Tales From the NFL Quarterback CarouselDarkness on the Edge of McCownThe 1-7 Buccaneers made a quarterback switch Tuesday, benching second-year passer Mike Glennon for 35-year-old Josh McCown, who opened the season as the team’s starter. Glennon was not particularly impressive in McCown’s absence, but the baseline wasn’t exactly set very high, either. Glennon posted a 55.9 QBR in his six-week stretch as the starter, beating out McCown’s 47.1 QBR from September.McCown, signed to a two-year, $10 million deal after an incredible five-start run as Chicago’s backup last season, had exhibited his former replacement-level performance during the opening three games of the year before suffering a thumb injury in Tampa Bay’s 56-14 loss to Atlanta. The injury prevented McCown from gripping a football until two weeks ago, but the Buccaneers kept him on the bench until deciding to make the switch for football reasons this week.The language that Lovie Smith used to describe the move was almost bizarre. Smith said Glennon was still his quarterback of the future, but that he was starting McCown to try to give his team a “spark.” Dumpster fires give off sparks, I guess, but it’s hard to imagine the same McCown whose last start ended with the Buccaneers losing by 42 points suddenly inciting a winning streak in Tampa.What do the Buccaneers gain from starting McCown? His 1,405 career attempts tell us he’s an eminently replaceable backup quarterback. That’s probably better than Glennon, but it’s not by much, and it’s of little consequence. The Buccaneers will almost surely cut McCown this offseason and avoid paying him his $4.25 million base salary for 2015, so Tampa Bay really is making this move to try to win more games now. It would be better if it were simply lying.However, the Bucs shouldn’t be trying to win more games. No, I’m not suggesting they tank, but reaching out for veteran mediocrity in the hopes of finding a cold, unsatisfying level of competence is shortsighted and risk-averse. McCown, by definition, won’t contribute to a winning Buccaneers team during his time in Tampa. The Buccaneers’ 2015 first-round pick might, and the Bucs should want that first-round pick to be as high as possible.If anything, Tampa Bay should be looking toward a higher-variance option at quarterback. Its third-string quarterback is 27-year-old Northwestern product Mike Kafka, a former fourth-round pick of the Eagles who bounced around several practice squads before ending up in Tampa Bay. His only regular-season work came in 2011, when he went 11-for-16 with two picks for the Eagles.I’m not suggesting that Kafka is some sort of hidden superstar. I have no idea. But we know that McCown’s a mediocre quantity. At this point, we can be pretty sure that Glennon is mediocre. While Smith says that Glennon is the Bucs’ quarterback of the future, he wouldn’t be replacing Glennon with McCown if he really believed that. Kafka is probably not an NFL-caliber passer, but 16 attempts three years ago don’t tell us anything. There’s a slim chance that Kafka is Brian Hoyer or Austin Davis, third-stringers who made it from the practice squad into the starting lineup and emerged as viable NFL starters for peanuts. That would be a serious asset, one way more valuable than McCown or Glennon will ever be to this team.And if Kafka turned out to be a total mess, that would also be good for the Buccaneers. It might even be better for them if he were a disaster, because they would have the best possible chance of finishing with the worst possible record and, consequently, the highest possible draft pick. The worst outcome for the Buccaneers would be to choose the option that diminishes the value of their draft pick while ensuring they have a zero percent chance of finding a long-term solution at quarterback this season. That is, somehow, exactly the option they have chosen.
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