When you really think about it, we live an incredible age for documentaries, with voyeuristic peeks behind the scenes at various facets of life, politics, sports, and entertainment becoming more and more plentiful and available by the day. If you wanted to make “watching sports documentaries” your full time job, you’d never be able to keep up with all the content being generated.

In football, the locker room and the the players’ lives away from the field used to be just that — private. Now, multiple players are wearing microphones for games, locker room speeches are on Twitter after the game, and we have series like Quarterback on Netflix that take us inside the day to day grind and personal lives of guys playing the sport’s most difficult position.

The first season of the Peyton Manning-produced series on signal callers came two years ago, as the series followed Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota for the entire 2022 season. The series covered wide receivers last year, but that was a major letdown. People care about quarterbacks more than every other position, maybe combined.

So here in 2025, they went back to quarterbacks as the central figures, with Cousins (now with the Falcons) returning, joined by Joe Burrow of the Bengals and Jared Goff of the Lions. I’ll give you some thoughts on the series below, but if you wanted to dip your toe in the water, here is the trailer:
Overall, I give the series a thumbs up. Of the seven episodes, the first three are excellent, the next two drag a little, and the series ends strong, with Cousins getting benched, Burrow putting up MVP numbers on a mediocre team, and Goff’s Lions getting upset in the divisional round of the playoffs after a 15-2 regular season.

So ultimately, on the field, each of the three subjects were, to some degree, losers. However, that’s an oversimplification. It’s more nuanced than that. So let’s do this “Four Winners, Four Losers” style. Here we go:

WINNERS

Joe Burrow
I wanted so badly to hate Burrow, given his very “non football” fashionista vibe, but dammit, Burrow seems like a cool dude. He seems like someone for whom I’d want to root. I’m smitten with him, like George Costanza was smitten with Elaine’s male bimbo boyfriend on that episode of Seinfeld!  Football-wise, I loved his leadership style, which was the perfect balance of laid back and intense. Also, he gets bonus points for not knowing how to work his dishwasher or washer-dryer, a sin of which I am guilty. (NOTE: My wife hates both Burrow and me.)

Jared Goff
This was another guy who I wanted to hate. (It should be clear now, if a player is not a Houston Texan, I start out hating him.) Like Burrow, though, Goff seemed like a great dude. Like Burrow, he was also a number one overall pick, but he was discarded by the Rams, and has been able to carve out a damn good redemption story in Detroit. Bonus points for Goff’s hot wife Christen, who also seemed like a very loyal, vibrant, fun life partner. Very enjoyable energy! Contact that to the corny Mahomes and his loudmouth wife, Brittany, and the Goffs are an absolute pleasure.

Very specific Kirk Cousins moments
I thought for sure I’d hate Cousins, in no small part because I hated him in the 2023 version of the series. This time around, though, he was okay. Maybe I’ve matured. Two instances in particular put him in the “winners’ category., First, he uses the Voice Memo app to communicate thoughts that pop up in his head to people who may need to know them. I like that method, as it keeps you off the phone. Talking on the phone sucks. Second, I like that Cousins was taking his five-year-old son’s flag football game seriously enough to game manage the clock like the end of it like an NFL game. That was hilarious.

Dan Campbell
Campbell, of course, is the Lions head coach, who is best known for wanting to bite off opposing players’ kneecaps and an energy level that could light up all of Vegas. He LOVES cursing, which makes every motivational speech that much more jarring. His speech about going for it on every fourth down was cinematic.

LOSERS

Julie Cousins
The wife of Kirk Cousins annoyed me far more than the actual Kirk Cousins did. She is very, very dramatic, as witness to her sobbing after Cousins lost his starting job. Chill out, Jules, he still gets his $45 million salary! Also, I didn’t like her blaming a botched shotgun play in Week 1 on the center, when her son asked what happened on the play. It was partially Cousins’ fault.

Steve Spagnuolo
Spagnuolo is the defensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs. After a controversial Week 2 loss to the Chiefs, a loss in which the referees threw a controversial flag on a 4th down to allow the Chiefs’ game winning drive to remain alive, Burrow was walking out to midfield to shake hands with various players and staff from Kansas City. Spagnuolo came up to Burrow and told him “Other than our guy [Mahomes], you’re the best in the league.” Hey Spags, after a loss, I’m guessing Burrow doesn’t want to hear about “YOUR GUY.” How about just tell Burrow how hard he is to prepare for, leave Mahomes out of it. By the way, it’s not crazy to think Burrow is better than Mahomes right now, it’s not.
Eric Murray
Okay, now we will localize the documentary a little bit. The Texans played the Lions in Week 10, a game in which they picked off Goff five times. Those picks were fun to watch. What wasn’t fun to watch was the Lions coming back from a 23-6 halftime deficit to win the game, 26-23. The one play they focused on in the documentary was a deep shot to tight end Sam LaPorta that they were waiting to hit all game long, after seeing Murray tend to overplay the run on play action fakes. They saw it during the week on film, and sure enough, they hit the Texans over the top in the second half. Thankfully, Murray is a Jaguar now, overpaid and not our problem.

Bobby Slowik
In one of the Lions’ games that got heavy focus in the series, the Lions scored 31 points in a win over the Vikings, a win where they destroyed Vikings’ defensive coordinator Brian Flores’ blitz-happy defense. That’s the same defense that dominated Bobby Slowik’s Texans offense in a 34-7 Vikings win in Week 3. Thankfully, Slowik is now gone, and this documentary gave a brief reminder as to why.

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