I was sitting at the kitchen table again after the kids finally crashed, the fridge humming its low, steady note in the dark like it always does when the swings miss. Last week’s takes on the D1Baseball assistant coach carousel and Koa Peat locking into the draft felt like watching a slow roller that never quite reached the bag. I called the Sorsby situation right when the NCAA brief dropped, but the rest of the ledger sat red. That bruise is still there. So tonight I went deeper into the tape on Dan Graziano’s annual 32-for-32 quarterback questions, and the thing that kept punching me in the gut was how every single franchise is still tiptoeing around the same cliff.
It’s June. Three months until real bullets fly. And somehow the entire league still can’t answer the most basic question in football: who the hell is throwing the ball? I never thought I’d be this deep into another offseason where the answers feel further away than they did in December, but here we are. Graziano laid it out clean—every team has at least one unresolved thread—and reading it made me feel the same way I did after that Brunson column last month. I thought the league had this figured out. I was wrong again.
Take the Cardinals. Graziano starts with the bluntest version of the question: who even is the quarterback? Kyler Murray is gone. Brissett held out, showed up anyway, and now he’s making less guaranteed money than a Broncos backup while the new coach, Mike LaFleur, never saw the 3,366-yard, 23-touchdown stretch Brissett put together last year. Minshew is there on a flyer. Carson Beck got drafted in the third round. Kedon Slovis is still around like a bad penny. I keep coming back to how this franchise keeps treating the position like it’s a temporary lease. Brissett deserves low-end starter money if he’s going to be the guy, but the front office is playing chicken with incentives and roster spots. At some point they’ll hand the keys to Beck just to see what they have before the 2027 draft. The problem is they might hand it to him in Week 8 after three straight losses and then wonder why the kid looks rattled. I’ve watched this movie before. It never ends with clarity.
Then the Falcons jump off the page. Is Michael Penix Jr. already in trouble? Eighth overall in 2024, finished the year as the starter, opened 2025 as QB1, then a knee injury wiped out the rest of it after just 1,982 yards and nine touchdowns. New regime, new GM, new coach Kevin Stefanski. They signed Tua Tagovailoa, who is healthier right now. Stefanski lived through this exact script in Cleveland—multiple competitions, zero clarity, constant noise. If Tagovailoa looks sharp in camp, Penix’s long-term window shrinks fast. I don’t buy the “he’s still the future” line when the new people in charge owe him nothing. That’s the stomach-punch part. One bad training camp and the eighth pick becomes the expensive bridge guy. I’ve been burned by these “new regime, clean slate” situations before. They rarely end with the high draft pick winning the job without drama.
The Ravens section stopped me cold. How long does Lamar Jackson actually stay in Baltimore? Two years left on the deal. Extension talks happened and went nowhere. Things turned ugly the last time this happened. Jackson is saying the right things in public, but if they reach December without a new contract, the questions get louder than the two-time MVP résumé. I wouldn’t be shocked if something gets done midseason just to quiet the noise, but I also wouldn’t be shocked if it drags into 2026 and the cap situation forces a decision nobody wants. That’s the part that feels like a betrayal arc in real time. The Ravens built around him, protected him, and now the business side is the only thing left unresolved.
I could keep going down the list—Jets and Giants both staring at veteran stopgaps while the young guys wait, Broncos trying to decide if they trust the guy they just paid or if they’re one injury from another carousel—but the pattern is what’s eating at me. Every team is pretending they have a plan while the actual plan is “hope the competition sorts itself out by September.” That’s not a plan. That’s denial dressed up as roster flexibility.
I keep thinking about how this mirrors the way I’ve handled my own misses lately. I was so sure about certain outcomes in the spring that I stopped listening to the tape that told a different story. Same thing here. These franchises keep drafting or signing the next answer and then acting surprised when the competition creates more questions. It’s the same front-office negligence I’ve been railing against for months. Tier 1 is the teams that actually have a locked-in guy with an extension. Tier 2 is everyone else pretending their situation is stable. There’s no Tier 3 because at this point the whole league is Tier 2.
The physical feeling of reading this piece was the same one I get when a late-night swing on a prospect blows up by noon the next day. Chest tight. Eyes on the ceiling. Wondering why I keep thinking the answers are closer than they are. Graziano’s piece didn’t give me new information so much as it reminded me that the league is still built on unresolved questions at the most important position. And the longer these teams wait to sort them out, the more it costs them in cap space, draft capital, and whatever is left of fan patience.
I don’t have the answers either. That’s the part that stings. I thought I’d be further along by now, both in these columns and in how I read the league. Instead I’m back at the same table, same hum from the fridge, same list of 32 questions that feel more urgent than they did last June. The difference is I’m not looking away this time. I’m staring straight at every single one of them and admitting the uncertainty is the only thing that feels certain.
