Christian Hackenberg is one of the worst draft picks in recent memory, a second-round quarterback for the Jets in 2016 who never played in a single regular-season game. He wonders what could have happened if he had been drafted elsewhere.
Hackenberg said on Ross Tucker’s podcast that he thinks he would have had a better shot of succeeding anywhere else.
“New York was probably the last place I should’ve gone,” Hackenberg said. “In terms of the market, the expectations, the way it was. My rookie year we ended up keeping four quarterbacks so there just was not a lot of opportunity for me to develop and grow. No plan, kind of an up-and-down organization. It was just one of those things where I think just the timing and where I ended up just wasn’t in the cards for me at that position. When I look at it introspectively, I was young, I needed a lot of help, and I needed a lot of direction and guidance, and I never sought that out. So that’s where my shortcoming was, is I didn’t do all those things until it was ultimately too late.”
Hackenberg had brief stints with the Raiders, Eagles and Bengals but never made it onto the active roster for any of those teams, and even when he was signed to be the starting quarterback for the Memphis Express of the Alliance of American Football, he was quickly benched. Hackenberg looked like he had talent at Penn State, but some players just can’t cut it in the pros, and he’s one of the clearest examples of one of those players.