Quarterbacks, Gambling and Cocoa Pebbles (Mailbag Pt. 2)

I apologize in advance to folks whose questions I did not get to. You asked a lot of great questions, but there are only so many hours in each day. Thanks for your participation! And now onto the many questions I was able to answer:

Some general warm-up questions

Hi Mike, First-time, long-time. I'm still a teacher (haven't started my Substack yet, lol), a field struggling with the advancements of AI. I wondered if you've already seen or heard some AI use creeping into analytics, game planning, etc., for NFL teams. Could you perform your best Carnac the Magnificent routine and tell us of the horrors to come? – Robert W.

NFL teams are already using AI in all sorts of ways. You can read about some examples here and here.

NFL decision makers are likely to become even more smitten with AI as it becomes ever-more prevalent. That’s because NFL decision makers love to regurgitate the same tired (and often erroneous) wisdom back and forth to each other, then declare each other geniuses for being so wise. Guess what AI does best? Yep: regurgitate confirmation biases back to the user! 

An AI avatar of a 30-something white dude with a crisp haircut and stubblebeard, trained on Sean McVay press conferences, could ace a Zoom interview and get hired as the Cardinals head coach. I guarantee it. In fact, it may have already happened. 

More seriously, I wouldn’t put it past some team to draft an AI hallucination in the seventh round in the next year or two.

Nick Sirianni appears to be a devoted AI user. That tracks. And I hate it. 

What are the best, worst, and weirdest trends that have developed in the NFL over the last few years? – Jamie

• Best: The rise in fourth-down conversion attempts, and the general diversity in fourth-down strategies. 
• Worst: NFL games on Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Crunchyroll, Super-8 film mailed to your basement, whatever.
• Weirdest: So many different alternate uniforms that teams don’t even have the time and bandwidth to promote when they will wear them, even though 99% of fans seem prefer to purchase jerseys and apparel that look like the standard uniform.

Thanks for the many years of expert analysis and hilarious takes on the NFL, Mike. Been subscribing for a few years and reading your work since I found Football Outsiders 20+ years ago thinking it would help my picks in a long running confidence pool (I think FO gave me that 1% edge). I keep missing the deadlines for your mailbags, so I'll start with just one of the many questions rolling round in my head, this one on stats:

Do 4th down interceptions count on the stat sheet as interceptions? The old rule was the defense was to knock down the pass on 4th down, but now with teams going for it on 4th down so much more often, it seems there are a lot more interceptions on 4th down, yet intercepting on 4th down still seems pretty boneheaded as the defense that intercepts on 4th down usually costs their team field position.

Why do defenses go for the interception on 4th down - does it pad the stats of the interceptor (more $ next contract?)? Even the announcers have gone from stating how stupid it was to pick off that 4th down pass to now getting all excited (e.g. Joe Buck shouting his, 'It's intercepted!!' and neither he nor Troy pointing out the interceptor just cost his team 20 yds). – Smooth Jimmy Apollo

Thanks for your decades of support!

Fourth down interceptions absolutely count as interceptions on all stat sheets.

Defenses intercepted 24 fourth-down interceptions during the 2025 regular season. The interception rate was 4.7%. There were 18 “dropped interceptions” on fourth downs in the Sports Info Solutions database. Some of those “drops” were surely intentional.

Back in 2016, defenders intercepted 19 passes for an interception rate of 8.4%, with just three interceptions. Fewer interceptions, but more per opportunity.

A hypothesis: as fourth-down conversion attempts have become more common, defensive coaches have placed more emphasis on reminding defenders to just swat the ball away. But fourth-down tendencies have evolved so rapidly in the last 15 years, and samples are so small and volatile, that we should not get carried away with any assumptions.  

Defenders intercept passes on fourth downs because they are 20-something-year old athletes acting on split-second instinct. Some may be dreaming of a pick-6 or a payday. Most are just doing what’s best in 95% of situations. I would bet that more fourth-down passes are batted down, rather than intercepted, if there was a timeout before the fourth-down play, allowing coaches could to remind defenders of their responsibilities.

1. Are you watching HARD KNOCKS this season. If so, have you learned anything about the Seahawks from it?

2. Very few NFL teams still hold training camp at colleges; almost all now host them at the team's own facilities, allowing players to live at home each day rather than some remote campus. Does any of this matter at all for team cohesion or the effectiveness of training camp? – Adam Bonin

1. Nope! Never watched it. When something interesting happens, Pro Football Talk lets us all know.
2. I don’t think so.

Have you ever, as an adult, laid down in a college dormitory bed? They are skinny. The mattresses are cheap little tortillas. And if you managed to get comfortable, you probably didn’t enjoy your trip to the hallway bathroom to heed nature or shower.

Now imagine 300-pound athletes, many of them millionaires, heading back to the dormitories after two hours of practice in the 90-degree heat. Forget esprit de corps: there are health, safety and athletic optimization issues to worry about. So you can imagine one reason why the sleepaway training camp tradition is rapidly dying.  

The Four-QB Conundrum, and More 

There are four teams that are keeping four quarterbacks rostered this season. Is that sound strategy? 

On the one hand, the old saw is that if you have X good quarterbacks you don't have one, and the chances that all of them see playing time are pretty slim. But it is the most important position, so taking several swings to get the right one may be worth it. I just don't see how there are enough practice reps to tell if any of them but the guy you're starting that week are any good. – Benjamin Evans

Other readers asked related questions. 

QB roster building behavior seems weird this year - do you think there may be an element that explains that? Such as having little faith in next year’s QB class, or just little faith in general at how quarterbacks are developing at the college level? In other words, what additional factors could there be driving this hoarding behavior? It almost seems like coaches are prioritizing getting more bites at the apple, but that seems insane considering the QB bust rate – Mothman

Time for some brain-spraining logic:

• Quarterback is, by far, the most important position in football.
• Quarterbacks, at least theoretically, benefit from being in meeting and film rooms, practicing with a team, and generally basking in their coaches’ gargantuan intellects. 
• Quarterbacks take multiple years to develop, and in some bygone Golden Age every last one of them learned from the bench for three years before stepping onto the field. Yet,
• Keeping four quarterbacks on a 70-man extended roster (counting the practice squad) is a sign of organizational ineptitude.

The Eagles, Steelers and other organizations could have saved themselves a lot of criticism by keeping some UDFA defensive tackle no one has ever heard of instead of a quarterback! 

I think a lot of the discussion surrounding the many teams that kept four quarterbacks stems from the fact that it was something to discuss after roster cutdowns. It’s hard to generate a conversation about keeping 11 offensive linemen, or whatever. But fans have heard of the quarterbacks. 

That said, the Vikings and Browns are clearly playing politics by keeping four quarterbacks. The Vikings don’t want to admit final defeat on J.J. McCarthy. The Browns are just guessing their way through life. Both the Vikings and Browns are keeping quarterbacks that they would prefer to release. In the Browns’ case, it’s their starter. That's bad roster management.

The Steelers kept four quarterbacks because Aaron Rodgers is 42 years old. Drew Allar is a rookie, and Will Howard may have been hard to sneak onto the practice squad without someone making a waiver claim. 

The Falcons will probably move Jack Strand to the practice squad once they are fully comfortable with Michael Penix’s health and readiness. There’s a 1% chance Strand will be helpful in 2027, which is one percentage point higher than the chances that Tua Tagovailoa and Cooper Rush will be on next year’s roster. We will get to the Eagles in a moment.

As Mothman mentions, there were other odd backup quarterback decisions last week. The Packers, for example, traded Kyle McCord after what was described by observers as a fine training camp, plus a four-touchdown preseason finale. Brian Gutekunst spoke at length about the McCord trade on Tuesday, indicating that there was no reason to keep a quarterback without the potential to develop into a backup. 

I am not sure I agree with that logic, which is a variation on another old saw: if the starter and backup get hurt, we’re screwed no matter what. Say Jordan Love misses his customary two games this year. Tyrod Taylor always gets knocked out of his relief appearances. So Taylor gets hurt in the third quarter of a close game against the Dolphins in Week 15. The playoffs are on the line. Who gives the Packers the best chance of closing out a win: the guy who spent all spring and summer with Matt LaFleur or newly-signed Kedon Slovis, who was deemed expendable by LaFleur’s baby brother in Arizona? If the answer is really Slovis, then what were all of those weeks of meetings and practices for?

But then, I am not as deft at building seventh-place rosters with little holes in them as the Packers are. 

How did Howie Roseman, usually one of the shrewdest GMs in sports, screw up the Eagles' backup QB situation so badly? – Tracer Bullet

Gosh, I can remember when Eagles fans loved Tanner McKee.

I will be publishing backup quarterback rankings next week. For now, I ask which teams have “good” backup situations. The 49ers, with Mac Jones? Sure. If you name three others, you are probably just naming teams with recognizable Mitch Trubisky-type backups. Many of those quarterbacks looked roughly as bad in the preseason as Andy Dalton and Tanner McKee did. 

I think Dalton is serving as a deputy offensive coordinator. McKee could probably RPO his way to a win or two by 16-13 final scores. I don’t know why Cole Payton hasn’t been stashed on the practice squad. I hope ChatGPT didn’t tell Nick Sirianni to use him as a Tush Push Specialist or something.

I think the real anxiety here isn’t about the Eagles backup quarterbacks, but the fact that their preseason offense looked even more discombobulated than last year’s regular-season offense.

The most interesting thing to me about roster cuts is the backup quarterback position. Titans cut Will Levis to keep Mitch Trubisky, Cowboys cut Joe Milton to keep Sam Howell, and the Eagles are waffling between Tanner McKee and ancient Andy Dalton as their backup. I don’t understand why teams are choosing experienced backups with little to no potential over backups with possible upside. Are teams telling us that if their starter goes down, they know they're going to lose no matter who the backup is? Or is it time to admit that backup quarterbacks are just another coach for the starter? – Scott

Again, I will publish backup quarterback rankings next week. It’s a fun exercise, but also a silly one. It’s impossible to accurately analyze players based on sporadic cameos over multiple seasons, preseason backup-on-backup action, and outdated scouting reports from college or five years ago, when the backup was a starter.

Teams have prioritized older backups over prospects for a long time. It takes a different mindset to be a backup. Patience. A lack of ego. The ability to focus on gameplans, week after week, that you are unlikely to execute. The ability to suddenly enter a high-pressure situation without peeing yourself because it’s your first time. Coaches also want the starter to take about 75% of practice reps during the season, so it’s best to have a backup who doesn’t need any sort of development. And someone like Mitch Trubisky can be a useful sounding board for Cam Ward.

Sometimes, NFL coaches grow too enamored with their pet veteran backups. But there are also legitimate reasons why the most talented guy doesn’t always get the job. 

What is your opinion of Will Levis? Bad QB or victim of bad coaching? At what point is an underwhelming draft pick considered irreparable in practice, i.e. when should coaches stop with “reclamation projects.” – Nicholas

Levis left college as a fake Josh Allen. He was huge, mobile, and he had a live arm but all sorts of flaws. He wasn’t as huge/mobile/live-armed as Allen, mind you, but he did have all of Allen’s collegiate flaws. Naturally, Levis drew Allen comparisons, because it’s always wise to focus on the rare exceptional case and not the 100 examples of talented teases who never pan out. 

Levis evaluations were all over the place in the 2023 draft. I thought he was a mid-round pick with a slim chance of becoming a starter. And here we are!

As for when to give up on a project, it's often best to cut loose a young prospect who failed to win a job sooner than later. It's human nature for both sides to wish to move on.

I’m Shocked – Shocked! – That Gambling is Going on in this Mailbag

Have your feelings changed on gambling over the past year? I used DraftKings weekly the past few NFL seasons, but it feels like there was some kind of vibe shift with the Sorsby stuff, tons of articles on gambling addiction, etc etc. – MT

My opinions on sports gambling haven’t changed much. However, I have become radicalized about:

• Prediction markets that allow people to wager on military actions and forest fires.
• Addictively-engineered casino-style games on phone apps.
• Incessant, excruciating gambling advertising on every single media I ingest.

No, Neil Patrick Harris, I am not going to play blackjack on my phone while my kid is practicing for a dance recital or something. You sound like Beelzebub himself for suggesting something so fiendish in your jaunty little commercial showtune.

I think of sports gambling – placing some wagers, then watching the results play out across hours, often in a social setting – as grandpa smoking his pipe on the porch, or the fellas lighting up stogies at a Friday night poker game. All of this app-based rat-pellet gambling I see advertised during Jeopardy! is more like selling cotton candy-flavored nicotine vapes behind the middle school.

I have the same issue with cannabis legalization. I enjoy being able to legally purchase a little weed, or some 5 mg THC seltzers to replace my Friday night beers. I don’t think 100 milligram root beer-flavored THC hemp-based products should be available in convenience stores. The federal government is about to institute a ban on all hemp products, rather than implementing dosage restrictions or availability regulations, which will impact my ability to purchase 5 mg seltzers in a liquor store. Common-sense regulation wasn’t our government’s strong suit in its best days.

There should be strict regulations about predatory, addictive gambling apps, as well as some limits on advertising, and the “prediction markets” should be litigated into a black hole. If that makes putting $20 on the Eagles game a little harder, so be it. 

I still wager a little on sporting events but will probably not mention it as much on social media, where lots of folks have gone full Carrie Nation about gambling and often falsely equate putting $20 on an Eagles game with blowing your bank account on Huff ‘n’ Puff or placing bets on the location of the next measles outbreak.