Steve Young lifts his arm, holding an imaginary football, preparing to throw. This act—the most basic aspect of quarterbacking—has defined his life and, at times, his self-worth.
Today, on an August evening, he’s standing at the front of a country-club ballroom in San Mateo, long retired. A bunch of professional-football luminaries are in attendance, including the Hall of Famer John Lynch, the former Pro Bowl quarterback and current Stanford football executive Andrew Luck, and, in the front row, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and his wife, Jane. The occasion is an event held by the Women’s Coaching Alliance, a group striving to diversify football staffs. The panel discussion topic is the state of college football. But, as always, the talk drifts toward quarterbacks, that uniquely American job with uniquely American responsibilities.
Young was one of the greatest ever, a three-time Super Bowl winner and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He’s 63 now, working in private equity in the Bay Area. Of all the quarterbacks I’ve met in my years covering the NFL for ESPN, Young stands out, not only because of his excellence, but because of his vulnerability. Guys like Joe Namath and Dan Marino always knew how to throw a football where they wanted, when they wanted, and unrelenting practice only refined those gifts.
Young is different. He was a natural athlete and extreme competitor, but he needed to learn how to become a quarterback. When he was behind Jim McMahon on the depth chart at BYU, Young sneaked a look at the radio station McMahon listened to in his car, convinced that it was available only to superstar quarterbacks. He was relieved to learn it was just normal classic rock. As a precocious backup in San Francisco, Young studied Joe Montana, searching for hidden clues that helped him transcend mere game management into something more like artistry.
Young’s eventual success is proof that greatness can be learned, if not taught, and while many of his peers speak of quarterbacking either in language resembling business-school jargon (QBR, RTG, LTA) or in middle-school vernacular (Trent Dilfer, a Super Bowl champion, often says that a quarterback needs “Dude Qualities”), Young can veer into philosophical territory. He proffers theories and ponders existential questions.
Young tells the room about coaching his daughters’ flag-football team. One day, he was tasked with teaching the quarterbacks that basic, magical thing that confounds everyone from parents in the backyard to NFL general managers in the war room: throwing a football. He holds the microphone in his right hand and lifts his left arm, a weapon for which no NFL defense in the 1990s had an answer. But then Young’s demeanor subtly changes, and his mind seems to have drifted elsewhere, not back to his legendary moments, but to a primary place of uncertainty, as if nothing has changed since he first picked up a ball.
“How do you throw it?” he says. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
The quarterback has never held a loftier place in American culture. It’s not just a job; it’s a way of being. The very idea of the quarterback was and remains bound up with who we are and how we see ourselves. Johnny Unitas was bedrock establishment. Joe Namath was rebellion. Joe Montana was pure cool. Patrick Mahomes is sleek innovation—with a fade hairstyle that is approaching mid-’90s Jennifer Aniston levels of ubiquity. And yet part of the quarterback’s allure is that, for all the worship lavished on those in the position, there is still a mystery about them. Nobody knows how the greats do it. Even the greats don’t always know. When I ask Mahomes how much he thinks about throwing, he shrugs and says “not a lot.”
When Walter Camp, one of football’s founding fathers, invented the job title—“quarter-back”—in 1880, he intentionally set it apart from other positions; ever since an otherness has characterized the game’s great passers. Michael Oriard, an offensive lineman for the Kansas City Chiefs turned English professor, noted in his 1993 book, Reading Football, that Camp’s ideal football player “was no bloodless intellectual” but instead “a man whose charismatic personality was more powerful than mere physical strength.”
From the moment the forward pass was legalized in college football in 1906, people knew it was something special. On October 3 of that year, Wesleyan played at Yale. Wesleyan quarterback Sam Moore took the ball and faded back. Two receivers ran long. They were decoys. Moore stared deep, then threw to halfback Irvin Van Tassell for roughly 18 yards. He was tackled immediately. At first, the crowd was silent; one writer in attendance called it a “breathless stillness.” And then there was a roar. “Such an ovation as scarcely ever before greeted a visiting team at Yale,” the journalist wrote.
The story of the quarterback has always been a story about American fame. In the 1940s, Bob Waterfield was the country’s best quarterback, playing for the Los Angeles Rams, and his wife was Jane Russell, one of America’s most famous pinup actresses. He looked like James Dean, before there was a James Dean. Her sultry photo shoot for the movie The Outlaw—lying on a stack of hay, holding a gun, blouse straps at her shoulders, revealing just enough—led to a censorship battle. Football and Hollywood, two ascendant entertainment forces, were laying claim to this country, and Bob and Jane were at the center of both, with paparazzi tailing them and—imagine this—asking for permission to take a photo.
An invitation to a party at their house over the Hollywood Hills became a sign of social status, a marker of arrival. Clark Gable spent many long nights there. So did Gene Autry, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Mickey Rooney, Robert Mitchum, Bing Crosby, and John Wayne. You can draw a straight line from “Russfield,” as the couple was called, to Namath and Raquel Welch (to name just one of his paramours), Randall Cunningham and Whitney Houston, Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, Josh Allen and Hailee Steinfeld, even Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. (Hey, he was a high-school quarterback!)
Steve Young and I once sat in his Palo Alto office and counted all of the hats a pro quarterback often wears: general, matinee idol, spokesman for a multibillion-dollar organization, amateur psychologist—we stopped at 17, and probably left some out. How one handles those tasks is as vital as one’s ability to throw a crisp post route. Young would watch how Montana worked a room, how he glided and glad-handed and—this is what stunned Young—remembered a detail about each person, whether they were in front of him or gawking from the corner. Quarterback is a job you live, rather than a position you play.
Perhaps that’s why we’re so bad at spotting successful ones. Just look at Johnny Unitas, who was a ninth-round draft pick in 1955, or Tom Brady, a sixth-rounder in 2000, or Brock Purdy, the last pick—Mr. Irrelevant—in 2022.
We try. NFL teams use technology to analyze throwing mechanics, attempting to map and quantify the perfect motion. They use exams such as the S2, a predraft cognition test, to try to understand processing speed. Nothing works. Bryce Young scored in the 98th percentile on the S2 and was drafted first overall by the Carolina Panthers in 2023; until the very end of last season, he looked like an epic bust. C. J. Stroud, meanwhile, scored in the 18th percentile that same year—and has generally played like a star for the Houston Texans. You can’t trust analytics, either. Passing numbers at the collegiate level have exploded in the past 15 years, as offenses have been designed around airing the ball out; as a result, college performance has almost no predictive value to the NFL—a quarterback version of grade inflation. In 2021, Bailey Zappe set a season-single record for the top tier of college football with 62 touchdown passes; he’s barely hung on in the NFL.
High-school-quarterback showcases are a multimillion-dollar circuit. It’s a dangerous space, with sharks lurking and entitlement aplenty. The desire to be the most precocious, to be next—to celebrate “the hope,” as Young puts it—has never been greater.
One of the main characters in my new book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, is a star out of Jacksonville, Florida, named Colin Hurley. He wanted to be on the fastest fast track. He skipped middle-school football altogether, going from youth ball to starting at Trinity Christian Academy. He took school online, maximizing time to train and travel to quarterback events. His throwing coach, arm-care specialist, and biomechanics coach feel that his strength and release are up there with the pros’. After leading Trinity to a Class 2A state title as a freshman and winning Player of the Year as a sophomore, Hurley “reclassified”—graduating a year early, in American high-school-sports parlance—and entered college in January 2024 at Louisiana State. He was 16 years old.
Colin is a kind kid, raised well, but he had spent his entire life pleasing adults. He suddenly had power and status and—thanks to a landmark 2021 Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for college athletes to be compensated for their name, image, and likeness—a lot of money. All of this terrified his father, Charlie, a former cop who had a premonition that something would go wrong. Was it too much, no matter how wise and mature and ambitious his son was?
Colin nearly died this past January when he drove his car into a tree at 3 a.m. He was found breathing but unresponsive. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he mumbled that he thought he was at football practice. Police said that impairment was not suspected in the crash. Thankfully, he recovered fully. He is now back on the team, with a newfound appreciation for his chosen line of work, hoping to become QB1.
Football’s power is unquestioned. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched broadcast programs in America were football games. Yet it is also facing existential danger. Parents, scared by the specter of brain damage, are reluctant to let their kids play tackle football. Flag football is on the upswing. And yet NFL quarterbacks have never been more prominent in American culture. The guys who do it now—Mahomes, Allen, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, even the University of Texas’s Arch Manning, a dynastic presence who has achieved little in college football but something outstanding in life, managing to make it this far with insane expectations and hype—are so celebrated that it’s no longer intellectually honest to compare them to other athletes. A quarterback is closer to a pop or movie star—and as our culture continues to fracture, few of those have the kind of broad appeal of the NFL’s truly elite passers.
To survive a ruthless winnowing—to go from one of about 16,000 high-school quarterbacks each year to one of the 10 good ones in the NFL to one of the three or so each generation who earn the Hall of Fame’s gold jacket—hones certain traits within them and strips others away. Quarterback is an isolating and lonely position, despite entire infrastructures reverse-engineered in service of those who play it, to say nothing of the elaborate playbooks created for them. In the end, whether high-school kids or NFL superstars, they’re alone with Steve Young’s existential questions:
How do I do it?
Can I do it?
You won’t know until you do it, and just because you do it once, or twice, or for 12 years, that’s no assurance that you’ll come through the next time. Tom Brady took a nap before his first Super Bowl; he didn’t know better, didn’t know what it might feel like to lose on the biggest stage. By his last Super Bowl, as a champion many times over, he was nearly sleepless the night before the game, perhaps trying to quiet doubts and convince himself that yet again he was worthy of his label: Greatest Ever.
A quarterback cannot enter the huddle with any doubt or fear. Anxiety must be stored somewhere. Some guys turn to the bar, or religion, or women, or Instagram, or avocado ice cream. Burrow took me through his pregame process—designed to land him in a headspace where he not only feels no pressure but feels almost nothing altogether: sitting in the locker room, staring in silence, listening to hip-hop, entering a tunnel with room for only himself, trying to flush all emotion until there is none.
“To play quarterback, you’re not allowed to worry about anything except the task at hand,” Luck told me. “And that seeps into other areas of life. It’s not the healthiest way to live.”
Last year, Steve Young was on BYU’s campus for an alumni event. Someone told him about an alumni football game that night, and asked if he wanted to play.
At first Young thought, Don’t do it. But something ignited within him that he hadn’t felt for a while. A chance to throw. On a football field, that sacred space. To moving targets. In front of fans, under lights on a Friday. An opportunity to wake a dormant gift. To feel that thing. What the heck? He decided to see what he could do.
It was warm that evening, in the 60s and partly cloudy. In a hoodie, Young took the field against men half his age, some less. He threw an interception on his second play. But later in the game, he drove his team down the field with a few short passes. He was near the end zone. The ball was in his hands. He bounced on his feet. He looked right, then saw a receiver named Aleva Hifo crossing the field left. He was open, in a window most people can’t see. Young just reacted, fluid and quick. The ball was out of his hands, like that, toward the corner of the end zone, where Hifo caught it with inches to spare. People cheered. The guys surrounded Young and lifted him on their shoulders. He leaned back, raised his arms, and yelled, not unlike when he was handed the Lombardi Trophy.
That night, Young was staring at his phone in bed when he received a video of the play. The angle was from behind, a perfect look to study himself, to answer that question: How do you do it? His footwork was elegant, his release high and fast, the ball a spiral, with the magical mix of touch and power. “A reminder of what’s in me,” Young says. He watched it again. And again. And again. And again.
*Lead image credit: Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Otto Greule Jr / Getty; Jim Gund / Allsport / Getty; Jeff Speer / Icon Sportswire / Getty.
This article has been adapted from Seth Wickersham’s new book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback.
The post How America Fell in Love With the Quarterback appeared first on The Atlantic.
