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Wednesday, Nov. 4, gave us a whirlwind of quarterback news. Six different teams are dealing with either real or very possible quarterback changes heading into Week 9.
It’s the Vikings, the Browns, the Seahawks, the Ravens, the Cardinals, and the Eagles. Let me just recap everything for you. There’s a lot going on, so I’ll list who the quarterbacks have been for each team, who they will be/might be, what happened, and what the reasoning is behind it all.
The official word coming from Minnesota is that Kyler Murray is dealing with a sore hamstring. The Vikings play the Bills on Monday night, so there’s plenty of time for him to get healthy and play … but my antennas are up.
It’s no secret that the Vikings offense has been rough. If you throw a dart at an offensive metric, you’ll see that they are in the bottom half of the league. If you narrow it down to passing metrics, they’re in the bottom 25 percent of the league (at best).
On top of that, Justin Jefferson, a guy who has spent more than a full year with bad quarterbacks, is finally starting to outwardly show that he’s disgruntled. That’s not great.
I believe that Kyler Murray is dealing with something because it’d be weird not to. Hell, I believe that it’s probably hindering how good he can actually play quarterback. But do I believe that him taking a backseat to Carson Wentz for a game or two is purely because he needs to get healthy? Not a chance.
Luckily, they’re 6-1, so they have some wiggle room.
Deshaun Watson hasn’t been consistently playing good football: not from game to game, and not from drive to drive … But he’s in concussion protocol, so this isn’t a soft benching thing. Maybe the Pro-Bowler Shedeur Sanders comes in and plays good enough that Todd Monken and the Browns have to make a decision down the line, but that seems like a stretch.
Some of the weird corners of the internet want Sam Darnold benched for Drew Lock because Darnold is tied for second in interceptions thrown. While that is true and kind of fair, it ignores the part where he’s feeding the leading wide receiver in the NFL … who, by the way, is leading by over 200 total yards and three touchdowns.
I don’t think you just bench a guy when you’re getting that kind of production, especially when play calling seems like it’s an issue too.
Well, Darnold is dealing with a quad thing and has not only been downgraded to out for Week 9, but he’s also considered week-to-week.
So Lock is going to be the guy … and I imagine that he’ll be the guy until the Seahawks get back from their Week 11 bye. That means he gets the Cardinals and the Raiders, which are two teams that are very gettable by a backup quarterback.
This is also a straightforward-ish situation. Lamar Jackson jacked up his thumb on the first play of the game in Week 8, and now he has to have surgery, and he’s on IR. But they have Snoop Huntley as their backup, right? Wrong. He got turf toe 10 plays later, and he’s done for the season.
So their third-string quarterback is this fella named Joe Fagnano, a rookie Undrafted Free Agent from UConn. He’s a big downgrade from Huntley, and he’s an unfathomable downgrade from Jackson.
So the Ravens traded for Jacoby Brissett (from the Cardinals; we’ll get to that in a second). We don’t know the details of the trade yet, but it’s happening. That means that he’s going to get back together with Israel Wilfork, his old quarterbacks coach (from Arizona and Cleveland).
There are two little hiccups in all of this. One is that the Ravens play on Thursday night, and there’s no chance Brissett is going to be ready to play by then.
The second problem is that Fagnano is dealing with an ankle injury. I imagine that he’ll be healthy enough to play … but if he’s not, or if it gets worse during the game? Well, they also signed Austin Reed and Kedon Slovis, who are two guys who played in the UFL, and they’re probably not worth getting invested in. If either of them plays on Thursday, you can go ahead and just turn the game off.
Brissett will definitely be the guy moving forward, but it’ll just be after this week.
Alright, so this offseason Jacoby Brissett held out to get a better contract from the Cardinals. In hindsight, that might’ve been one of the most genius holdouts that we’ve ever seen. He ended up starting eight games for Arizona and then got benched during the fourth quarter against the Cowboys. You really have to stink to get benched against the Cowboys.
Gardner Minshew came in as relief and won the game, so the Cardinals decided that they would give him the starting job.
The problem here is that we know Minshew, and we know that the best version of him is when he comes in during the fourth quarter of his first game … after that, he starts to fall off …
But hey, this is what they’re doing for now. So that’s fun.
The Eagles came into the season with four quarterbacks on their roster: Jalen Hurts, Andy Dalton, Tanner McKee, and Cole Payton. During training camp, Nick Sirianni’s obsession with “competitive advantages” hurt the team; Dalton and McKee split reps as QB2, which meant neither of them really got comfortable with the job.
It turns out Dalton was the actual QB2 because he came in for four plays during the Week 3 game against the Bears when Hurts was getting tested for a concussion. He threw one pass, and it was an interception in the end zone … less than two weeks later, the team released him.
So Hurts goes down with the blood clots after Week 5, and the next man up is McKee … he holds the starting job for a total of three weeks.
On Thursday afternoon, Adam Schefter reported that Joe Milton was going to take over as the Eagles’ starting quarterback.
“But Jake, he wasn’t one of the four quarterbacks on the Eagles roster. Why is he the guy?”
I have no idea. The Eagles signed the 2024 sixth-round pick off the Cowboys’ practice squad on October 16. That means they gave the job to a guy who has been with the team for fewer than three weeks, instead of Payton, who they picked in the fifth round of the 2026 draft and has been there the whole time.
It’s complete nonsense, but at least the offense has the potential to be interesting (it won’t be).
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