Backup quarterbacks don’t get much on-field work in the NFL. Pure and simple, the league views them as break-glass-in-case-of-emergency options. If they’re getting live reps in important games, the plan has gone horribly wrong.
Which brings us to Denver, where the Broncos will be deploying backup Jarrett Stidham in Sunday’s AFC championship game against the Patriots. Starter Bo Nix fractured a bone in his ankle late in Denver’s divisional round win over the Bills, so Stidham will get his first start since 2023 and his first significant work week of the season. Coach Sean Payton said this week that Stidham has gotten stray practice reps at points during the season but that most of the reps went to Nix. Payton called the idea of the backup getting work during the season “mythical.”
“That just doesn’t happen,” he said. “Generally in a work week, the reps are limited and the starter wants them.”
Stidham hasn’t attempted a single in-game pass this season. Not even during mop-up duty in garbage time. Now, he’ll be entering Denver’s Super Bowl chase without rhythm or experience with this offense, and he’ll be attempting to do something no quarterback in NFL history has ever pulled off: leading his team to a championship without making a start—or attempting a pass—during the regular season.
We’ve seen backups get their teams over the finish line at other points in league history, most recently in 2017 when Nick Foles led the Eagles to their first Lombardi Trophy after he replaced Carson Wentz. Jeff Hostetler led the Giants to a Super Bowl in 1990 after Phil Simms went down with an injury. And Doug Williams was the first to pull off the feat in 1987 with Washington. But all three of those quarterbacks had at least some runway heading into the postseason gauntlet. Foles had made three starts for Philadelphia during the regular season. Hostetler and Williams got two starts apiece and had played in other games. And then there’s the most famous backup success story of them all, Tom Brady, who replaced an injured Drew Bledsoe in the second game of the 2001 season and led the Patriots to the first of many Super Bowls. Brady wasn’t viewed as a true backup by the playoffs, though. He had taken Bledsoe’s job and had nearly a full season of reps before taking New England into the postseason. Brady gets enough glory and is headed for Canton. He can let the real backups have this claim for themselves.
There haven’t been many quarterbacks who’ve been in the spot Stidham now finds himself. According to the AP, only six quarterbacks have started playoff games after getting no regular-season starts. Bills backup Frank Reich was the only one who led his team to a victory, and that required the greatest comeback in postseason history. The other five quarterbacks who’ve had the chance—Roger Staubach in 1972, Gary Danielson in 1983, Joe Webb in 2012, Connor Cook in 2016, and Taylor Heinicke in 2021—squandered it. Even if you expand the sample to include backups with three or fewer regular-season starts, the picture doesn’t get any brighter. Since 2000, those quarterbacks are a combined 4-10 in the postseason, and three of the wins belong to Foles alone. The fourth belongs to John Wolford, who started a wild-card game for the Rams in 2021 in what may have been a soft benching of Jared Goff. Wolford left the game with an injury after taking just seven dropbacks.
Backup Quarterbacks in the Playoffs, Since 2000
Stidham is one of the least experienced quarterbacks of this group. The 29-year-old has made just four career starts, recording a single win, and logged 233 total dropbacks. He’s thrown as many interceptions as touchdowns. Based on historical precedent, Stidham is walking into a buzz saw and has very little experience or career success to fall back on. But this talented Denver team doesn’t need much from its backup to finish off this season. The Broncos don’t need him to be Peyton Manning—or even Foles or Williams, who both took home Super Bowl MVP honors. They just need him to survive, and maybe make a few winning plays along the way.
Stidham leading Denver to a championship would be a historical outlier. But as other teams have shown, it’s not impossible to win it all without your starting quarterback. So, armed with those examples, here’s a guide for how to survive a Super Bowl run with a backup quarterback.
Step 1: Have a Hall of Fame coach.
What are the odds? The Broncos just so happen to have one of these coaches in Payton, who already deserves a spot in Canton but can solidify his case over the next few weeks. That’s good news, because this is the most difficult box on this list for teams to check. There aren’t many Hall of Fame coaches available for hire. Denver had to give up first- and second-round picks to get Payton.
The history of backup quarterbacks in the playoffs shows why those coaches are so valuable. Williams had Joe Gibbs. Hostetler had Bill Parcells. Frank Reich had Marv Levy. Nick Foles had Doug Pederson, who isn’t bound for Canton but does have a statue outside the Eagles stadium, which is close enough. I’m sure all of the factors that made those coaches great when they weren’t trying to guide a backup through the postseason—the X’s and O’s, the game management, the attention to detail, etc.—also helped in those situations, but we can’t overlook the importance of having someone who’s won at a high level stand in front of the locker room and project confidence even after losing a star quarterback to injury.
Payton hasn’t won a playoff game without his starting QB before, but he has done plenty of winning without one in the regular season. He and Teddy Bridgewater went 5-0 when Drew Brees missed a month in 2019. Taysom Hill went 7-2 as a starter under Payton in New Orleans. Jameis Winston went 6-4. Payton also got Stidham his first career win in 2023, something Bill Belichick couldn’t do. I don’t know if there’s ever been a coach more prepared to take on this challenge than Payton. When he tells you to “just watch” what Stidham does this weekend, you don’t roll your eyes. You listen to him.
Step 2: Earn the confidence of the locker room.
In researching this piece, I realized that every backup success story involves a quarterback who had earned unwavering respect from the locker room even before their breakout moment. I don’t know if that means the backups who fell flat on their faces were just bad hangs, but being a good dude seems to be a prerequisite for winning as a second option.
Months before Williams replaced Jay Schroeder at the end of the 1987 season, the Washington locker room was clamoring for Gibbs to make the change. Williams paid more respect to the offensive line, according to teammate Jeff Bostic. This was before the tradition of quarterbacks buying their offensive linemen extravagant gifts—you just had to remember their names and give them a few shout-outs in the media. Schroeder couldn’t even do that. So when Gibbs named Williams the starter before the playoffs, it was a hit in the locker room.
Hostetler had to do a little more, over a longer period of time, to earn the respect of his Giants teammates. He was a third-stringer for the first few years of his career, so playing time was hard to come by. But Hostetler was a good athlete, so he volunteered for a special teams role and ended up on the punt return unit. He also played a little receiver but got just three targets before breaking his leg and making a return to the backup quarterback job. “A lot of people outside of our locker room didn’t realize everybody rooted for Jeff Hostetler,” said teammate and Hall of Fame linebacker Carl Banks. “He stood in special teams huddles. He ran scout team. In practice, the guy did everything so he was every man’s man.” Seeing Hostetler take a borderline dirty hit in the NFC title game against the 49ers apparently fired up the defense, which eventually knocked Joe Montana out of the game.
Reich was the Bills backup for seven seasons before he made his playoff run. There are no notable stories about him winning over Buffalo’s locker room, but he had been 4-1 as a spot starter before that point. And with the Bills falling into a 35-3 hole in Reich’s first playoff start, having a quarterback who once led a 31-point comeback in college at Maryland likely gave the Buffalo sideline a morale boost. Reich proved that wasn’t a fluke by throwing four touchdowns to lead the Bills to a historic comeback win.
Having been a successful starter during his first stop with the Eagles, Foles had already earned locker-room clout before his Super Bowl run. Some of the franchise’s key leaders, including Jason Kelce and Brandon Graham, were on the team when Foles threw 27 touchdowns and just two interceptions in 2013, so they were aware of what he could do.
If Denver makes the Super Bowl, I’m sure we’ll hear stories about how Stidham got the respect of his teammates and how the people inside the building always knew what he was capable of. The narrative groundwork has already been laid. Stidham was Payton’s first free-agent signing in Denver. And the Broncos coach says that the backup could start for several teams based on what he’s done on the practice field. “There’d be practices where I’m looking at [defensive coordinator] Vance [Joseph] getting pissed off because Stiddy’s making our defense look bad,” Payton said this week. Star receiver Courtland Sutton has “no doubt in [his] mind that Jarrett is gonna be ready to play.” If the Broncos aren’t confident in Stidham, they’re doing a good job of faking it.
Step 3: Don’t change the offense (too much).
This is where Payton’s experience with backups will really come in handy. A few years ago, former Saints backup Luke McCown—who threw for over 300 yards against the 15-1 Panthers in 2015 in place of Brees—told me his former coach “just feels where a quarterback’s sweet spot is” and builds around their strengths. We’ve seen that in Denver, where Payton has meshed RPOs and read option concepts to benefit Nix while keeping the foundation of his traditional West Coast offense.
Without Nix, the option run game may have to be shuttered. Stidham has never run a read option play in his NFL career, outside of two preseason reps in 2023. We might see Payton dial one up in a high-leverage short-yardage situation to catch the defense off guard, but it won’t be a major part of the game plan like it is when Nix is under center.
But that may be the only change we see with the offense. Stidham isn’t a runner, but as Payton explained Wednesday, he’s not a statue, either. “I view him as someone who’s going to move and elude,” the Broncos coach said. “He’s got a good pocket awareness now. He’s a different type quarterback than Bo. … I would say he’s a real good foot athlete.”
So Payton will be able to call the play-action fakes that got Nix outside of the pocket. And he’ll be able to call the pure dropback concepts he’s been using all season. The system won’t have to change too much—and that has been a winning formula for teams playing with a backup.
Gibbs’s offense worked with any quarterback he plugged in there, so he didn’t have to alter his play calling for Williams. The Giants took advantage of Hostetler’s athleticism by getting him outside of the pocket, but the run game served as the foundation of that offense. New York didn’t ask its quarterbacks to throw downfield too often. Their main job was to dump it off to the running backs. Here’s a graphic breaking down the team’s target distribution a month into the season when Phil Simms was at quarterback:
The Eagles faced a similar dilemma as Denver, going from the athletic Wentz to the more stationary Foles, but they didn’t need a quick quarterback to run their RPOs. Plus, Foles was a steadier hand in the dropback game—which could prove to be the case with Stidham, who’s shown a bit more pocket presence compared to his younger teammate.
Step 4: Don’t get attached.
This is really a bonus step, and it applies only in situations in which the backup leads his team to a title—or even just plays well in a losing effort. Things tend to get messy after that, especially if the backup sticks around.
The Giants needed two years to settle the Hostetler-Simms battle that ensued after they won Super Bowl XXV. Under new coach Ray Handley, who took over when Parcells retired, Hostetler won the job during the following offseason’s camp. But Simms won it back the summer after that. Eventually, all three were let go as the Giants imploded. Parcells had made the smart decision to bail on the situation altogether after winning the Super Bowl.
In Philadelphia, Wentz struggled to reestablish himself when Foles stuck around. Wentz eventually got hurt again the following year, and Foles stepped in to save a season that had been headed in the wrong direction. He got Philly back to the playoffs, and the Eagles went on to beat the Bears in the Double Doink game. That would be Foles’s final game with the franchise. He left for Jacksonville the following offseason, but even with him gone, Wentz was never able to recapture the locker room. He played well enough to earn a second contract but was benched for Jalen Hurts just a year after signing it. Wentz was eventually traded to Indianapolis, and Pederson, the coach who brought Philly its first Super Bowl, was forced out the same offseason.
You don’t need a Lombardi Trophy hanging over the situation to make things complicated, either. The Browns got caught in a yearslong quarterback controversy after backup Kelly Holcomb lit it up in a loss to the Steelers in a 2002 wild-card game. Playing in relief of Tim Couch, the 1999 first pick who had broken his leg in the regular-season finale, Holcomb threw for 429 yards and three touchdowns and averaged nearly 10 yards per dropback. There had already been calls for Holcomb to start before Couch’s injury, so that performance sparked a full-on quarterback battle the following offseason. It never really got settled, as the two failed to stay healthy or find a rhythm. Couch retired early, and Holcomb resumed his life as a backup.
Stidham would have to go nuclear over the next two games for there to be a quarterback controversy during the next Broncos training camp. And even then, it’d be a stretch. But if Stidham does lead Denver to a title, and if Nix gets off to a slow start in the 2026 season, things could take a messy turn. Payton could avoid all that by thanking Stidham for his service after this season and shipping him off to a desperate team that’s willing to overpay for him. And that may be the wise thing to do if the situation arises. After all, coaches have won Super Bowls with backup quarterbacks before. But no coach has survived the backup quarterback hangover that follows.
