ESPN’s Max Kellerman Calls Out NFL for Trend of Black QBs Stock Falling Before Draft: This Year’s Top 3 Are ‘White Guy, White Guy, White Guy’
It’s an annual occurrence for quarterbacks to see their stock rise as we get closer to the NFL Draft with teams becoming desperate to find their franchise signal caller. But ESPN’s Max Kellerman noted on First Take that it’s usually the white pass throwers who rise, while Black quarterbacks unfairly slide down the draft board.
“I know it’s on my radar,” Kellerman told his First Take co-host Stephen A. Smith. “Sometimes quarterbacks rise, sometimes they fall, but what I’ve noticed, in recent years after decades of artificial barriers being put in place for Black quarterbacks is that vis-a-vis white quarterbacks, Black quarterbacks in the draft tend to fall pre-draft.”
After Ohio State beat Clemson in the Sugar Bowl, Buckeyes quarterback Justin Fields saw his NFL Draft stock on the rise. But in recent months, analysts have tried to explain why Fields dipped from the second best quarterback prospect down to fourth or fifth.
“Are we going to pretend this doesn’t happen?” Kellerman later tweeted in reference to his take on NFL Draft evaluations.
“Sometimes it’s right, Daniel Jones looks like he’s going to be better than Dwayne Haskins,” Kellerman added. “And sometimes it’s wrong. Mitch Trubisky is not as good as Deshaun Watson or certainly not Patrick Mahomes.”
Just as Fields has seen his draft stock slide in recent months, elite quarterbacks like Watson, Mahomes and Lamar Jackson experienced similar outcomes. But as Kellerman pointed out, there are also times general managers are justified when quarterbacks slide, such as Haskins or Geno Smith.
“The point is, the correlation that can be made, is that your status falls, vis a vis white quarterbacks and so that’s why my antenna are up when I notice one, two and three this year – white guy, white guy, white guy.”
Watson and Mahomes might have been disrespected in terms of their draft stock, but once they made an impact in the NFL, they were properly compensated. The top four average annual salaries in the NFL are owned by Black quarterbacks, Mahomes, Dak Prescott, Watson and Russell Wilson.
Watch above via, ESPN
