The 4 quarterbacks still standing couldn't be more different

The good news for fans of the Denver Broncos is that all of Jarrett Stidham's experience as an NFL starter has come late in the season. He's practically Mr. January.

The bad news is that the sum total of that experience is four starts.

Since he was drafted in the fourth round by the New England Patriots in 2019, Stidham's career is best summed up by one phrase: mop-up duty. He's appeared in 20 games over seven seasons and completed an average of fewer than six passes in those games. He's taken more than twice as many sacks (19) as he has thrown touchdown passes (eight).

His starts - two of them at the tail end of the 2022 campaign with the Las Vegas Raiders and two the following year with Denver - were still clean-up duty of a sort, finishing lost seasons for teams going nowhere.

And now the 29-year-old is starting in the AFC Championship Game after the Broncos lost Bo Nix to an injury he suffered at almost the very end of their overtime playoff win against Buffalo.

The significance of this adjustment for the Broncos cannot be overstated. Stidham hasn't attempted a single pass in the 2025 season for Denver besides in training camp.

Will he be good? Will he be at least competent? It's impossible to say; he's hardly been on the field.

And yet, in an NFL that has increasingly become the Quarterback League, where Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow have long been the dominant characters, Stidham is an appropriate fit for this final four. These conference finalists have demonstrated there's more than one way to find success at the sport's most important position.

The most obvious route remains the one that Denver's opponent took. The New England Patriots drafted Drake Maye third overall two years ago, their second crack at a first-round quarterback in recent years after Mac Jones. Maye wasn't as highly touted a prospect as first overall pick Caleb Williams, nor did he have the gaudy stats (and Heisman Trophy) of No. 2 pick Jayden Daniels, and he played at the relatively low-profile North Carolina (pre-Bill Belichick).

Even if drafting your quarterback is the conventional path, Maye is another case suggesting draft evaluations are largely a guessing game. He had the least experience of the quarterbacks at the top of that draft, but he's played with remarkable assurance in his brief NFL career. He led the league in completion percentage this season while still throwing downfield aggressively. In his second season, playing under a new coach and offensive coordinator (after a couple of duds in those roles during his rookie season), Maye looks like he'll be leading playoff teams for years.

Matthew Stafford can also attest to the importance of the right coach. After a dozen years in Detroit piling up stats on poor-to-middling teams, the Los Angeles Rams pried him away from the Lions with a package that included Jared Goff and draft picks.

Rams coach Sean McVay promptly turned Stafford into the playoff winner he'd never been in Detroit. But even after the Super Bowl victory in their first season together, Stafford's time in L.A. appeared limited due to his age and injury history. Going into this season - his 17th in the league - there were questions about whether Stafford could play at all after he missed almost the entire first month of training camp because of an aggravated disc in his back.

All he did was lead the league in passing yardage and passing touchdowns, putting himself in the running for the first MVP award of his long career. (His highest previous finish in balloting was eighth.)

Stafford's performance in Los Angeles offers evidence that, at any given time, there are probably a handful of veteran NFL quarterbacks toiling away who could be elite with the right coach in the right offense.

That brings us to Sam Darnold.

The former third overall pick who busted with the New York Jets (no real shame in that) bounced around before landing with the Minnesota Vikings in 2024. He was supposed to mentor rookie J.J. McCarthy. But after McCarthy was lost to a preseason injury, Darnold became a world-beater in Kevin O'Connell's high-powered offense - right up until the end of last season, when he delivered back-to-back disasters against the Lions and Rams.

This made Darnold's free agency one of the offseason's most intriguing subplots. Would any team be brave enough to hitch itself to a quarterback who had briefly looked like Joe Namath but more often resembled Zach Wilson for the rest of his career?

The Seattle Seahawks raised their hands. Darnold has been as good as Seattle might have hoped - except for the awkward fact that two of his worst games came against the Rams, his opponents again Sunday. At his best, Darnold looks like the player he was projected to become when he came out of USC in 2018: strong, accurate arm, decent wheels, just what you want in a professional passer. And then sometimes, he looks like Jake Delhomme.

Of course, Jake Delhomme made a Super Bowl. Sometimes the NFL's quarterback narrative delivers a twist.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.