The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are trying to pick up the pieces after they fell to 0–3 last Sunday and quarterback Chris Simms suffered a ruptured spleen that could keep him out for the rest of the season.

No team wants to be in Tampa Bay’s position, but the Buccaneers do have two things going for them: They have a bye this week, so their offense has two weeks to adjust to its new signal caller; and they haven’t followed the recent NFL trend of keeping just one backup quarterback on the roster.

When NFL teams selected their opening-day rosters this month, nearly a third of them kept only two quarterbacks on the squad. That’s unusual: Rosters with three quarterbacks are so ingrained in the NFL that there’s a special rule dictating that teams can have 45 players suit up for every game, plus a 46th player, known as the emergency quarterback, who can only play if the first- and second-string quarterbacks have gotten hurt. But some teams have reasoned that there’s no sense in paying the salary of an emergency quarterback who is unlikely to play and unlikely to be prepared to lead the team to victory if he does.

The decision of so many teams to retain only two quarterbacks could harm the teams if they lose both (as the Jets did last year), but it could hurt the league even more if it hinders the long-term development of passers throughout the NFL. Current starters like the Kansas City Chiefs’ Trent Green, the Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner, and the Minnesota Vikings’ Brad Johnson might have left football years ago had they not been on rosters as third-stringers and developed their skills through practice repetitions and film study.

Teams with three quarterbacks generally structure their roster the same way Tampa Bay did. The Buccaneers entered the season with Simms as the starter, Tim Rattay as the more experienced backup, and Bruce Gradkowski as the young backup who still needs to learn the nuances of playing in the NFL but could eventually develop into a solid starter. Coach Jon Gruden has installed Gradkowski as the starter, but he won’t hesitate to replace him with Rattay if Gradkowski struggles.

The downside of keeping three quarterbacks on the roster is that most teams never use all three. The Green Bay Packers haven’t had anything to worry about at quarterback in recent years because Brett Favre has started an NFL record 224 consecutive games, but Favre’s stability has led to the Packers’ paying the salaries of young backups and then watching them catch on as starters elsewhere.

Four former Favre backups now start for other teams: Warner, the Seattle Seahawks’ Matt Hasselbeck, the New Orleans Saints’ Aaron Brooks, and the Washington Redskins’ Mark Brunell. The Packers currently have two young quarterbacks behind Favre: last year’s first-round pick, Aaron Rodgers, and this year’s fifth-round pick, Ingle Martin. With Favre expected to retire after this season, next year Rodgers will likely do what Warner, Hasselbeck, Brooks, and Brunell never did: start a game at Lambeau Field.

Every team with only two quarterbacks on its active roster does have a third quarterback on its eight-player practice squad, which doesn’t suit up on game days. If any of those teams loses one of the two quarterbacks on its active roster, it will likely bring the practice squad player onto the active roster.

However, practice squad players can’t be called up during a game, so if any of those teams loses both quarterbacks on the same day, it will have to get creative, putting a non-quarterback under center and hoping he doesn’t embarrass himself. The Dallas Cowboys, for instance, have practiced a few plays and taken snaps with wide receiver Patrick Crayton, who was a quarterback at Northwestern Oklahoma State, just in case starter Drew Bledsoe and backup Tony Romo both get hurt on the same day.

But Crayton stopped playing quarterback for a reason, and the Cowboys will be in trouble if they have to resort to lining him up under center. More important, the league will be in trouble if the growing trend of having only two quarterbacks on the roster makes for less development of young talent at the game’s most important position.

Mr. Smith is a contributing editor for FootballOutsiders.com.