Midway through a conference call last Sunday afternoon, one in which Herm Edwards was detailing to the media the wrist injury suffered by quarterback Chad Pennington and how the New York Jets might deal with it, the coach was asked if he was "bummed" by the specter of playing without his emerging star for the next three months.

	Chad Pennington suffered a fractured and dislocated wrist in a preseason game.

The question, sophomoric in both nature and tone, was meant to elicit a radio sound bite from the Jets' classy coach. Instead, his reply was biting, offered tersely and with an undeniable level of exasperation.

"I've still got a quarterback, right?" responded Edwards. "What am I bummed about?"

Whether the Jets coach was simply posturing -- trying to buck up the confidence of his wounded team, professing publicly his faith in new/old starter Vinny Testaverde, or just attempting to convince himself he wasn't already facing a season on the brink -- really is immaterial. The fact is, Edwards was right, and righteously indignant at the suggestion he was in a funk over Pennington's serious injury.

At age 39, and in his 17th season, Testaverde certainly has entered his football dotage. Were he the same player he was even two or three years ago, Testaverde would not have been yanked from the starting lineup after four games last season, and the Pennington Era would not yet have dawned. But his resume includes 182 starts, nearly 40,000 yards, 244 touchdown passes, and more snappy comebacks than Henny Youngman.

"Hey, you never want to lose your starter, right?" said Jets wide receiver Santana Moss. "But we've got great faith in Vinny. It's not like it's the end of the world or something."

Indeed, it's when a franchise doesn't have a viable No. 2 quarterback that things can be apocalyptic.

Witness the Miami Dolphins of 2002, a team that featured the NFL's rushing champion and third-ranked defense, but which finished out of the playoffs, in part because backup Ray Lucas won only two of six starts when Jay Fiedler was out of the lineup. It's little wonder the Dolphins added an insurance policy against such second-string meltdowns, by signing former Denver Broncos starter Brian Griese, in the offseason.

Conversely, the Jets won the AFC East because they unearthed Pennington, a former No. 1 draft choice who had played sparingly his first two seasons in the league. Not even the most optimistic New York official could have predicted that Pennington would lead the NFL in passing but, when Testaverde was benched, the former Marshall star blossomed.

Want more from just the '02 season alone? Pittsburgh rode itinerant Tommy Maddox, who began the year as the backup to Kordell Stewart, to the AFC North championship. When starter Donovan McNabb was sidelined by a broken ankle, Koy Detmer and A.J. Feeley rallied the Philadelphia Eagles to a 5-1 stretch-run record in his absence. Atlanta began an eight-game unbeaten streak with a victory over the New York Giants that was engineered by backup Doug Johnson, who will now replace the injured Michael Vick for the first month of this season.

In 2002, just 14 quarterbacks started all 16 games for their respective teams, and that was actually an increase over the past several seasons. For the last four seasons, the NFL has averaged 54.5 different starters, and franchises can no longer count on much stability at the game's most critical position. In that period, there were four different teams forced to use four different starting quarterbacks. Also during that time, approximately 15 percent of the victories recorded in the league were posted by backup quarterbacks.

The winning quarterbacks in three of the last four Super Bowl contests -- Kurt Warner of St. Louis, Baltimore's Trent Dilfer and Tom Brady of New England -- went into training camp in those championship years as backups.

And the quarterback carousel is already in full swing in 2003. Because of injuries or just ineptitude, five franchises will open the season next weekend with No. 1 quarterbacks who were not projected to be starters when training camps opened seven weeks ago. The summer featured some of the more compelling quarterback derbies of the past few years.

	“	You're just naïve, or deluded, if you think you can get by anymore with just one guy. It doesn't happen that way. You'd better have someone in whom you've got faith, that you feel very comfortable with, and that you know can go in and perform. If you don't have someone like that, then you're playing with fire, and eventually you're going to get burned. ”
		— Andy Reid, Eagles coach

"You're just naïve, or deluded, if you think you can get by anymore with just one guy," acknowledged Philadelphia head coach Andy Reid. "It doesn't happen that way. You'd better have someone in whom you've got faith, that you feel very comfortable with, and that you know can go in and perform. If you don't have someone like that, then you're playing with fire, and eventually you're going to get burned."

That kind of mindset resonates throughout the league now but, in fact, it wasn't that long ago that some coaches preferred to have a backup quarterback who simply knew his role, was happy to collect a paycheck for holding the clipboard, and didn't threaten the starter. More recently, teams have raised the financial ante for backup quarterbacks, and coaches don't mind nearly as much having their starters pushed a bit by the guy behind them.

Indeed, on Friday afternoon, the San Francisco 49ers rewarded backup Tim Rattay with a three-year contract extension worth $4.8 million. Although he has yet to start in a regular-season game, Rattay is valued by the 49ers, and they didn't want him exiting after the '03 season as an unrestricted free agent.

So now, while San Francisco officials will still spend '03 worrying about the balky back of starter Jeff Garcia, they don't have to fret of the future of his backup. "We just didn't want to have to start over again with someone else next year," said 49ers general manager Terry Donahue. "We know what we've got with Jeff."

Which is not to say that every team understands precisely what it is getting with its No. 2 quarterback. Certainly in 2001, New England coaches could not have known Brady would have played so well, after he replaced the injured Drew Bledsoe. St. Louis thought so little of Warner's potential that they exposed him in the expansion draft that helped to stock the Houston Texans franchise. Feeley was the most unknown of commodities less than a year ago but now it would require a high-round draft choice to pry him away from the Eagles. The Falcons have tried, unsuccessfully to this point, to lure Johnson into a long-term contract extension.

Once viewed with only a modicum of respect, viable backup quarterbacks have become a pretty hot commodity in the league, and their value figures to continue increasing. The era of the indestructible starter, with apologies to iron man Brett Favre, has gone the way of the single-wing.

When a coach is forced to go to the bullpen now, he wants the comfort of knowing there is a backup there who can throw strikes.

"You want some security, some peace of mind, at the No. 2 (quarterback) position," said Carolina coach John Fox. "It's become a very critical position."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.