In the 2022 NFL Draft, when Adam Peters was the assistant general manager of the San Francisco 49ers, he saw his team strike gold in a way that almost never happens. They found their eventual franchise quarterback, Brock Purdy, with the last pick in the entire draft.
By the time Purdy emerged as the 49ers starter later in the season and led them all the way to the NFC Championship Game, Peters had proof that franchise quarterbacks aren’t always found at the top of the draft. He could see, first-hand, that with good scouting they can be found anywhere.
And that’s true. But there’s also another lesson that Peters, now the GM of the Washington Commanders, took with him from the Purdy experience.
“If we thought he was that good,” Peters said at the NFL scouting combine on Tuesday, “we probably wouldn’t have waited until the last pick.”
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And that’s why there should be no doubt about Peters intentions with the No. 2 pick in the NFL Draft this April, because this isn’t really a difficult decision. The Washington Commanders are going to take a quarterback in that spot as long as Peters and his staff are sure that at least one of them really is “that good.” They’re not going to sit back and hope that Sam Howell becomes a star in his third season. And they’re not going to take a shot at another Purdy-like miracle later in the draft.
Elite quarterbacks don’t come around very often. And if a GM thinks he sees one, he’d be a fool to let him pass.
Now, Peters, of course, wouldn’t say for sure if he thinks USC’s Caleb Williams or North Carolina’s Drake Maye — the consensus top two quarterbacks in this year’s draft — are elite. He insisted the Commanders’ plan for the No. 2 pick “hasn’t been decided yet by any stretch of the imagination.”
But, of course, he’s not fooling anyone — not in this draft. There is a pretty strong consensus among scouts and executives around the league that Williams, Maye and possibly one or two other quarterbacks have elite potential. There are some who believe that Williams might be one of those once-in-a-generation quarterbacks — think Andrew Luck, Patrick Mahomes or someone like that. And there are others who think Maye is the better of the two.
Dan Quinn, the Commanders new coach, said on Tuesday that he wants a quarterback with “rare, unique stuff.” Williams and Maye might have that. No one thinks Howell does.
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That’s not an indictment of Howell either. He did a lot of good things last year during his first full season as a starter. The 23-year-old threw for 3,946 yards and 21 touchdowns. And he did that while being sacked a ridiculous 65 times. The amount of pressure he faced behind Washington’s terrible offensive line is at least a partial explanation for his NFL-worst 21 interceptions, too.
It wasn’t perfect. Overall, it wasn’t even a top-20 performance. And the 4-13 record with him under center is hard to ignore. But his arm, his toughness, his intelligence all helped him show promise. And next year he’ll have the benefit of what he learned from a full season of experience too.
But, as Peters noted with Purdy, if anybody thought Howell was going to be nearly as good as what the world thinks Williams and Maye will be — if they thought he had that “rare, unique stuff” that Quinn wants — Howell would have been selected much, much earlier. Even Peters’ 49ers team passed on him four times in the first five rounds — and they were obviously looking for a quarterback since they took Purdy two rounds later. That old Commanders’ regime was just taking a shot in the dark when they took Howell with the 144th overall pick in the 2022 draft. They liked what they saw in him. They believed he had potential.
They certainly didn’t think they were discovering their next franchise quarterback in the fifth round. If they did, as Peters noted, they wouldn’t have waited that long. And if anyone else thought Howell had franchise quarterback potential, they wouldn’t have let him keep sliding either.
Sure, mistakes can be made. Every once in a while there’s a Purdy or a Tom Brady (sixth round in 2000) or a Tony Romo (undrafted in 2003) that falls through the cracks. And Peters can testify to the mistakes at the top of the draft too. The year before the 49ers lucked into Purdy, they traded to take Trey Lance with the third overall pick in the draft. He made four starts in two seasons in San Francisco before they dumped him to Dallas for a fourth-round pick.
Of course, Lance was hardly a consensus top-of-the-draft pick in 2021 — certainly not the way Williams and Maye are now. There were scouts back then who thought there wasn’t a clear No. 2 after the Jaguars took Trevor Lawrence, that there wasn’t another quarterback worthy of being selected in the Top 15.
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This year the consensus is strong. Peters knows that too, which is part of why this isn’t hard. The decision he’s about to make at quarterback is absolutely a no-brainer. He has no attachment to Howell, no interest in his development, and no need to even keep him around for the final two years of his rookie contract. He’s not going to wait around just to see if the Commanders get as lucky with him as his old team did with Purdy.
Peters did have nice things to say about Howell. He said they took a walk around the Commanders facility a few weeks ago and Peters “got to know him a little bit better.” He said “I feel really good about him too. I feel really excited about him.” Just not enough, of course, to say “He’s our guy.”
Because he’s not. The new regime will be tying their fates to a new quarterback because it’s the only logical thing to do. They are in what they hope is a rare position at the top of the draft — one they expect not to be in again any time soon. They will be looking at, at worst, the second-best quarterback on their draft board — a rare player at the most important position in sports.
Yes, great quarterbacks can be found in a lot of different places. Peters knows enough, though, not to look away when one is staring him in the face.
Ralph Vacchiano is the NFC East reporter for FOX Sports, covering the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.
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