Bill Polian: Franchise QB ‘unfair, stupid label’ for Sam Darnold, Josh Rosen and Josh Allen

Bill Polian isn’t a fan of widespread discussion the presumed top three quarterbacks in the 2018 NFL Draft are going to be “franchise” players.

The Hall of Fame general manager thinks that the media has gotten carried away with talking up the respective potential of USC’s Sam Darnold, UCLA’s Josh Rosen and Wyoming’s Josh Allen.

‘You’re not a franchise quarterback when you play zero games in the National Football League’

Polian said calling any quarterback a “franchise player” is something that is popular with media and fans, but not with those who actually make decisions in the NFL.

“It’s unfair, it’s a stupid label, but it’s become nonetheless part of the lexicon and there’s nothing you can do about it. It has no bearing, in fact,” Polian told Bruce Murray and James Lofton on the SiriusXM Blitz. “Jim Kelly, after five or six years, was a franchise quarterback. Joe Montana, five or seven years into his career, was a franchise quarterback. You’re not a franchise quarterback when you play zero games in the National Football League. But that’s not the way the world looks at it, so you’ve got to adjust.

‘This is nothing more than hype, it has nothing to do with reality’

“And the way you adjust is to make sure you, as a general manager, as a head coach, that you tamp down expectations, that you be realistic in your evaluations and you be realistic with the fans and with ownership and drown out the noise from the people who hype this thing. This is nothing more than hype, it has nothing to do with reality.”

Polian said saying that Darnold, Rosen and Allen are at the top of draft boards in the league is misleading, because draft boards have yet to be fully assembled.

‘We don’t know what their mental makeup is, we don’t know what their emotional makeup is, we don’t know what their medicals looks like’

“They’re all incomplete, many are not even formed,” he said. “But the bottom line is that these three guys that are ostensibly at the top, we don’t know whether they’ll succeed or not. We only know about 30 or 40 percent of what we need to know. We don’t know what their mental makeup is, we don’t know what their emotional makeup is, we don’t know what their medicals looks like. Those are very important issues; in fact, the most important issues. And we don’t have any information on that at all and no one in the media has such information.”