September 2, 2025
This breaks last season’s record of 15 starting Black quarterbacks
Last football season, a record 15 Black quarterbacks were starters for NFL teams, and this year, that record will be broken, as there are 16 Black football players slated to start the season as their team’s starting quarterback.
According to USA Today, as the NFL prepares to open the 2025-2026 season, 16 Black men are at the position most sports enthusiasts consider the most important one on the gridiron. Those players are Jalen Hurts, Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott, Russell Wilson, Geno Smith, Jayden Daniels, Lamar Jackson, Spencer Rattler, C.J. Stroud, Cam Ward, Justin Fields, Bryce Young, Jordan Love, Michael Penix, Jr., Caleb Williams, and C.J. Stroud.
With 32 NFL franchises, that’s 50% of the league with Black starting quarterbacks.
The first Black quarterback to win a Super Bowl (Super Bowl XXII), Doug Williams, stated that he predicted this feat would take place less than two years ago.
“I said about a year and a half ago, half the league gonna be Black quarterbacks before long. I said probably within the next five years, and it happened before five years,” Doug Williams said to the media outlet. “If you write the top quarterback in the league, I think the majority of them would be Black.”
The quarterback position, many years ago, was considered too pivotal and too thought-provoking for Black athletes, as that narrative has been evidently altered in recent years.
CBS Sports reported that the past three seasons have been record years for starting Black quarterbacks in the NFL. At the start of the 2023 season, there were 14 Black signal callers at the helm for their teams, then 15 that started the 2024 NFL season.
The latest season starts Sept. 4 with the Dallas Cowboys’ Prescott starting at the quarterback position against the Philadelphia Eagles’ Hurts as the opposing quarterback. The game will take place at Lincoln Financial Field in Pennsylvania, as the Eagles will defend the title they won against the Kansas City Chiefs last season in a matchup that featured two opposing Black quarterbacks for the second time, since the two quarterbacks made history as the first Black quarterbacks to face each other in 2023.
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