New evidence shows how NFL discriminates against Black QBs

The NFL presents itself as America’s most cutthroat meritocracy. And yet evidence continues to show that teams screw up the single most important decision they make due to racial bias.

From 2010 to 2022, teams were chronically underrating Black quarterbacks in the draft, a new statistical analysis from SFGATE shows.

QBs selected in those drafts had four times better odds of reaching at least one Pro Bowl if they were Black. SFGATE’s analysis found a statistically significant gap between the rate that Black quarterbacks reached the Pro Bowl relative to their peers despite controlling for draft position. 

At every stage of the draft, the average Black quarterback outperformed their non-Black peers. In fact, the analysis found that the average Black quarterback was more likely to receive at least one Pro Bowl selection than the average non-Black quarterback selected 66 picks (roughly two rounds) earlier. The evidence strongly suggests that racial bias is blinding teams in the draft process, leading them to prefer inferior quarterbacks as long as they’re not Black.

In other words, Black quarterbacks are penalized in the draft solely for being Black, our analysis suggests, and it’s a penalty that reverberates years into their professional careers.

In a perfect world, there should be no disparity between the rate that Black quarterbacks drafted at any point reach the Pro Bowl compared with non-Black quarterbacks drafted at the same point.

These findings are not a reflection of the players selected but a reflection of the scouting departments and executives who made decisions during the draft. Despite persistent claims otherwise, there is no evidence that a player’s race has any impact on their athletic ability. 

Rather, these results reinforce longstanding claims that Black quarterbacks face double standards, leading NFL teams to undervalue them in the draft.

Dating back at least three decades, well more than half of the league has been made up of Black players, although that number has slightly dipped in recent years. But less than a fourth of QBs drafted from 2010 to 2022 were Black.

“Black quarterbacks probably aren’t getting in the pool unless they’re amazing,” David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University who has extensively studied the effects of race in the NFL, told SFGATE. “White quarterbacks are getting in the pool when they’re not amazing. That’s why you see this.” 

The data backs up Berri’s point. While nearly 1 in 3 (32.4%) signal-callers drafted between Round 1 and Round 3 were Black, less than 11.7% of quarterbacks drafted between Round 5 and Round 7 were Black. 

Yet even though NFL teams have dedicated so many more picks to non-Black quarterbacks in the later rounds, the last non-Black quarterbacks selected after the 102nd pick (when Kirk Cousins was selected back in 2016) to go on to reach a Pro Bowl were Derek Anderson and Matt Cassel back in 2005. Over that span, Dak Prescott (135th), Tyrod Taylor (180th) and Tyler Huntley (undrafted free agent), a trio of Black quarterbacks, have all earned at least one Pro Bowl selection despite their limited draft pedigree. 

The trend is visible throughout the draft: Generational talent Patrick Mahomes slid to the 10th pick. Future MVP Lamar Jackson went 32nd overall. (You may remember one ex-NFL GM saying before Jackson’s draft that he should play wide receiver.) All-Pro Russell Wilson wasn’t drafted until the third round.

This is impacting not just opportunities but also compensation. The NFL has a tiered pay scale for players based on the draft, meaning players make more the higher they’re picked. That also generally — with notable exceptions — leads teams to invest more in their development and hang on to them longer.

Jackson, for example, received a four-year contract with roughly $9.5 million in guarantees after he was selected with the final pick of the first round in 2018. Baker Mayfield, the first pick in the same draft, signed a four-year deal that guaranteed him $32.7 million.

Back in 2016, Prescott’s rookie-scale contract paid him just over $2.7 million over four seasons, with little of that money guaranteed. Jared Goff and Carson Wentz, two white quarterbacks who have had undeniably inferior careers, were the top two picks in the draft, and both received more than $25 million in their rookie deals. 

“Black quarterbacks seem much more likely to be evaluated in terms of ‘what have you done lately? ’” Berri and his co-authors, Alex Farnell and Robert Simmons, wrote. “The halo effect from being a top draft pick seems to vanish much more quickly for the Black quarterback compared to White counterpart. The difference in rate of decay of early draft pick pay premium is substantial. Whereas it takes around 10 to 12 years for the early draft pick pay premium to vanish for White signal callers, a comparable Black quarterback sees his early round pay premium only last for 6 to 7 years.”

It’s hard not to tie these findings to the San Francisco 49ers quarterback room. The Niners drafted Trey Lance, a Black quarterback, with the third overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft. According to the team, the Niners planned to have Lance sit behind Jimmy Garoppolo as a rookie before handing him the keys the following year. But after Lance suffered a season-ending injury in Week 2 of last season, he was usurped by then-rookie seventh-round pick Brock Purdy.

Purdy, a white quarterback, was undeniably good across his eight starts (five regular-season games, three playoff games), but he also suffered a serious elbow injury, and during the offseason, he had an elbow surgery that is rarely performed on football players. (He did look excellent in Sunday’s win.)

Beyond concerns about his health, there are reasonable questions about Purdy’s ability to sustain this success. 

But the 49ers did not simply choose to roll with Purdy, leaving Lance ready to take over if he faltered. They also signed Sam Darnold, the third overall pick in 2018, to compete with Lance to be Purdy’s backup. 

Lance is still a bit of an unknown; Darnold has unquestionably struggled in his 55 starts, debatably playing worse in a large sample size than Lance did in a tiny one. But Kyle Shanahan telegraphed all offseason that he preferred Darnold to Lance, and he made it official last month, naming Darnold the backup and shipping Lance to Dallas.

“The Black quarterback level of this is the lack of patience,” Bomani Jones, former host of HBO’s “Game Theory,” said on a recent podcast episode right before Lance was traded. “And I don’t necessarily mean that from Shanahan; I mean from fans. ‘Hey, Lance stinks.’ You’ve seen him play like three games! Like I am amazed at how certain they are that he stinks after seeing him play three games and how certain they are that Purdy is awesome.”

Both a 2007 study by Berri and Rob Simmons and a 2022 study published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics found evidence that Black quarterbacks were drafted lower than white quarterbacks with comparable college production and scouting combine performances. However, both papers found that the gap was no longer statistically significant — present but not large enough to draw academic conclusions — when including Wonderlic test results. The Wonderlic is an intelligence test that academic research has found to have an anti-Black bias since the 1970s.

Were teams actually heavily influenced by Wonderlic test results, or was this simply a convenient excuse?

The NFL stopped giving prospects the Wonderlic test in 2022, and the past two drafts have had some positive developments, suggesting that perhaps a part of the problem in the past amounted to NFL teams refusing to ignore an antiquated test.

In 2022, a pair of Black quarterbacks were drafted in the third round for the first time since 1984. (That year, two Black quarterbacks were selected in the third round, but they never signed with NFL teams.) A Black quarterback was also drafted in the seventh round, for just the second time since 2007.

In the 2023 NFL Draft, Bryce Young (Alabama), C.J. Stroud (Ohio State) and Anthony Richardson (Florida) became the first trio of Black quarterbacks in NFL history to be selected in the first 10 picks of the same class. Moreover, it marked the first time in NFL history that multiple Black quarterbacks were drafted in the first round and between Round 5 and Round 7.

Given the Wonderlic’s history, the NFL (and NFL media) should be exceedingly cautious. A myriad of tests have attempted to supplant the Wonderlic. Most recently, the S2 Cognition test claims to evaluate “an athlete’s invisible skill sets and the ‘whys’ behind their performance.” It has been described by NFL media as “like the 40-yard dash for the brain.” 

S2 already lists clients throughout professional and amateur sports, but the only peer-reviewed papers analyzing the test include S2’s owners as co-authors. Since the company has not made test results public, or shared them with an independent third party, there’s reason to be concerned about racial bias.

A pair of analyses published in 2009 and 2010, respectively, found that NFL teams and NFL media consistently described players in ways that emphasized racist stereotypes. White players were more often credited for their work ethic and intelligence than their Black counterparts. Black players, on the other hand, were often lauded for “innate” and “natural” athletic abilities, a backhanded compliment that discredited their work ethic and intelligence.

The same year, Mahomes, one of the biggest stars in the league, expressed a similar feeling. “Obviously, the Black quarterback has had to battle to be in this position that we are to have this many guys in the league playing,” he said. “Every day, we’re proving that we should have been playing the whole time. We’ve got guys that can think just as well as they can use their athleticism. It’s always weird when you see guys like me, Lamar, Kyler [Murray] kind of get that on them when other guys don’t. But at the same time we’re going out there to prove ourselves every day to show we can be some of the best quarterbacks in the league.”

“To be honest, my dad since I was a young age, maybe middle school, he told me, ‘You are going to have to be better than the white quarterbacks,’” said Justin Fields of the Chicago Bears a month later. “I don’t know why it is like that. The reality is that’s what it is.”

Lou Moore, a historian at Grand Valley State who researches the intersection of race and sports and the author of “Battle of the Black Bombers,” a book on the history of the Black quarterback, is skeptical that recent trends will last.

“You have more representation,” Moore told SFGATE. “You’re probably going to have 12-13 starters this year. You got three of the top four picks are Black quarterbacks. You got two Black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl. But I think some of the same problems exist for these guys … People will still go back to those stereotypes. People will still long for Tom Brady and Peyton Manning.”

To Moore, a couple of highly touted Black prospects struggling will lead NFL evaluators right back to where they were in the past, even if they take a different route.

“If it doesn’t work, they’re just going to go back to the same type of mold.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct information regarding Brock Purdy’s offseason elbow surgery.