Travis Kriens/KORN News Radio Sports Director
There’s a lazy habit in football coverage that refuses to die: every win belongs to the quarterback. Didn’t matter what actually happened on the field. Didn’t matter who made the biggest plays. If the team wins, the quarterback “led them to victory.”
Watch the games. That line doesn’t always survive five minutes of honest observation.
Over the past few weeks of playoff football, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard some version of “so-and-so QB leads his team to a win,” followed by highlights that have little to do with the quarterback at all. Defensive touchdowns. Short fields created by special teams. Opposing offenses strangled into submission. Yet the credit still flows, automatically and incorrectly, to the guy taking the snaps.
I’m talking about Sam Darnold in Seattle. Drake Maye in New England. Bo Nix in Denver. Even Carson Beck with the Miami Hurricanes.
All young quarterbacks. All on winning teams. And in several cases, all passengers more than drivers.
Take Sam Darnold’s 41–6 win over San Francisco. The box score looks neat until you actually read it: 12-of-17 for 124 yards and a touchdown. Those are pedestrian numbers in any era. Darnold didn’t flip field position. He didn’t rescue drives. He didn’t put the game on his shoulders. The defense did that. Special teams helped. The game was decided without him needing to matter.
Yet the narrative was immediate: Darnold leads Seattle to a blowout win.
No, he didn’t.
Bo Nix’s performance against Buffalo tells a similar story. Yes, 279 yards and three touchdowns pop off the screen, until you notice the 20 incompletions on 46 attempts and the interception. That’s volume, not dominance. Denver didn’t win because Nix was great. They survived uneven quarterback play while other units carried the load.
Drake Maye’s playoff run is perhaps the clearest example of how credit gets misassigned. Against Houston, he went 16-of-27 for 179 yards, three touchdowns, an interception along with four fumbles, two of them lost. Solid? Against the Chargers the week before: 17-of-29 for 268 yards, one touchdown, one pick in a 16–3 win.
But here’s the part that rarely leads the story: New England’s defense allowed just 207 total yards against the Chargers. Then followed that up by forcing four interceptions against Houston, including a pick-six, while giving up only 241 yards.
That defense, not Maye, is the reason the Patriots are back in the AFC Championship Game. Maye happens to be the quarterback. He is not the headline.
College football isn’t immune to this either. Miami is playing Indiana in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game tomorrow, and the reflex answer for why is Carson Beck.
It shouldn’t be.
Beck was 14-of-20 for 103 yards and a touchdown in a 10–3 win at Texas A&M. That’s not controlling a playoff game, that’s surviving one. Against Ohio State, he threw for 138 yards in a 24–14 win. Again, the Miami defense won those games.
Even in Miami’s 31–27 win over Ole Miss, Beck’s 268 yards and two touchdowns came with an interception and a steady stream of missed throws downfield or passes forced into coverage. That game was won despite the quarterback, not because of him.
None of this is an argument that quarterbacks don’t matter. They do. When they’re great, they should get credit. When they’re bad, they deserve criticism.
But football is still the ultimate team sport, and pretending every win is a quarterback achievement is an insult to the other 45 players, especially the defenses that actually decide playoff games.
The quarterback already gets more praise and more blame than anyone else on the field. That’s baked into the position. But it doesn’t mean we should ignore what our eyes tell us.
Watch the game. See who makes the difference.
Sometimes, even in victory, it isn’t the quarterback.