2013 NFL Draft: Are Offensive Tackles Truly Safer Picks than Quarterbacks?

For a team with that will be making their first selection of the draft in the top half of the first round, war rooms will not only be concerned with finding an elite player, but they’ll likely be equally as focused on trying to avoid picking a player that will eventually be a bust.

This top of this draft in particular seems to be lacking in real elite talent, but there is a wealthy of high risk/high reward players. For some franchises, they’ll be looking to make the safest selection possible instead of making a gamble. In several of these cases that could mean selecting an offensive tackle in the top half of the draft, instead of making an attempt to find their quarterback of the future. But is that really a safer route?

It’s a common assumption that offensive tackles, and linemen in general are the safest pick a team could make. However, there are also those that would argue that busts on the offensive line are simply just noticed far less than at other positions. When quarterbacks bust, they usually go down in a blaze of glory, whereas bad picks on the offensive line aren’t going to be nearly as noticeable to the untrained eye.

So which it? To get a better idea for how the actual numbers break down, I looked at the offensive tackles and quarterbacks drafted within the first 16 picks of the first round in each of the past ten drafts. Each player was categorized strictly as bust, or a successful selection.

In some cases, defining a player as a bust is straightforward – no one will argue, for example, that Vince Young wasn’t a bust. Some other cases aren't quite as black and white. Jake Long has been an good player for the most part, but plenty of Dolphins fans would view him as a bust not only because of his play but also because who they passed up on to select him. However, for the purposes of this article, a player like Long would be labeled as a successful pick.

The results of this very non-scientific study might surprise you. By my count, only four of the twenty one offensive tackles that were drafted in the early in the last ten years truly ended up being busts: Jason Smith, Chris Williams, Robert Gallery, and Shawn Andrews. Regardless of whether or not you’d elect to define another player or two as a bust (you can see the full list for both positions at the end of this article), a failure rate around just 19% is quite remarkable.  

As one might expect, the bust rate for quarterbacks is significantly higher. There were 23 quarterbacks drafted in the same time frame, and qualifying them as success or failures was a bit more difficult. While neither Jake Locker nor Christian Ponder have gotten off to great starts in the league, I felt it was a bit premature to label them as busts, so I removed them from consideration entirely. That left seven out of 21 quarterbacks to be labeled as busts, of 33% (including Locker and Ponder as busts would have raised that to a whopping 39%).

Based on those numbers, there’s very little question that in the last decade, going quarterback over an offensive tackle early in the draft is an extremely risky move. But what does that mean for this coming draft?

Based upon the talent available at both offensive tackle and quarterback, it’s quite possible that there could be three offensive tackles taken within the top five picks, while at the same time it’s well within the realm of possibility that a quarterback isn’t taken within the top five selections. Furthermore, it’s conceivable that five offensive tackles could be selected in the first round while only one quarterback could hear his name called.

However, what those quarterback bust rates tell us is that if there is one position that teams will consistently ended up “reaching” for, it’s quarterback. In hindsight, there’s no reason that players like Locker or Mark Sanchez should have been drafted as early as they did. Teams at the top of the draft are often desperate for help at the position, and desperation hardly ever a logical motivation.

So in spite of the fact that this quarterback class isn’t particularly strong at the top and history makes it clear that reaching for a quarterback can often have disastrous results, it’s likely that we could still see multiple passers drafted early on in this draft. Will that make a desperate team’s situation even worse for the years to come?

Offensive Tackles:

Quarterbacks: