Geno Smith: 2022's Most Pleasant Surprise

NFL Week 4 - There's a surprising name near the top of Quick Reads this week, up there amidst Super Bowl veterans such as Tom Brady, Jared Goff, Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes, and Russell Wilson. He's an aging veteran, but according to our quarterback rankings, he's playing as well as the sport's young superstars, including Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, and Mahomes. We are speaking, of course, about Seattle's Geno Smith, who has emerged from nearly a decade of ignominy and irrelevance to become one of the NFL's best passers early this season.

A second-round pick by the Jets in 2013, Smith started all 16 games as a rookie and went 8-8, with a league-best five game-winning drives in the fourth quarter. Our numbers were not impressed, however—Smith made the bottom four in both DYAR and DVOA that year, suggesting his success would be short-lived. Indeed, Smith went 3-10 as a starter in 2014 and was benched for a 34-year-old Michael Vick at one point. In 2015, Smith suffered a fractured jaw in a fight in training camp, then lost his starting job to Ryan Fitzpatrick and spent most of that season on the sidelines. That looked like the end of Smith's starting career; he made only five starts in the next seven seasons as a backup with the Jets, Giants, Chargers, and Seahawks.

Smith entered this season in a quarterback competition in Seattle, but the Seahawks' insistence on getting Drew Lock in the Russell Wilson trade (and their praise for Lock in the subsequent press conference) suggested he was an underdog in that battle. But he started with the first string in training camp and never looked back, and his early performance has been better than anyone could have expected. As of Monday afternoon, Smith leads the NFL in completion rate, and his yardage, touchdown, interception, and sack rates are all better than average. He has even won over the Football Outsiders computers, sitting at third in DYAR and second in DVOA.

This has us pondering the best seasons ever by a quarterback who returned to the starting lineup after spending time on the bench. We're going to define starters simply as any quarterback who started at least half his team's games in a given season—so, seven starts in a 14-game campaign; eight starts in 16 games; nine starts in our new 17-game world; or five or six starts, respectively, in the strike-shortened seasons of 1982 and 1987. From the AFL merger in 1970 to last season, we found 159 instances of a quarterback who:

• qualified as a starter;
• but had not been a starter the season prior;
• but had been a starter at some point before in the NFL.

That last point is key. We're not looking for rookies or veterans who have never started before. We're trying to compare Smith to other quarterbacks who started but were benched for poor performance, then came back later to earn another starting opportunity; quarterbacks who came Back From a Benching (BFB). Our definitions are looser than that—we're also going to pick up a lot of passers who came back from injury or suspension—but they at least give us a good starting point. We'll do our best to filter those cases out in search of players who went from starter to backup and back.

This can be trickier than it sounds, however. Should Drew Bledsoe qualify as a BFB quarterback in 2002? During the second game of the 2001 season, Bledsoe suffered a sheared blood vessel in his chest that sidelined him for the rest of the regular season. An unproven backup named Tom Brady guided New England to the playoffs, but when he too was injured, it was Bledsoe who finished the AFC Championship Game victory over Pittsburgh. Two decades later, this may be difficult to believe, but Bill Belichick's decision to start Brady over Bledsoe in the Super Bowl was not without controversy. Brady, of course, started and won the Super Bowl and kept throwing passes in Foxborough for nearly 20 years, while Bledsoe was a starter in Buffalo the next season.

This is all relevant because Bledsoe's 375 completions, 610 attempts, and 4,359 passing yards with the Bills in 2002 would be BFB records, if you want to consider Bledsoe a BFB quarterback. If you don't, those records instead go to Jon Kitna, who started 76 games for the Seahawks and Bengals before backing up Carson Palmer for a couple of seasons in Cincinnati. In 2006 he started every game for Detroit, picking up 4,240 yards in 596 attempts and leading the league with 372 completions. He was also sacked a BFB record 63 times.

Neither of those would be the greatest BFB season of all time, however. After 11 seasons with a lot of highs and a lot of lows in Philadelphia, Randall Cunningham retired from the NFL in 1996. Cunningham spent a year installing granite and marble, then returned to the NFL in 1997 to back up Brad Johnson with the Vikings. He started in place of an injured Johnson in two playoff games that year, but it was Johnson who was starting the first two games in 1998. After Johnson left the field in Week 2 with an ankle injury, however, Cunningham was off to the races. He started every game for the rest of Minnesota's season, finishing with BFB records of 34 touchdown passes, 1,598 passing DYAR, and a 45.1% DVOA as the Vikings reached the NFC Championship Game. Don't feel bad for Johnson, however—after returning to back up Cunningham later that year, he had an excellent BFB season with Washington (1,074 DYAR, 18.7% DVOA) in 1999, won a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay in 2002, and returned to Minnesota for another BFB season in 2005.

The best BFB quarterback of the DVOA era, however, would be Steve Young. After a brief stint with the Los Angeles Express of the original USFL, Young joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for two seasons—and he was terrible, finishing below replacement level in both years. He then joined the San Francisco 49ers as a backup, but he played frequently as Joe Montana's injuries began to pile up. Young played in 35 games from 1987 to 1990, including 10 starts, amassing 898 DYAR. Officially, 1991 was Young's only BFB season, and though his own injuries limited him to 10 starts, he finished fifth in DYAR and second in DVOA. That was the first of eight seasons when Young finished in the top 10 in passing DYAR and top five in DVOA; only Tom Brady and Peyton Manning (13 each), Dan Marino and Drew Brees (11), and Montana (eight) have done so that often. Young was also first or second at the position in rushing DYAR in seven of those eight seasons. Oh, and he also won two MVPs and a Super Bowl.

A few other notable BFB quarterbacks:

• Erik Kramer spent a few seasons in a quarterback rotation in Detroit; three-plus decades later, he is still the last Lions quarterback to win a playoff game. He joined another quarterback rotation with Steve Walsh in Chicago in 1994, then started every game for the Bears in 1995, leading the league with 1,585 DYAR (a single-season record for Chicago, more than double any other Bears quarterback) and finishing second in DVOA behind future Hall of Famer Troy Aikman. His 3,838 yards and 29 touchdowns that season are still Bears records.

• Jeff George was the NFL's first overall draft pick in 1990, but he wore out his welcome in Indianapolis after four losing seasons and a litany of disagreements with coaches and management. He was then traded to Atlanta, leading the Falcons' run 'n' shoot offense to a wild-card game against Green Bay in the 1995 season. After throwing an interception against Philadelphia in Week 3 of 1996, however, George got into a shouting match with head coach June Jones on the sideline; he was then suspended for the rest of the season. (His spot was taken by former Saints starter Bobby Hebert, who went on to throw 25 interceptions, a BFB record he shares with Lynn Dickey of the 1980 Packers.) In 1997 George was in Oakland, leading the league in passing yards; in 1998 he was in and out of the Raiders lineup, publicly feuding with new head coach Jon Gruden and offensive coordinator Bill Callahan. In 1999 he was Back From the Bench in Minnesota, taking over the starting role in mid-October after Randall Cunningham could not sustain his magical performance from the year before. George finished third in DVOA that season (behind future Hall of Famers Kurt Warner and Peyton Manning) and seventh in DYAR, beating the Dallas Cowboys in the only playoff win of his career. The Vikings opted not to re-sign him, going with 1999 first-rounder Daunte Culpepper instead. George signed with Washington, where he rotated with fellow BFB QB Brad Johnson. He started the first two games of the 2001 season, but was released outright after a pair of disastrous performances (-143 DYAR, -60.1% DVOA). He would later sign contracts with the Seahawks, Bears, and Raiders (again), but never played for any of those teams.

• Kerry Collins was the fifth overall pick in 1995, the first-ever quarterback of the Carolina Panthers in their expansion year. Though they reached the NFC Championship Game a year later, the marriage between Collins and the Panthers did not last long. After an 0-4 start in 1998, Collins approached head coach Dom Capers and said his heart was not in the game and he didn't think he could play; Capers took this as Collins quitting on the team and released him. Collins signed with the Saints a few weeks later and was starting in New Orleans by the end of the year. Following an arrest for drunk driving, Collins entered treatment for alcohol abuse; he later admitted that much of his erratic behavior was due to his struggles with alcoholism. He began the 1999 season backing up Kent Graham in New York, but again was starting by the end of the year. In 2000, Collins made the top 10 in DVOA and DYAR, leading the Giants to the Super Bowl. Collins was runner-up for Comeback Player of the Year; he would also finish second in that category in 2008, when he was a BFB QB in Tennessee.

• Like Jeff George, Michael Vick was a former first overall draft pick; like George, he quarterbacked the Falcons in a playoff game in Green Bay; and like George, the end of his tenure in Atlanta had nothing to do with his performance on the field. A dogfighting scandal in 2007 led to a suspension and, eventually, 21 months in federal prison. He returned to the NFL in 2009 backing up Donovan McNabb in Philadelphia; when McNabb was traded to Washington in 2010, Vick started the year on the bench behind Kevin Kolb. A concussion knocked Kolb out of the lineup in the season opener, and Vick went on to start 11 games, finishing seventh in passing DVOA, leading all quarterbacks in rushing DYAR, and winning the AP's Comeback Player of the Year award. Vick would last a few more years in Philadelphia before finishing his career as a backup with the Jets and Steelers. 

With the obvious exception of Young, most of these BFB QBs were not long-term answers for their teams, so Seattle is likely to have another new quarterback in 2023 regardless of how Smith fares the rest of the year. This also applies to the other BFB candidates this season, including Marcus Mariota in Atlanta, Jacoby Brissett in Cleveland, and either Jameis Winston or Andy Dalton in New Orleans. (The Jets' Joe Flacco and Pittsburgh's Mitchel Trubisky would also qualify, but it appears they're going to spend the rest of the season behind Zach Wilson and Kenny Pickett.)