their careers. Richardson’s biggest problem is more concerning because no QB in the last 11 seasons was less accurate than his 2024 campaign.

That’s why, if pressed, I’d bet on McCarthy to figure things out, even after a 2025 season that was arguably worse overall. His best trait is already showing up at an elite rate, and the things dragging him down — sacks, turnovers and down-to-down accuracy — have all improved dramatically in previous reclamation stories. Richardson obviously has elite traits too, but becoming even an average NFL passer requires something much closer to the transformation that made Allen an outlier in the first place.

None of this means McCarthy won’t become another Fields — where the flashes keep convincing teams to provide opportunities without him ever becoming consistent enough to be the face of another franchise. And Richardson’s physical ability is so unusual that writing him off at 24 would be foolish. 

The point isn’t that either outcome has already been decided — it’s that the burden of proof has changed. Before a first-round quarterback loses his job, every bad game can still be explained through the developmental lens. Once his team chooses somebody else, every subsequent opportunity becomes an audition, and those opportunities tend to get shorter each time.

Only Darnold clearly remade himself into a franchise quarterback — and you could argue he’s now done it with two teams. McCarthy and Richardson will get another chance, and perhaps chances, to prove everybody wrong. History suggests that’s actually the easy part. The harder part isn’t getting another team to believe. It’s giving that team a reason to keep believing.