The evolution of the NFL’s most important position will be on vivid display Sunday. The four quarterbacks vying for the Super Bowl play different styles. Washington’s Jayden Daniels is an electric current; Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts is a battering ram. Buffalo’s Josh Allen is a freight train; Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes is a child scampering away with the remote control. They are united in how frequently and proficiently they test defenses with their ability to run.

In another era, the rookie Daniels might have considered himself a running quarterback. In the one he grew up in, ubiquity has made the term obsolete. Can a quarterback of his generation keep the ball and run with it after reading the defense on the fly? You might as well ask him whether his phone can take pictures.

“That’s how the position is played,” Daniels said. “You got guys on the other side of the ball that run 4.4, 4.3 [in the 40-yard dash]. You got to be able to move a little bit and play-make. That’s just a part of the game and how the game is evolving now.”

Confluences can be mistaken for trends — just three years ago, pure pocket passers Matthew Stafford and Joe Burrow faced off in the Super Bowl. But the advantages running quarterbacks provide in the NFL’s current climate may be too potent to overcome without one. The remaining quartet of quarterbacks prompt the question of whether a running quarterback is a prerequisite for Super Bowl contention, whether it has transformed fully from curiosity to luxury to necessity.

“It’s truly amazing how the game has evolved,” said Randall Cunningham, a dual-threat precursor who starred for the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1980s and ’90s. “You can’t sit in the pocket anymore.”The benefits of having a running quarterback surface both during games and developmentally. On the field, it presents defenses a simple math problem: “You got to play 11-on-11 football,” Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said. In traditional offenses in which quarterbacks are solely passers, they become bystanders on running plays. A mobile quarterback forces the defense to account for him even if he ultimately hands to a running back or throws a short pass. On a designed quarterback run, all 10 teammates can block for him.

A quarterback’s running ability also provides time to learn the position. Under the NFL’s salary structure, franchises are incentivized to rush young quarterbacks to the field to exploit the roster-building boon of a rookie contract. A young passer may lack the knowledge to audible into the right play or discern complex coverages. But he can overcome inexperience by buying time with athleticism.

In his early years in Buffalo, Allen often played recklessly. But his athleticism allowed him to play well enough to stay on the field and acquire the finer points of quarterback play. Without his mobility, Allen might have been benched before he could blossom into an MVP-level force.

“These young guys come in, the expectation is to play well and play right away,” Commanders offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury said. “Sometimes the ability to escape and make plays with your legs, that’s going to translate faster than trying to be perfect on every play call and asking them to do that much at the line of scrimmage.”

For most of NFL history, running quarterbacks were anomalies. Chicago’s Bobby Douglass set the quarterback rushing record at 968 yards in 1972, a mark that withstood Cunningham’s challenge in 1990 and lasted until Michael Vick ran for 1,039 in 2006.

In 2012, the position changed when Washington coach Mike Shanahan and a young offensive staff that included his son, Kyle, and future Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur designed an offense around Robert Griffin III that brought the zone read, run-pass options and other concepts previously relegated to college offenses into the NFL. In 2015, Cam Newton led the Carolina Panthers to a 15-1 regular season record with an offense built around his bruising rushes. Still, perhaps owing to Griffin’s career-altering injuries, most franchises aimed to tether even their athletic quarterbacks to the pocket.

“Early on in my career, it was so much more about playing within the pocket, playing on time,” said Commanders backup Marcus Mariota, a mobile quarterback drafted second overall in 2015. “Now guys are off-platform, off-structure, making plays, creating explosives. It’s really cool.”

The largest leap in embedding the quarterback run into the NFL came in 2019. The Ravens revamped their franchise around Lamar Jackson’s blend of accurate passing and electric running, an experiment coach John Harbaugh compared with releasing the first iPhone. Never before 2019 had at least 11 quarterbacks attempted 50 rushes in a season. In every year since, at least a dozen have.

“The X-factor that quarterback mobility is in our game and how it’s trending and has been trending, that is not a new discussion,” Tomlin said. But the running quarterback has crept steadily deeper into the game. Eighteen quarterbacks registered at least 50 rushing attempts this season, four more than any other campaign and double the number of 10 years ago.

Hurts (150 attempts), Daniels (148) and Allen (102) ranked first, second and fourth in regular season rushing attempts. Mahomes ranked just 15th among quarterbacks with 58, but he stuck to his pattern of increasing his running when the playoffs arrive, scrambling four times for 24 yards in the Chiefs’ divisional-round victory, not counting three kneel-downs at the end of halves.

“There’s different levels of it, for sure,” Commanders coach Dan Quinn said. “It certainly feels like the guys that are most difficult to defend have that capability.”

Teams have solved, or at least grown comfortable with, the increased injury risk of running. Rule changes have legislated many injurious quarterback hits out of the game and, indirectly, have made their running even more effective — penalty-wary defenders may hesitate before tackling a quarterback. Teams also have realized what Cunningham had insisted since the ’80s: Quarterbacks are more likely to be injured standing around the chaos of 300-pounders fighting over territory than in the open field.

“I’ve gotten hurt more in the pocket than I have outside of the pocket,” Mariota said. “Growing up, playing Pop Warner or playing as a kid in the street, you learn how to maneuver yourself so you’re not taking contact. When you’re in the pocket, you’re just exposed because that’s the nature of the position.”

Offensive coaches have been tinkering with how to maximize pocket quarterbacks for 50 years. They have comparatively only begun to understand how to leverage quarterbacks’ running ability: The zone read, Mariota said, was a rarity when he entered the league inside the past decade. Late this season, Mariota noticed Jackson extending his dropback further behind the line of scrimmage, creating space between him and defensive tackles who were effectively schemed into oblivion.

“Nowadays, guys are taking these 10-, 12-yard drops, and all of a sudden, they’re scrambling around, and they hit a guy down the field for 30 or 40,” Mariota said. “When I first got in the league, that was a big no-no. You couldn’t do that. It’s fun to see that, and it’s continuing to evolve. Teams are just scratching the surface with these athletic quarterbacks.”

Despite the foursome lining up behind center on the NFL’s penultimate Sunday, Mariota stopped short of declaring mobility a mandatory quality for a Super Bowl quarterback.

“The greatest one ever was Tom [Brady], and he couldn’t move around like these guys,” Mariota said. He pointed out the excellent seasons Jared Goff, Stafford and Burrow had this year. They don’t need to beat a pass rush with their legs, because they beat it with their mind, often even before the ball is snapped.

But the balance of quarterbacking style has flipped. Passers who rarely run now are the anomalies, especially in the sport’s most important games. The evolution has brought with it an aesthetic appeal. Cunningham, now a pastor in Las Vegas, rushes home from church each Sunday to watch Hurts or Daniels or “my man Lamar, who is absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “Because it’s fun to watch.” At times, it even makes him wish he could play again, in an era when his style has grown predominant.

“I really thought about making a comeback,” Cunningham said. “But my knee said, ‘Come back where? To the Eagles?’ The other day I was thinking about it. I was thinking ‘Man, this sure is fun!’ It’s not realistic. Because I’m 61 now.”