The Hardest-to-Fill Job on Earth: NFL Quarterback

I don’t mean love in the way you love a new toaster, or 7-iron. I mean authentic, human love. I mean you know your NFL quarterback’s middle name; his college major; his high school team’s mascot; and what both of his parents do for a living. You’ve named at least one pet after him. If you had a chance, you’d invite your NFL quarterback over for your birthday, or, more humbly, for a bowl of homemade soup.

Most people don’t love their NFL quarterbacks this way. The relationship between the average fan base and the average starting signal caller rests somewhere between grudging acceptance and outright despair. For every franchise with a rock solid superstar under center, there are a half dozen that would prefer to host an open audition as quickly as possible.

Quarterback remains a mysteriously volatile job. Everyone knows it’s the most essential position in the game, the successful casting of which can pivot a franchise from train wreck to glory, but it remains deeply difficult to obtain and develop a choice which sticks. If you watch a lot of NFL football, you know the not-so-secret truth: you watch a lot of crummy quarterbacking. Few crack the ceiling between ambivalence and civic adoration.

Which is why we are here again, at the edge of spring, raging into the annual NFL quarterback panic. It’s a highly predictable freakout, partly triggered by trades and free agency, but also the entry draft, which starts this year on April 25 in Detroit, and involves a selection of elite college quarterbacks who could alter the course of a team’s history. Or not at all! Nobody knows, which is part of the anxious fun.

Now is the season when fan bases behold the man in the job and wonder if he’s up to the task. Now is when teams make moves—look at New England, choosing to jettison Mac Jones to Jacksonville, the former ‘Bama star sinking from draft day darling to following Grumpy Lobster Boat Captain Bill Belichick out of Foxborough. Jones will now back up Trevor Lawrence, the first pick in Jones’s 2021 draft class, and yet a work in progress himself.

Other familiar names are getting recycled. The Pittsburgh Steelers just signed Russell Wilson to a one-year contract—yes, that Russell Wilson, the one who won a Super Bowl more than a decade ago with Seattle, only to become a punchline following a post-prime payday from the Denver Broncos. For Pittsburgh, this is a low-risk acquisition, as the Steelers already have an incumbent on the roster in Kenny Pickett, and the 35-year-old Wilson signed for cheap, as the Broncos remain on the hook for much of his ridiculous salary.

Meanwhile: Kirk Cousins! An occasionally thrilling quarterback, and yet also…Kirk Cousins. He’s off to Atlanta, after a six-year stop in Minnesota, a place which really looked like home, but…this is the NFL. As the Journal’s Andrew Beaton wryly noted, Cousins has hacked pro football by being a very good, but not great, QB—talented enough to win plenty of games, but not generational enough to get locked into a long-term, team-friendly deal. Instead Cousins bets on himself, signing briefer, high-value deals (the Falcons are in for four years, $180 million), accruing a generational wealth you wouldn’t associate with an NFL QB who has won one career playoff game and is returning from Achilles surgery.

Good for Kirk, I say! That’s striving to aspire to.

As for the draft…chaos remains on the menu in Chicago, which has a gifted if imperfect young quarterback in Justin Fields, but also owns the No. 1 pick. Wisdom says the Bears should use that pick to take USC’s mostly-celebrated quarterback Caleb Williams, dealing away Fields to clear room, or even keeping Fields as insurance, but…these are the Bears, cosmically bound to make it hard on themselves.

Next in the draft order is Washington, once a hostile landing spot, lately improved under new ownership. Should Chicago turn as expected to Williams, the Commanders will likely take Jayden Daniels, the Heisman-winning quarterback out of LSU, or Drake Maye, the behemoth QB from North Carolina. New England, drafting next, will take whomever Washington doesn’t. There will be noisy calls for proven winners like Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy and Washington’s Michael Penix. There will be skeptics who remind us that Super Bowl runner-up Brock Purdy was taken with the very last pick in the 2022 draft, that none other than Tom Brady was a sixth rounder, and nobody knows anything, and honestly…they’re right.

It’s the nature of the quarterback—a relationship that can change your team and improve your life, but a recipe for disillusionment and heartbreak. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but if you really want to love something, I’d say get a toaster. Or that 7-iron.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com