There are days I wonder if I'm just not cut out to work as a teacher.

I know that I associate well with kids, I know I have the experience and knowledge to mold their psychological development, and I know how to structure a lesson plan well; I'm not afraid of any of that. It's actually the idea of getting up at five in the morning so that I can be to school by six that sounds frankly terrifying to me.

You have no idea how much coffee I would be chugging on days like that.

Just as much as I'm afraid of having to find out what dawn looks like on my way to my future school, many coaching staffs and front offices in the National Football League wrestle with a similar question themselves. When is it too early to anoint a young quarterback as your starter? More and more we are seeing teams thrust rookie passers into prominent roles on the offense, and some have worried that this is destroying the quality of the quarterbacks in the league.

We've proven that there is no difference between rookie passers now compared to the past 15 years, but a question does remain: do “sit-and-learn” quarterbacks have better careers than rookie starters?

Common Roots

It's no secret that the National Football League is a young player's league. Especially for a quarterback, teams are hoping more and more to find franchise players at that position, and are forcing their young talent to start earlier. Even 20 years ago, it was unthinkable that a rookie passer would be starting a game unless the veteran was injured; nowadays it's so common that the four top-40 selected quarterbacks last year all started at least one game in their rookie year.

The table below depicts just how much the rookie passer impact has increased in the league over time. The table shows how many average starts a quarterback drafted in the top-40 of the NFL Draft makes in their rookie year.

From this data, we can see very clearly that rookie quarterbacks in the league have progressively become more heavily leaned on, to the point where the average starts of a highly-drafted rookie passer in this decade is starting nearly double the amount of games that a quarterback in the 1970's was. The era of sitting premium rookies at the quarterback position is essentially over, but should it be?

The slowly-developed quarterback is a dying breed, but should we revere them as much as we do, or is the best thing for a young face of the franchise to receive a trial by fire?

Morning Glory

Those of us who yearn for “the old days” of the NFL can list the great quarterbacks who were protégés before they broke out. In the last 15 years alone, we've had Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers; the list goes on and on. Yet, there are still plenty of great quarterbacks who did start early on: Ben Roethlisberger, Cam Newton, Carson Palmer, Matt Ryan, and so on.

What's better for a young signal-caller? We can assess player production in the NFL through numberFire's signature metric, Net Expected Points (NEP), in order to find out.

NEP helps us take the numbers we get from the box score and assign them contextual value so they relate even closer to the game on the field. By adding down-and-distance value, we can see just how much each play and each team as a whole influence the outcome of games. For more info on NEP, check out our Craig Krenzel or Blaine Gabbert ever had at becoming prolific, sustainable NFL quarterbacks.

So, as with many mysteries of the NFL, there is no ultimate truth, no aphorism that can suit all cases. There's only determining what's right for the players you have on your team. Figuring that out will turn a great coach into a great teacher.