Last year, I wrote about the shrinking middle class of quarterbacks in the NFL. After the 2019 NFL Draft, things looked even more polarizing: with four QBs being selected in the top 10, and a fifth joining a “franchise QB” in Baltimore, there was a very small middle class of quarterbacks in the NFL, at least based on salary cap dollars.

That leaves just four teams with non-franchise, non-rookie QBs: the Dolphins with Tannehill, the Broncos with Keenum, the Jaguars with Bortles, and the Bengals with Dalton.

As you know, none of those teams were successful last year, and three of them have gone in a different (albeit similarly unexciting) direction at quarterback. Miami is going to release Ryan Tannehill, and the Broncos and Jaguars swapped out expensive veteran quarterbacks who aren’t franchise quarterbacks in Case Keenum and Blake Bortles for… expensive veteran quarterbacks who aren’t franchise quarterbacks (but have won a Super Bowl!) in Joe Flacco and Nick Foles.

In addition to those four teams, there are three other teams in quarterback purgatory. One is Washington, who lost Alex Smith due to injury (and are paying borderline franchise quarterback dollars to him this year, to the tune of a $20.4M cap hit) and replaced him with Keenum, who at least has an extremely modest base salary in 2019. Of course, going cheap at quarterback with a below-average passer is hardly a strategy teams look to employ, especially when it comes with spending an extra $20M on an injured quarterback. The other two teams found themselves in no man’s land thanks to inconsistent play from the first two picks in the 2015 NFL Draft. Tampa Bay and Tennessee both used the fifth year option to extend the contracts of Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, but that leaves them with cap hits in excess of $20M for 2019 despite neither player being a top-10 quarterback. That leaves the Titans and Bucs in a similar space — in terms of both salary cap dollars and quarterback production — to teams like the Bengals, Broncos, and Jaguars.

So, to recap: (i) two teams (Miami and Washington) are lost at quarterback and probably deserve an incomplete grade at this time: both are prime candidates to use a high draft pick on a quarterback in the 2019 Draft, and (ii) five teams (CIN/JAC/DEN/TEN/TB) are stuck paying between $16 and $22M to quarterbacks that are among the least desirable starting quarterbacks in the league.

11 teams, meanwhile, are rolling with quarterbacks on rookie deals, including all 5 from the 1st round of the 2018 Draft (CLE/NYJ/BUF/ARI/BAL), with the possible chance that Arizona may in fact replace last year’s 1st round QB with a new 1st round QB. The other 6 teams? 3 took QBs in the 1st round of 2017 (CHI/KC/HOU) and all are very happy about that: those three teams have a 2-year window with those rookies on cheap deals. The other 3 took QBs in the 2016 Draft: two with the first two picks (LA/PHI), and one (DAL) with a late round pick. The Cowboys are likely to give Dak Prescott a big contract before the start of the ’19 season, as Dallas doesn’t have the fifth year option at its disposal since Prescott wasn’t a first round pick. Prescott’s contract is up after this season (Dallas can of course use the franchise tag on him), while the Eagles and Rams can — if they choose — wait a year on both Jared Goff and Carson Wentz. Of course, as the Bucs and Titans can attest, the fifth-year option is hardly cheap, but based on their productivity, both Goff and Wentz would still be good values at $21M in 2020 (it helps that they’ve been much more effective than the top two picks in the draft the prior year).

That leaves 14 teams with “franchise QBs” at least measured by dollars (whether Derek Carr or Eli Manning still qualify is a different matter), although Jimmy Garoppolo (another player on whom the jury is still out) — by virtue of having an insane $37M cap hit last year — is only counting for $19.35M against the 2019 cap. These are the quarterbacks you would expect, so there’s not much more to say about them. Last year, Washington and Baltimore were on this list, but both have much cheaper quarterbacks in ’19 (again, with the Redskins being a weird case due to Smith’s injury).

So we have 14 teams that paid big dollars to franchise quarterbacks and another 11 that are trying to win with “cheap” rookie deal quarterbacks. The other 7 teams include two incompletes and five teams that basically lost the quarterback carousel and are still looking to find the answer.

Below is a graphical representation of the NFL landscape, in terms of starting quarterbacks:

Here is the same data, but presented by category rather than division:

What stands out to you?