playBill BarnwellOct 1, 2026, 06:25 AM ETCloseBill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X’s and O’s, offseason transactions and so much more. He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsIt happened again.
Just when it looked like we might get through a Sunday without an NFL quarterback getting injured for the first time in 2026, Tampa Bay’s Baker Mayfield went down in pain against the Vikings. On a day when Mayfield was sacked six times and knocked down on four more dropbacks, a glancing blow proved to be the most painful hit, as the Bucs starter suffered a dislocated thumb while trying to get the ball out on fourth down. The injury is expected to cost Mayfield about three weeks, which only makes life harder for the winless Buccaneers, who will now turn to Jalon Daniels in the meantime.Then, on “Monday Night Football,” both teams dealt with quarterback injuries. The Bears started Case Keenum after Caleb Williams injured his hamstring and Tyson Bagent spent most of the week in concussion protocol.
The Eagles briefly lost Jalen Hurts to a concussion check of his own, and although he quickly returned to the game, he was out of the lineup just long enough for Andy Dalton to throw a critical interception in the end zone that ended an Eagles drive.Depending which player you define as each team’s primary option, Mayfield was somewhere between the sixth, seventh, eighth or even ninth starting quarterback to go down so far this season. The Bears likely would have started Bagent if not for the time in concussion protocol, but he didn’t actually miss any action. Hurts was back quickly, as Dalton threw only one pass. You could argue that the Falcons would have started either Tua Tagovailoa or Michael Penix Jr. in Week 1; both were injured, leaving them to start Cooper Rush instead.The NFL made it exactly zero drives without a starting quarterback going down this season, as Sam Darnold suffered a glute injury before the end of Seattle’s opening possession in the season opener.
He’s already back after missing a couple of weeks, as is Kyler Murray, who left quickly in Week 1 because of a concussion.Subscribe: ‘The Bill Barnwell Show’The news was good on Jayden Daniels (elbow) and Williams, who luckily avoided long-term injuries. Giants fans were less fortunate, as early suggestions that Jaxson Dart would be OK eventually turned more ominous. Dart’s season is over after he underwent knee surgery last week. He’s currently the only starting quarterback lost for the year.So, to recap: Seven quarterbacks have been forced out of games by injuries through the first three weeks of the NFL season.
Is that a lot? Is it a problem that’s getting worse? Are QBs getting hit more often? Are we seeing more backup quarterbacks than ever?
Should teams be investing more in those QB2s as a result? These are all legitimate questions to ask. So, I actually did the research this week to try to figure out how often quarterbacks get hurt early in the season.Going back through 2002 — when the league expanded to 32 teams — I looked at where every team and their preferred starting quarterbacks stood through the first three weeks of the season. I looked at every team that had two or more quarterbacks throw at least five passes through those first three weeks to see how often teams had been forced to turn to their backups for even a modest number of snaps.
Let’s see what history says about all these quarterback injuries.Jump to: Are we seeing more QBs than usual? Are there more QB injuries than usual? Why are so many QBs getting hurt? Are QBs getting hit more than ever?
Should teams invest more in QB2s?Are we seeing more quarterbacks playing than usual?Not really. Through three weeks, 41 quarterbacks have thrown at least five passes. That’s up slightly from a year ago, when 40 quarterbacks were on the board through three weeks, and tied for where we were in 2024. There was a four-year stretch between 2020 and 2023 when we saw fewer quarterbacks than normal, including just 35 passers appearing through three weeks in 2022.Since 2002, though, the average has been just over 39 quarterbacks with at least five pass attempts over the first three weeks of the season.
And that number hasn’t even changed all that much since the league emphasized roughing the passer rules heading into the 2018 season. Teams have averaged 38.9 quarterbacks through three games over that span.If it seems like we see more backup quarterbacks on a weekly basis than we might have 20 or more years ago, that’s likely a product of simply seeing more football overall. Over the first three weeks of the season, the NFL put on 10 primetime “island” games to go along with widely available access to Sunday Ticket via streaming. In 2006, there were eight island games through three weeks, and Sunday Ticket was available only via satellite.
In 1986, the league had five island games through three weeks, with no way to watch otherwise out-of-market games. We see more of every kind of quarterback than we did in the past.Yes, 41 quarterbacks is slightly more than the historical average but hardly out of line with what we’ve seen during the 32-team era. And if you go back even further into the past, coaches were cycling through QBs on an even more regular basis. In 1999, for example, 47 different signal-callers threw at least five passes through the first three weeks of the season despite the fact that there were only 31 teams in the league at the time.
The same number popped up again in 1995, when the NFL had 30 teams. Was that a product of an era when defenses had more latitude to hit quarterbacks or coaches trying to find a better answer under center?Are we seeing more quarterback injuries than usual?Yes. This is the most injured season through three weeks we’ve seen from NFL quarterbacks in recent memory. Defining an injury depends on your methodology, but in terms of quarterbacks who would have been in the lineup if healthy but weren’t able to make a start, or backup quarterbacks who were forced into the lineup to throw at least five passes because the quarterback ahead of them on the depth chart wasn’t healthy enough to play, the league has dealt with eight injured passers through three games. (While he hasn’t yet thrown five passes, I’m counting Jalon Daniels as a backup who has been forced into the lineup because we know Mayfield will be out for a few weeks because of his thumb injury.)Again, the evidence suggests that while the league is on the higher side relative to historical averages, it’s not an outlier or indicative of a broader trend.
Eight injuries to quarterbacks through three games is up from five in 2025 and four in 2024. The 2022 season was an outlier, with just two injuries through three weeks, but that’s the lowest figure we’ve seen since 2002.The last time eight quarterbacks were unavailable by our criteria through the first three weeks of the season would have been all the way back in 1999. There were seven quarterbacks sidelined through three weeks of the 2019 season, a group that included Andrew Luck, who dealt with a calf injury all summer and then shockingly retired because of the ailment just before the start of the campaign.Over the course of the past 25 seasons, an average of almost exactly 5.0 quarterbacks have been injured by the end of Week 3. You can split that up into 4.6 quarterbacks who have been hurt during the regular season and an average of 0.4 quarterbacks who were injured and unavailable heading into Week 1.play0:20Schefter: Bears expect Caleb Williams to miss multiple weeksDepending on whether you consider Penix or Tagovailoa the preferred starter in Atlanta, we would have had either zero or one injured starter heading into the season, which isn’t always th
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