If you are familiar with any of the discourse surrounding Jalen Hurts this offseason (and if you aren’t, please, for the love of God, share your secrets on how you exist online without encountering Philadelphia sports fans), you’ve probably heard a lot about how he doesn’t like the middle of the field, or how the new Eagles offensive coordinator intends to open up that part of the passing game.

Hurts isn’t the only quarterback to have come under scrutiny in recent years for not utilizing the middle of the field in the passing game. It’s been a topic of debate for quarterbacks ranging from Justin Fields to Joe Burrow. But what exactly does “using the middle of the field” mean in the passing game? Why does it matter? Is it true some quarterbacks are averse to it, and if so can they learn to get over their fears? These are important questions I’m going to try to tackle today.

For one, when NFL coaches talk about the “middle of the field” they usually don’t mean every throw between the hashmarks. Plenty of the quarterbacks we’ll be talking about today are comfortable throwing shallow crossers or quick hitches and dump-offs to guys directly in front of their faces. What we’re looking for are passes thrown 10+ yards downfield between the hash marks. These are the deep digs and crossers that power the McVay/Shanahan/Johnson offenses that are in vogue across the league right now. These in-breakers are designed to take advantage of defenses running the two-deep safety shells that have proliferated in the wake of the Vic Fangio Revolution. Throws to the middle of the field routinely generate greater EPA than throws outside the numbers.

But while throwing to the middle of the field offers great rewards, it’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it’s not for the timid. The league interception rate on these throws in 2025 was 5.7%, well above the average interception rate of 2.2% on all throws. The aforementioned Hurts is a perfect example of this, as a full 25% of his career regular season and playoff interceptions have come on throws to the intermediate and deep MOF, despite those throws representing a small % of his overall pass attempts.

To throw over the middle, a quarterback has to have high risk tolerance. They must also play with a sense of timing and anticipation, as windows close quickly with all the traffic from streaking linebackers and safeties in the area. Many of these throws are also paired with under center play-action concepts or longer five- and seven-step drops from under center, which not every quarterback is comfortable with in a generation of passers raised mostly in shotgun-heavy spread schemes.

So now that we’ve covered why this matters, and why it’s not for everyone, let’s look at the numbers. Here’s how often every quarterback targeted the intermediate and deep middle of the field (10+ air yards) in 2025. The numbers below include all attempts in both the regular season and playoffs for quarterbacks with at least 200 overall passing attempts this year.

I am looking at attempts and attempt % here because it’s very important when considering something like this to be what the cool kids call #DenominatorPilled. Many Eagles fans pushing back against the “Hurts doesn’t like the middle of the field” narrative like to cite things like his yards per attempt or passer rating on these throws, without acknowledging the context that he doesn’t make these kinds of throws very often.

This is a pretty common mistake fans make in these discussions, like the persistent myth that Bryce Young is a “good” deep ball thrower due to his deep completion % or his sparkling PFF grade on deep passes. Quarterbacks often have good QB ratings, EPA, completion %, and so on with low volume on these types of throws precisely because they refuse to throw them unless the picture is very clear and their receiver has a great deal of separation. In the NFL, however, if you’re only willing to throw the ball to an already-open receiver, you’re not going to get very many opportunities overall.

As you can see, the Hurts narrative is quite accurate when it comes to how often he actually attacks the middle of the field. Only 9.4% of his total passing attempts targeted the MOF, well below the league average of 12.9%. The correlation between using this part of the field and overall passing success is strong, as only one of the passers to rank in the top 10 in adjusted net yards per attempt this year, Sam Darnold, targeted the MOF less often than the league average — and he was just a tick below at 12.1%. You just don’t see many top offenses these days that aren’t willing to utilize this area in the passing game.

So can you get a reluctant veteran over their MOF avoidance? I specified “veteran” there because it’s fairly common for players to take a big leap attacking the MOF after their rookie seasons, but it’s much less common to see the jump anytime after that. Since 2020, only five veteran quarterbacks have managed to climb from the bottom 10 in MOF% one season to the top 10 in another.

Those five are Jared Goff, Kirk Cousins, Mac Jones, Matthew Stafford, and Trevor Lawrence. These five are often used as positive examples for guys like Hurts, Burrow, Kyler Murray, or any of the other names often bandied about as guys looking to make a later-career change in their approach. The problem with that is that most of those guys are repeat offenders, while our five success stories were not. In the context of their careers, their low-MOF-years look like the aberration, not the rule.

Goff struggled in 2020 in his last year in LA, which prompted a trade to Detroit and his resurrection as a MOF God with the Lions — but he hadn’t struggled attacking that part of the field before 2020. In 2019 his MOF% was over 13%, well within his norm in Detroit. Likewise, Stafford’s bottom 10 season came in 2022 when he was injured behind a bad Rams offensive line that couldn’t protect him on longer-developing concepts; but he’d hammered the MOF 17.6% of the time during the Rams’ 2021 Super Bowl season.

Cousins had also had several seasons well above the league average rate before his outlier year. Mac Jones burst onto the scene attacking the MOF 14.2% of the time as a rookie, and his 2024 campaign in Doug Pederson and Press Taylor’s static, moribund spread attack looks like the deviation, as he immediately resumed his MOF-heavy approach last year in San Francisco.

Hurts, meanwhile, has ranked in the bottom 10 in MOF% every single year of his career. He’s broken the 10% mark just one time, in 2022. Burrow actually attacked the MOF at a decent clip as a rookie, finishing a respectable 12th at 15.1%. But he must have soured on the experience after completing just 2/14 passes to the deep middle part of the field, since he’s never surpassed that number of attempts in any season since. Burrow has never ranked better than 19th in MOF% since that rookie season, with three seasons in the bottom 10. Kyler Murray, likewise, has not ranked better than 19th in MOF% in any season since 2020, with three straight bottom-10 finishes.

If we’re to find any optimism for these particular tigers to change their stripes, the one example that sticks out is Trevor Lawrence. Lawrence was extremely aggressive between the hashes in year one of the Liam Coen experience in Jacksonville, with 17.1% of his attempts in that range. This is after Lawrence had finished bottom 10 in both 2023 and 2021, and just outside it at 27th in 2022. Though he’d shown a little improvement in 2024, ranking 14th at 14.1%, it’s still proof that it is possible to evolve in this department.

The jump for Lawrence was not painless. His six MOF interceptions ranked fifth-most in the league and his interception rate of 5.9% was above average as well. But overall he posted very good numbers between the hashes, and the Jaguars offense soared in the second half of the season. The growing pains were certainly worth it for them. I also think that Lawrence’s MOF avoidance earlier in his career may have been more about scheme than quarterback, since Mac Jones also had a career-low MOF% in his stint as Lawrence’s backup under Pederson. Lawrence was not particularly averse to the MOF in college, either. Nonetheless, this is a recent example of the kind of growth we’re looking for.

So is there a chance that significant improvement in this department is possible for Hurts and other veterans like him? Yes. I would say the odds of someone who has so consistently ranked at the very bottom of the league in this category making such a leap are low, especially since he’s had multiple different offensive coordinators and has never significantly changed up his approach with any of them. But the existence of a recent example who has made such a change should offer a bit of hope that this experiment is not automatically doomed. When it comes to working the middle, perhaps, in the words of the poet James E. World, “it just takes some time.”*

*I was originally going to title this article “it just takes some time - live a little in the middle” since that is what I thought the lyrics were for 25 years. It turns out it’s “It just takes some time, little girl, you’re in the middle.” 25 freakin’ years, man. And I listen to that song a lot! This is a real low point for me.

In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio that he couldn’t provide a legal definition of hardcore pornography but “I know it when I see it.” I feel similarly about the term Pocket Presence. Everyone knows Pocket Presence is important, maybe the defining quality of an elite quarterback, but everyone’s definition is seemingly different.

Some folks cite Joe Burrow as today’s paragon of pocket presence, given his willingness to stand and deliver under pressure, but I can’t mesh that with a quarterback who has had a pressure to sack rate over 20% going back to LSU and routinely gets sacked at a higher rate than his elite peers and his own backups behind the same offensive line. ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky once praised Jayden Daniels’ pocket presence before the 2024 draft, which I found insane for a quarterback who had the highest pressure to sack rate for a first round pick since 2014 and by far the highest clean pocket scramble rate. With Daniels especially I think there’s a bizarre tendency to mistake the fact that he only throws the ball when the pocket is clean and he isn’t under duress with him always being poised and calm, simply because he takes sacks or scrambles rather than attempting many throws under adverse conditions.

On the other side of the spectrum Bo Nix has been nearly impossible to sack through two NFL seasons, but he also routinely bails from clean pockets and limited the Broncos from running many slower-developing concepts because of his skittishness. There’s more to it than just sack avoidance. Obviously these are high and usually unachievable standards but you want someone like Peyton Manning or Dan Marino or Tom Brady who can subtly shift within the pocket to avoid rushers, buy time, and hang tough against pressure before delivering strikes downfield. It can be difficult to quantify these traits, but I think it’s valuable to attempt to do so anyway, because the “eye test” that leads people to such widely different definitions of pocket presence also clearly fails.

To that end, Michael Penix was an analytical darling for some entering the 2024 draft. If Jayden Daniels’ 24.5% pressure to sack rate was his glaring red flag, you had Penix and his impeccable 6.5% P2S, the lowest for a first rounder since 2014, as the counterweight. At first glance Penix didn’t appear to sacrifice aggressiveness for sack avoidance, either. His career ADOT of 10.5 yards was above average, as was his overall deep pass attempt % of 17.9%. Explosives + Sack Avoidance is a winning formula, generally. I’m sure this line of thinking played into Atlanta’s controversial decision to take him much higher than expected in the draft.

Through two (very injury-shortened) seasons in the NFL some of this has absolutely translated for Penix. His 12.3% P2S rate in 2025 was seventh-best in the league, and his actual sack rate of 4.5% was sixth-best. This helped him in terms of adjusted net yards per attempt, as he finished a respectable 14th in ANY/A, although that obviously comes with the caveat that he was 29th in total dropbacks this year due to his injury and may not have sustained that production over a whole season.

Under the hood though there are some problems with Penix’s production. In terms of EPA he was just 22nd in non-garbage time EPA/play per Sumer Sports and the Falcons were 22nd in dropback EPA in the weeks he started for them. Penix was wildly inconsistent from week to week, falling under 200 yards passing in four of his nine starts, while having just two games where he managed multiple touchdown passes. The Falcons offense, despite another outstanding season from Bijan Robinson, scored just 20.5 PPG in Penix’s starts and were 23rd in EPA/play when he went down in week 11.

I think the disparity between Penix’s relatively respectable passing line and his overall performance in terms of points both expected and real has to do with his response to pressure, and I think his response to pressure is largely determined by his lack of the requisite mobility to play the quarterback position well in the modern NFL.

Anyone familiar with Penix is aware of his extensive injury history. In college he suffered four consecutive season-ending injuries, twice tearing the ACL in his right knee. His 2025 season ended with a torn ACL in his left knee. It is understandable that these injuries have left him unable or simply unwilling to risk injury on scrambles or by hanging onto the ball long enough to let plays develop, but I believe it absolutely limits his ceiling as an NFL quarterback.

The first place where Penix’s immobility shows up is in his scramble rate. Penix scrambled on just 2.0% of his college dropbacks. Out of 153 college quarterbacks who were drafted or have gone onto the NFL since 2014 that is the 10th-lowest scramble rate, and the list is not exactly encouraging:

Penix then flashed with a 4.5 second 40 yard dash that provided some hope that perhaps there was another gear in him as a runner that he simply hadn’t utilized in college. While it’s true he has scrambled at a higher rate as a pro at a 4.1% clip, the results have not been encouraging. I wrote about how Bo Nix has managed to use his tight rope act of avoiding sacks and scrambling for first downs to help him turn a below-average passing line into average or better overall quarterback play, but Penix is only working with half of that equation. In 2025 he scrambled 13 times for 77 yards. His 5.9 yards per scramble were well below the league average of 7.5 yards and placed him 38th in the NFL, right behind 35 year old Geno Smith. Only Aaron Rodgers (age 39), Matthew Stafford (38), Kirk Cousins (38), Tua Tagovailoa (Tua), and Joe Burrow (turf toe) averaged fewer yards per scramble than Penix, a second-year pro who shouldn’t even be near his physical peak, let alone ranking amongst veterans well in their decline phase.

Another place where Penix mostly ranks among aging vets and injured players is a metric I talked about in my Jaxson Dart article: QB Responsible Pressures. Now while I’m quite sure that Jaxson Dart being responsible for his own pressures at a rate beyond any quarterback we’ve ever seen is bad, I don’t know that Michael Penix creating basically no pressure at all for himself is good. This year Penix was credited with responsibility for just 3.2% of his pressured dropbacks, by far the lowest rate in the NFL. 41 year old Joe Flacco was in second place at 5.2%. 2024’s leader was Kirk Cousins, fresh off a torn Achilles at age 37, at 4.7%. Derek Carr wars right behind him at 5.1% before riding off into the sunset. The last starting quarterback before Penix to come in under 4% was 2023 Joe Burrow, who was in the midst of the worst passing season of his career and hampered by a calf strain. If you go back further you’ll find similar numbers from Ryan Tannehill in his penultimate season, an injury-riddled Matt Stafford in 2022, late-career Andy Dalton, and Carson Palmer in his swansong. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. This is usually an indicator of a quarterback who is old, injured, statuesque, and above all unwilling to take a hit anymore. Michael Penix playing like a group of NFL geriatrics in the second year of his career, before his third ACL tear, is not a promising indicator.

Penix's unwillingness to risk contact has led to woeful production under pressure. For one his average time to throw on pressured dropbacks in 2025 (3.31 seconds) was well below the average time of 3.57 seconds. While you might think getting rid of the ball quickly when pressured is the ideal response, most of the league’s elite quarterbacks are under pressure as they extend plays and create. Caleb Williams led the NFL in TTT under pressure, but Josh Allen was second, Lamar Jackson third. You’ll find others like Drake Maye, Trevor Lawrence, Patrick Mahomes, Brock Purdy, and Drake Maye also on the longer range. Penix has thrown just one touchdown under pressure since entering the NFL. Even JJ McCarthy has thrown three. Penix ranked ninth in the % of his pressured dropbacks ending in throwaways as well. He’s simply not giving his offense a chance when the rush comes.

Penix’s reluctance to invite pressure also meant the neutering of his aggression downfield. Last year he ranked 36th in deep attempt % at 9.8%, a far cry from his college days and also well below the 15% mark of his brief rookie season. Were it not for Bijan Robinson leading all running backs in yards after catch by a wide margin it’s likely Penix’s overall yards per attempt would have reflected his actually conservative approach. Instead his reluctance to open things up downfield despite a weapon like Bijan drawing so much attention in the backfield was arguably the main restriction on the Falcons’ offensive potential.

Now you might say to yourself “hey, quarterbacks weren’t always mobile and so scramble-happy, I’m looking at these allowed pressure and TTT under pressure reports you’re talking about and Jared Goff ain’t far behind, can’t Penix just be like him?" The stationary pocket passer isn’t extinct, it’s true, even if he’s seemed endangered of late. The problem is that Penix doesn’t really have the accuracy to survive playing that way. Jared Goff was second in the NFL in adjusted completion % at 80.2%. Michael Penix was 36th, at 71.3%. While I spent a fair bit of time talking about what a bad metric completion % is in isolation in my Caleb Williams article, when you’re not generating explosives consistently, picking up the chains with your legs, or producing under pressure then the ability to hit your layups consistently is imperative. Goff also generates his chunk plays when needed by attacking the intermediate and deep middle of the field on in-breaking routes, with 17.5% of his pass attempts going to that area in 2025, second in the NFL. Penix only attacked the middle of the field 10.1% of the time, good for 30th. In his career so far he has thrown just eight passes 20+ yards downfield between the hashmarks. Nine different quarterbacks attempted at least 20 such passes this year alone. Penix isn’t a timing and rhythm passer cut from the mold of a Jared Goff or Kirk Cousins, so far he’s been more like an attempt to recreate Jalen Hurts in Madden with the speed rating dialed way down and the injury slider maxed out.

I hope for Michael Penix’s sake, and for all of us who would love to be spared more of the Tua Tagovailoa experience, that he’s healthy in 2026. Even if he is, though, I question how likely he is to improve on all of the things I’ve brought up here given what I imagine will be an even more pronounced lack of mobility and an understandable desire to protect himself even more. If he can’t find a way to hang in the pocket longer, allow plays to develop downfield, or to produce under pressure it’s hard to see a franchise quarterback there. This was always the risk in taking an older, oft-injured prospect who wasn’t likely to age gracefully even if he had stayed healthy. There’s a lot of pressure on Penix entering this pivotal year of his career, and the only way to succeed will likely require putting even more of it on himself.

The NFL has a quarterback development problem, I’m told. Poor Jonathan James McCarthy. At just 23 years old and only 10 starts into his young career, our dear friend Nine has been cast aside by the Vikings. This is evidence the NFL has forgotten patience, apparently. It’s cruel and vicious to take a kid at the most important position in sports, give him just 10 starts, and abandon the experiment when it doesn’t immediately bear fruit. We did things better back in the old days. We used to give guys time and let players develop.

That’s the story anyway. Is there any truth in it?

Well, I will say we used to give guys more time. From the NFL merger in 1970 to 2010 (the decades before the rookie wage scale was implemented) there were just 12 quarterbacks drafted in the first round who had fewer than 16 career starts with the team that drafted them. Over 40 years, that’s 12 out of 89 first-round QBs who got the hook before they’d completed a full season’s worth of work with the team that drafted them. In the mere 15 years since the rookie wage scale made it cheaper and easier to discard young quarterback contracts, there have been seven quarterbacks (assuming McCarthy and Anthony Richardson are both done with their respective original franchises even though both are still there for now) to get such a quick hook. Maybe eight if Michael Penix loses the quarterback battle in Atlanta to Tua Tagovailoa (or just gets hurt again).

That’s 58% of the number of pre-rookie-wage-scale abandoned quarterback projects in just 38% of the number of years. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to deny that teams are absolutely less patient with struggling young quarterbacks than they used to be.

Should they be more patient than this, though? Are they actually getting any worse at turning drafted quarterbacks into success stories overall? I’d say no to both. From 1990 to 1999, for example, the NFL drafted 21 quarterbacks in the first round. Just five of those players ended up earning a second contract with the team that took them.

Certainly teams were more patient with their young players back then. David Klingler got 24 chances to start for the Bengals. Tim Couch got 59 for the Browns. Even Ryan Leaf got 18 starts for the Chargers. Did any of those players profit from this patience? Did they reward their teams for showing faith in them?

In the era of the rookie wage scale, even with teams “losing patience” with their young signal-callers, the hit rate for first-round quarterbacks receiving a second contract with their drafted team has gone from the 23.8% of that 1990-1999 period to 39.5% from 2011-2022. Whether all of those quarterbacks were smart extensions (hi Tua) or not, it’s clear that NFL franchises are absolutely willing to keep a quarterback if he shows something. JJ’s problem was mostly just showing nothing.

McCarthy was one of just 15 quarterbacks this century to average less than 4.5 adjusted net yards per attempt in his first 10 career starts, clocking in at 4.3. I won’t bother with most of the names in this group with him because they were bad and would not offer anyone rooting for JJ McCarthy’s success any comfort, but I will look at the only three to go on to become Pro Bowl players later in their career: Matthew Stafford, Carson Palmer, and Geno Smith.

We’re gonna dismiss Geno as a hopeful comp right away because I think “Hey, maybe after seven years on the bench we might have something here!” does not exactly prove the Vikings are wrong to bench McCarthy indefinitely right now. That leaves Stafford and Palmer, and I think there’s a glaring difference between those two and McCarthy that gets at something that isn’t always apparent at first glance when it comes to stats: trust.

The big narrative out of Minnesota this offseason has been about the lack of trust the staff and players have in McCarthy. Last year, the Vikings were quite public about how they simplified the offense throughout the season to try and make things easier on the overwhelmed quarterback. That played out in the numbers as his year went along. In his first five starts, McCarthy dropped back an average of 33 times per game. The results were simply horrific: he threw just six touchdowns against ten interceptions, completed only 52.8% of his passes, and took 15 sacks. His 3.4 ANY/A through those first five starts was actually the 10th-lowest of any quarterback this century.

McCarthy did rebound a bit over his last five starts, completing 64% of his throws at 7.7 yards per attempt and throwing five touchdowns to four interceptions, but the simplification the coaching staff discussed was quite evident. Over those final five starts, McCarthy dropped back just 25 times per game on average. He attempted just 12 passes total to the intermediate and deep middle of the field in those five games. 17.6% of his dropbacks were screens, second-most in the NFL over that stretch.

Even if you were to extrapolate just these five games, the “best” that JJ had to offer, to a full 17-game schedule, he’d have passed for less than 3,000 yards. This was not a real NFL offense, it was more like the NFL playcaller version of giving a little kid a disconnected PlayStation controller so he thinks he’s part of the team.

McCarthy ended his 10-game season with just 243 total pass attempts in a training-wheels offense. This despite playing for one of the league’s most respected offensive minds with the game’s best wide receiver on a team that won 14 games the year before. Notably this was after he had a whole season to sit and learn a playbook that nonetheless baffled him anyway.

Palmer and Stafford, meanwhile, took over teams that had missed the playoffs the year before (and in Stafford’s case had literally gone winless) and were thrown right into the deep end. Hell, Palmer threw 52 passes in his third career start. Welcome to the NFL, kid. Palmer and Stafford ended their first 10 career starts with 343 and 377 pass attempts, respectively.

If you were to take Palmer’s final five starts of his first year in the role and projected them to 17 games, you’d get over 4,000 yards and 40 touchdowns. He was clearly on the rise and growing with his offense, and the coaching staff didn’t hesitate to throw the proverbial kitchen sink at him. The same can’t be said about McCarthy and his pared-down remedial playbook, though it seems possible KOC wanted to throw an actual kitchen sink at him. Also I’ll just go ahead and say that Matthew Stafford and Carson Palmer are both built like brick shithouses, as my father would say, and are/were two of the most gifted pure throwers I’ve ever seen. JJ McCarthy is not. The Vikings are perfectly correct here to lump JJ in with all of the quarterbacks that started this badly and ended up being very bad, not the two that did not.

The biggest issue with the JJ McCarthy experiment is that when it comes to quarterback prospects, he is what I would call the worst of both worlds. The goal when you draft a quarterback in the first round is to acquire a player you believe can ultimately carry a roster to the Super Bowl even when they are making a top-of-the market salary. This is important because, for as much noise as people make about the importance of the Rookie QB Contract Window, very few rookie-contract QBs have ever won the Super Bowl.

A guy who can continue to carry the team even after he’s been paid his market value is therefore the best way to open an indefinite contention window. The problem is these guys are rare and hard to find and always have been. To find one in the draft, you usually need a quarterback prospect who is extraordinarily talented, experienced, and accomplished. There’s not one of those in every draft, and if there is they go quite early.

Most teams don’t get a crack at those platonic ideal QB prospects, so they’re left to pick from the next tier of guys, who broadly fall into two main archetypes that I like to refer to as The Tools Goof and the Pro Ready Prospect. The Tools Goof looks like the top quarterbacks in the NFL if you’re just doing a police lineup. They’re big, strong, fast, athletic, with powerful arms. Usually they come with significant warts, however. Maybe they’re inaccurate, or prone to turnovers, or inexperienced, or a combination of all three. If you’re willing to invest time and effort into them, however, the hope is someday they smooth their rough edges and reach their sky-high ceilings. The patron saint of this archetype is Josh Allen, but Jordan Love is another successful example, and arguably Sam Darnold fits as well. The worst-case scenarios in recent memory are Anthony Richardson and Trey Lance.

The Pro Ready Prospect isn’t going to win the underwear Olympics. His arm strength won’t wow anyone. He might not be particularly fast. But he makes quick decisions, he’s willing to test NFL windows with perfect timing. He’s usually a longtime college starter with tons of reps to his name and is ready to hit the ground running. Jared Goff leads this crowd, but you could also look to Brock Purdy. Unfortunately, when these guys aren’t instantly ready to succeed at the NFL level the jig is up pretty quickly, since there’s not much untapped potential to fall back on. An example of a Pro Ready Prospect who wasn’t actually Pro Ready would be Kenny Pickett.

With the Tools Goof, the theory is to hope they have managed to harness their immense talent by the time you pay them so that you have one of those top-tier quarterbacks even when they are expensive. With the Pro Ready Prospect, the hope is usually that you hit the ground running and can win during their rookie contract while you can still use the extra cap space to build a solid team around them. There are pros and cons to both archetypes, but there is at least a viable path to success for each as well.

JJ McCarthy was neither a Tools Goof nor a Pro Ready Prospect, however, and thus it was never easy to see how this was going to work. Despite some exuberant comparisons to John Elway you may have heard, McCarthy was never a particularly talented quarterback prospect. While he’s not short for a quarterback, he does have a slight frame.

McCarthy’s arm strength was lauded by some because of the velocity he often put on his throws in college, but that velocity was a result of him over-striding and putting too much into his throws to make up for a lack of natural arm strength. This has resulted in a tendency for the ball to sail high and over his intended target, causing interceptions. This also meant that while he could throw with velocity on a line on short and intermediate throws, anything that required him to layer the ball, throw with touch, or throw the ball deep was a bit more dicey.

In college he excelled on intermediate and middle-of-the-field concepts, targeting that area of the field more than any other QB in the 2024 draft class besides Drake Maye, and completing an above-average 60.3% of those throws. On deep throws, especially deep throws outside the numbers, however, McCarthy’s production fell off considerably. Just 6.9% of his career pass attempts were deep throws outside the numbers — lowest of all the Class of 2024 first-round quarterbacks, and his production on those throws in terms of yards per attempt was the worst as well.

Fortunately for McCarthy there was evidence in the NFL of several quarterbacks with similar limitations thriving nonetheless. Brock Purdy’s menu of throws in the NFL has never included much deep and outside the numbers, but his willingness to hammer the middle of the field on in-breakers meshed perfectly with Kyle Shanahan’s scheme. Jared Goff and Kirk Cousins likewise have made up for struggles throwing the ball with zip outside the numbers by dominating within the hashmarks. It was easy to envision McCarthy slotting into that role as Cousins’ replacement in Minnesota and ripping digs and crossers to Justin Jefferson.

There was one teeny problem with that comparison, however. Brock Purdy was the very model of a Pro Ready Prospect. He had almost 1,700 dropbacks in college, which ranked 13th-most out of 148 quarterback prospects to enter the draft since 2015. He shouldered the load for an Iowa State team that needed him to carry the offense for four years. The kind of quick decision-making and rhythm passing that the current Shanahan-style point guard quarterbacks excel at is often the product of years of experience. JJ McCarthy had just 773 college dropbacks in a Michigan scheme that mostly asked him to stay out of the way and not screw things up, once icing a game against Penn State with 32 straight runs during his stint as the starting quarterback. The history of recent first-round quarterbacks with under 800 dropbacks in college is…checkered at best:

Obviously Josh Allen is the great success story, the most famous exception in the history of NFL quarterback development. Most importantly, however, he was the ultimate Tools Goof. The Bills had reason to be patient with Allen because the payoff if his immense potential was ever realized was the destroyer of worlds we’ve all come to know and love. Allen was a true swing for the fences, but McCarthy was more like an attempt to get on base with a bunt. Even if it worked, you’d have a long way to go to get home, but failing in the attempt is especially painful. McCarthy was more like Mitch Trubisky: a player with no superlative skills whose appeal was supposed to be a “high floor,” yet spent his entire career struggling to get out of the basement.

Ultimately McCarthy as a prospect tried to thread a needle that doesn’t really exist, or at least hasn’t been very successful in recent memory. The successful starters we’ve seen with similar skillsets to him were much more experienced players entering the league, while the few quarterbacks that have developed despite limited college reps were mostly physical freaks whose raw talent carried them while the rest of their repertoire developed. It is hard to fault the Vikings for looking at the long odds that McCarthy will develop into a successful starter and decide it’s not worth waiting around for a guy who never had the kind of potential to be a star anyway.

I don’t think the NFL has really lost the ability to develop quarterbacks, but I do think they’ve become more honest about who might ever actually develop. For JJ McCarthy, the answer is Nein.

There’s no shame to struggling as a rookie quarterback in the NFL. No matter how bad things might look for rookies there’s always a little light at the end of the tunnel. If Jared Goff can shake off his rookie year and become a successful starter just about anyone can have some hope. Since 1998 there have been 73 quarterbacks who attempted 200 passes as a rookie and were below average passers according to ANY/A+*. 20 of those quarterbacks went on to make the Pro Bowl or better in their career. It’s not a fatal omen at all not to light the world on fire in year one.

It gets a little more concerning if a guy struggles through the first two years of his career. There’ve been just 33 quarterbacks since 1998 to throw at least 200 passes in each of their first two seasons and put up below average passing marks in both. It’s a bad sign if a guy can’t at least get to league average in his sophomore campaign, as I noted in my Cam Ward article. Nonetheless, there’s still some hope. Nine of those quarterbacks who struggled through two years went on to become Pro Bowlers or better eventually. You’re getting scared, but there’s some life rafts to cling to if you’re still wanting to keep hope for your young quarterback afloat.

If your quarterback hasn’t put it all together by the end of year three, however, things start to look quite grim. For one, a fair number of the quarterbacks who are below average passers their first two seasons don’t even get the chance to start a third. Quarterbacks like Cade McNown, Blaine Gabbert, Kenny Pickett, Will Levis, and Brandon Weeden all had the plug pulled on their starting careers either before or early into year three. Of the survivors who did get a third season there were just 14 who remained below average passers by the end of round three:

As you can see of this group of three year under-achievers just two have gone on to a Pro Bowl appearance later in their career. I’m not counting Daniel Jones being named as an alternate this year, but I suppose you can. Certainly I’ll let the Bryce Young fans decide if “hey, maybe he’ll turn into Daniel Jones” is a good thing or not.

Now there are probably a couple names you might think I’m missing here. Drew Brees is famous as the original “fourth year breakout” candidate this century, but he doesn’t qualify because he only threw 27 passes a rookie. In his first stint as a starter in 2002 he also managed to be more productive (95 ANY/A+) than Bryce has ever been. His Year Four Breakout was actually just his third year as a starter and if you were to compare his first 42 starts in those three seasons to Bryce Young’s 46 in his first three years you would not find the comparison favorable to Bryce.

Another late-bloomer you might try to compare Bryce to despite his exclusion from the above lists (as he didn’t hit 200 pass attempts as a rookie) is Eli Manning. However, while Eli was considered a disappointment early on relative to his draft status and hype he was nonetheless an above-average passer already in his second season, with an ANY/A+ of 102. He showed much more than Bryce much earlier in his career.

If you want hope for Bryce’s imagined fourth year breakout you have to look more recently at Sam Darnold and Ryan Tannehill. Those are the two quarterbacks we’ve seen in the last two decades to shrug off three years of struggles to eventually become plus starters for a time. I don’t think those comparisons actually work for Bryce, however.

For one there’s what I would call the elephant in the room in regard to all Bryce Young discussions, but that would be unfair to elephants because they are very big and the problem is that Bryce is very small. Sam Darnold is a 6’3”, 225 pound moose with an absolute rocket launcher of an arm. His dominant physical traits led the Jets to draft him high despite the fact that he didn’t start a full season at quarterback until his senior year of high school and had under 1,000 college dropbacks at USC. He was considered a raw prospect and proved it with his rough introduction to the league. Tannehill, likewise, was a latecomer to the quarterback position. He initially played wide receiver at Texas A&M and didn’t take over as the full-time starter at quarterback until the eighth game of his junior year. Like Darnold it was Tannehill’s physical traits that appealed to the Dolphins in the 2012 draft as he checked in at 6’4”, 217 pounds with a 4.58 40 yard dash.

Bryce Young, meanwhile, is the shortest starting quarterback in the history of the modern NFL, generously listed at 5’10”, 204 pounds. Draft profiles praised his intangibles, not his physical traits. NFL.com’s official prospect preview from scout Lance Zierlein noted that Young had “measurables that fall below the standard for the quarterback position” with a “deep ball that is nothing special” and “drive velocity that fails to stand out,” but claimed he was a “full-field reader” who “possesses a full offering of intangibles that help set him apart.” Young was supposed to make up for subpar physical skills with an NFL-ready brain but that proved to be laughably incorrect given his struggles in year one (and two, and three). This led to a recurrence of a phenomenon that I call The Kenny Pickett Pivot, where the same talking heads that called a quarterback a “pro-ready” prospect with average physical tools before the draft pivot and describe him as a project who needs time once he is not, in fact, pro-ready. Young remains the same short, weak-armed player he was in college, however. The intangibles that were supposed to be his superpower never materialized and the tangibles were never super to begin with. He’s not a gold mine of untapped raw talent like Darnold or Tannehill that just needs time and coaching and an improved situation.

Even if Young fit the comparison to Darnold and Tannehill, though, it’s important to note how little that would help the 2026 Carolina Panthers. Darnold and Tannehill are extremely late breakout quarterbacks who struggled through their first three seasons, but they also kept on struggling in year four. Tannehill’s first above-average passing season came in his fifth year in Miami and his true star turn with the Titans came in his eighth professional season at age 31. Darnold spent his fourth year struggling mightily for the Panthers and didn’t enjoy his first complete season as a better than average passer until his seventh season in Minnesota. Even if there’s hope for some future version of Bryce Young to not be a disappointment, it’s likely to be farther down the road and, most importantly, with a different franchise.

Neither Tannehill nor Darnold would likely have resurrected their careers without a change of scenery and system. Darnold credits the 49ers and Vikings coaching staffs with his turnaround, and he enjoyed far greater supporting casts with Minnesota and Seattle than he ever had in New York or Carolina. Bryce Young, meanwhile, is entering his third straight year with the same coaching staff that has overseen his mediocre second and third seasons and largely the exact same offensive roster as last year as well. If he’s not sitting on a reservoir of physical talent that still needs to be harnessed, and he’s not in a new system utilizing him differently, and he’s not suddenly playing with vastly improved players at the positions around him, where is this improvement coming from? Is he going to get that much better at reading defenses? If he’s capable of that why hasn’t this coaching staff figured out how to get him there before now, and why would we believe they’ve got the key to unlocking it now if they haven’t before? How is a quarterback whose draft stock hinged on his perception as an elite processor actually so incredibly bad at it that his historic struggles through three years can be attributed to “processing,” and why would we believe he’s suddenly going to get much smarter?

There is, quite simply, no historical precedent for a quarterback who has been this bad for this long to turn it around, especially without a change in scheme or team or both to serve as the spark for it. I’m also willing to bet most people even entertaining such a notion are not aware of just how bad Bryce has actually been. For example, here’s the list of every single quarterback in the history of the National Football League (established 1920) to attempt at least 850 passes and average fewer than 10 yards per completed pass:

Is that bad? That seems bad. But hey! Bryce turned it around post-benching, right? What a heroic narrative, the little dude who overcame adversity to salvage his career. If we throw out his abysmal rookie year, which is totally fair and something we definitely do for every other quarterback and not just ones we like and want to see succeed because it feels bad rooting against the widdle fella, how does he fare? Well let’s sort every second and third year quarterback for the last 30 years or so by ANY/A and find out!

Ah, poop. It appears Bryce did not take a massive leap into the land of the good quarterbacks after his benching. Like one would expect for someone his size his leap was actually just a small hop from JaMarcus Russell territory to Trevor Siemian-ville.

If we don’t arbitrarily exclude 33% of Young’s professional body of work, however, we are left with a quarterback who ranks 94th in ANY/A among 100 quarterbacks with at least 40 starts and 1000 pass attempts since 2001. He’s just behind Mark Sanchez and Rex Grossman and just ahead of Joey Harrington and David Carr. I think Young’s height has paradoxically served as a giant obstacle that prevents many observers from seeing his production clearly. If he was a bit taller and blended in better amongst his peers they’d see his production for what it is and cease entertaining the unlikely possibility that he’ll overcome his limited tools and all of the historical precedent working against his odds of success. I’m afraid the truth most are afraid to admit is it’s very likely this quarterback is just the Little Engine That Couldn’t.

*ANY/A+ is my beloved Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt relative to league average for a given season. This helps us compare passing performance across different eras of NFL history better than just regular ANY/A. An ANY/A+ of 100 is league average, anything below is bad, anything above is good.

Cam Ward was pretty bad this year. That’s not hard to figure out. He finished 31^st in my beloved Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt, at 4.6 yards. He ranked 36^th in Sumer Sport’s EPA per play among QBs with at least 250 snaps. He was 27^th in the NFL in touchdown passes despite being 8^th in overall pass attempts. It was not a good rookie year, and even though we can be generous with rookie years because most of them stink, it’s fair to note he struggled to a somewhat extreme degree. By ANY/A+ (ANY/A compared to league average for a given season) Ward was at 78 this year (100 is average), meaning he was 22% worse than a league average passer. That mark was good for 52^nd out of the 66 rookie quarterbacks to start at least 10 games in a season since 1998. That’s not necessarily damning, there are good quarterbacks who fared worse as rookies (Josh Allen and Matthew Stafford are notable examples), but suffice it to say Ward’s rookie year was bad and there is work to be done.

The good news is that Cam Ward doesn’t need to set the world on fire in his second year. He just needs to be an average quarterback. Why? Because while quarterbacks can often take three or more years to hit their ceiling, year two tends to set their floor. The bad quarterbacks usually move to the bottom in their second season. It’s generally a very bad sign if a quarterback isn’t at least a league average passer by the end of their sophomore campaign. Here’s quarterbacks since 1998 who started at least 10 games in each of their first two seasons and didn’t post a league average passing season (according to ANY/A) in either one:

As you can see the vast majority of these guys were just bad quarterbacks. Only a handful ever made the Pro Bowl with their drafted team, and none won the Super Bowl in their original destination, although Josh Allen (and Bryce Young, I guess) still could hence the bolded names. Sam Darnold, Ryan Tannehill, and Geno Smith experienced success much later in their careers for different teams after crossing what a buddy of mine has deemed The Alex Smith Event Horizon**.

He may be Paramore’s favorite quarterback development story but we all generally agree that going with the “hey maybe he’s Josh Allen” approach after year two is the final form of cope. I’m also sure Titans fans don’t really want to see Ward go the Geno or Darnold route and figure it out five years from now somewhere else. For their sake, we need to see Cam Ward play like an average quarterback this year so they can keep hope alive he’ll be a franchise QB someday.

Can he get there? Let’s look at history for a guide. To begin with, it’s almost a certainty that Cam Ward will improve somewhat in year two. Almost every quarterback does, even the bad ones. Just 14 of 45 QBs to start at least 10 games in each of their first two seasons since 1998 saw their ANY/A drop from year one to year two, and nine of those quarterbacks were better than league average passers as rookies and mostly just fell back to earth a bit. Cam Ward will get better, I have little doubt of that. With that said, Ward does need a better than average leap.

The average quarterback sees around a six point jump in ANY/A+ and about a half-yard improvement in regular ANY/A. That wouldn’t be good enough for Cam, as it’d get him to only 5.1 ANY/A or an 84 ANY/A+. Fortunately for Cam the average first overall pick improves quite a bit more than just the average quarterback. This is not surprising, since quarterbacks taken first overall have a higher hit rate than quarterbacks taken elsewhere, and because they go to the worst team in the league and often have worse than average supporting casts that artificially deflate their rookie numbers. The average first overall pick QB in the sample improved their ANY/A by nearly a full yard and improved their ANY/A+ by 11 points. As a Bears fan this was why I was much less concerned about Caleb Williams’ rookie year than most, because he needed only a completely average level of improvement for a quarterback of his pedigree to get where he needed to go in year two.

Ward would need a tiny bit better than normal leap, however, since an 11 point/1 yard jump would get him to 5.6 ANY/A or an 89 ANY/A+. That’s marginally better than Bryce Young this year, but still a fair bit away from the League Average Passer mark we’re trying to hit. Thankfully for Ward, there’s plenty of precedent for the kind of leap he needs to clear that bar.

Five different quarterbacks taken first overall since 1998 (Trevor Lawrence, David Carr, Peyton Manning, Joe Burrow, and Caleb Williams) have all made the 22 point/1.5 yard leap that Ward needs. Bryce Young (21 pts, 1.4 yards) basically did as well, although his rookie year was so disastrous it still wasn’t enough to make him even kind of an average passer in year two.*** While Ward needs a better than average leap, he’s certainly not exactly sailing through uncharted waters to get there.

The main place where Ward can improve in year two is sack avoidance, and I believe he has the tools to do so. Ward took 55 sacks this year and lost 410 yards on those sacks, both led the league. He also lost the most EPA on sacks this year as well. Sack rate can be sticky and usually stabilizes fairly early in a quarterback’s career, but some guys do take more sacks than usual as rookies while they adjust to the speed of the NFL game and then revert to something more like their college selves. If Ward can cut his sack rate around 3% he’ll be better than league average, and three of his recent first overall pick peers have managed that. Caleb Williams, Bryce Young, and Kyler Murray all improved by 3.5% or more, with Williams leading the pack with a 6.7% drop.

Ward I think is capable of a similar improvement as he’s comparable to those three because he extends plays, but looks to throw when he does, and rarely scrambles. Out of 23 quarterbacks who left the pocket on at least 20% of their dropbacks, Ward had the second-lowest actual scramble rate at just 3.9%. The EPA doesn’t love this, because scrambles tend to generate a lot of EPA while incomplete scramble throws or throwaways do not, and he also got caught for a fair number of sacks, but I do believe this is ultimately good process that will bear fruit eventually. We’ve seen the injury bill come due many times for guys with extremely high scramble rates while guys like Williams, Young, and Murray saw big declines in their sack rate and big production jumps in year two as they learned how to extend without getting caught.

While cutting his sacks dramatically will go a long way towards getting Cam Ward to our League Average goal, he’s going to need to improve at actually throwing the ball as well. This is where the path to improvement is perhaps a bit murkier. Ward averaged just 5.9 yards per pass attempt this year, one of just 18 seasons since 2000 where a quarterback averaged under 6 yards per attempt on 400+ pass attempts. His 9.8 yards per completion were the fifth-lowest of any rookie since 2000. Now this may not mean much, as he’s not far for example from rookie Caleb Williams’ 6.3 Y/A or Trevor Lawrence at 6.0. I worry that Cam Ward might not see the same jumps as those two, though, because I don’t think he’s nearly as aggressive as either.

My biggest concern with Cam Ward’s college profile was his overall low average depth of target (ADOT) and specifically his deep attempt %. Ward’s career 8.3 ADOT in college ranked in the bottom 10 of all prospects since 2015, and his deep attempt % of 12.9% is the third-worst of a 1st round prospect in that time, ahead of just Daniel Jones and this year’s presumed first overall pick, Fernando Mendoza. As noted in last week’s Mendoza article it’s not a particularly encouraging group:

As I’ve said before it’s generally better to try and harness an aggressive but inaccurate young quarterback than try to coax a conservative passer into something more. I assume many are surprised that Ward’s game is so conservative, given that his highlight reel going back to college is littered with across-his-body gambles and scramble throws downfield. I was, too. I thought some of it might be explained by an RPO and/or screen-heavy offense that might limit his downfield options, but he was only 12th in the NFL in RPO/Screen attempt %, and fellow rookie Jaxson Dart managed to rank higher in ADOT and deep att% despite a higher RPO/Screen % than Ward. It’s hard to explain this disconnect between a player who, on film, seems willing to test nearly any window, and over 3,000 college and pro dropbacks where he’s nonetheless pushed the ball downfield at a lower rate than almost any quarterback in the last decade. It would seem foolish to ignore it, though. If there’s one place where Ward needs to be an exception in order to improve next year it’s here, where he needs to buck the history of this low-ADOT cohort and learn to let her rip.

In the end I do think there’s some reason to believe Cam Ward can be the exception. His journey toward becoming the top pick in the draft was an unorthodox one to begin with, so it’s not impossible his NFL development curve might be as unusual as his college arc. I feel most strongly that he’ll see good improvements in terms of sack avoidance, and that his willingness to push the ball out of structure when he extends plays may make up for some of his reluctance to do so within structure. I’m not exactly sold on what the Titans have done so far to improve the environment around him, but it would nonetheless be hard for things to get any worse. Still, I must admit some concern about his likelihood of making an unusual leap in terms of aggression downfield. If you ask me how confident I am he’ll cross the great divide to average in year two, I suppose I’d say it’s fitting the odds are about 50-50.

*I asterisk’d Teddy Bridgewater there because no, Pro Bowl alternate doesn’t count.

**If a quarterback is bad but promising enough to survive six years in the league or cross 50 starts they cross the ASEH and can become good simply by having seen everything the league has to throw at them.

***Or in year three. Bryce Young article coming soon, folks!

Most stats, be they yards or touchdowns or EPA, are results. College results don’t tell us much, as they might be the product of wide hashmarks or future NFL Hall of Fame wide receivers leaving future Footlocker employees in the dust. What we can look at is how college quarterbacks got their production. We can’t learn much from how many yards a college quarterback racked up, but we can learn a lot from whether he tended to scramble under pressure or hang in the pocket and throw the ball. It matters whether his interceptions came under pressure or whether he screwed up from a clean pocket. It tells us a lot if he was aggressive downfield or if he preferred to do most of his damage on short throws and let his receivers do the work. Players can improve certain skills, like deep ball accuracy or reading defenses, but they (usually) don’t dramatically change how they play when they make the leap. The guy who is scared to throw deep in college isn’t likely to find NFL secondaries less imposing, the quarterback who drops his eyes to the rush and takes off in clean pockets isn’t likely to become more disciplined when NFL pockets get tight and so on. So what I like to do is look at how a guy plays and see what the history of that type of player is in the NFL in order to get an idea of how they might project at the next level.

To that end I’ve created The Spreadsheet, a massive document that has the career college data of 140+ drafted or draft-eligible QBs since 2014, where I track how they play in terms of things like Average Depth of Target (ADOT), Pressure to Sack Rate (P2S), Clean Pocket Scramble Rate, Deep Attempt % and so on and so forth. What I’ve found through this is that most of the things that scouts stress are important for a prospect really do matter when it comes to things like pocket presence and poise under pressure and using all parts of the field etc, and that historical player comps are very important. Which is why it’s funny that scouts very often fail to check the numbers to see if they’re actually right about a player, and if the comp they’ve used actually works.

I’ve heard a lot about how Fernando Mendoza is a “high floor, low-ceiling” guy. He’s been compared a lot to Jared Goff, or even Kirk Cousins. Hearing this when I started watching him and entering numbers into The Spreadsheet I really expected to see a guy with limited physical skills who was accurate, disciplined within the pocket, and limited negative plays. I don’t think this game manager narrative is particularly accurate when it comes to Mendoza. The numbers were actually somewhat discouraging from that perspective, but the good news is the traits to me look better than advertised.

On the traits front, Mendoza has a lot to like. He’s big at 6’5”, 225 lbs. For a guy drawing comps to famously lead-footed guys like Goff and Cousins, he’s a capable runner, averaging 25 rushing yards per game in his career and 5.5 yards per carry. His arm strength is quite good and he can rip deep outs and hit hole shots against Cover 2 as well as anybody. Mendoza also isn’t an older prospect in an era that’s been dominated lately by super-seniors and COVID-extension beneficiaries. He’s young, he’s big, he’s strong, he’s decently mobile. This is good. This is the foundation of a solid prospect, guys have been drafted high for less. Hell, Rick Mirer got a 10 year NFL career out of being tall and going to Notre Dame. This is a good start.

I’m glad I like Mendoza’s traits, because the numbers are…okay? At best?

Here’s Mendoza on the main page of The Spreadsheet against the other 1^st overall picks I have data for. The colors aren’t just how these guys compare to each other but how they stack up against all 140 other guys in there. Compared to the average draft-eligible quarterback and the average top pick Mendoza is quite conservative, with an ADOT of just 8.9 yards. His accuracy is as advertised, with an adjusted completion % in the top third of all QBs since 2014, but I do think that has a bit of a caveat when you consider the low ADOT. Overall though you can see that Mendoza looks fairly less impressive than the kind of quarterback we usually see go at the top of the draft, with the exception of last year’s first overall pick, Cam Ward. Ward is about the least useful comp imaginable, though, since after a thoroughly Meh rookie year on a truly awful team I don’t think we have any idea yet what kind of NFL quarterback he’s actually going to be.

What concerns me a tad with Mendoza is the Big Time Throw rate ranking in the bottom third of all quarterbacks. Now Big Time Throw rate is subjective (as is a lot of the PFF data I use for all of this) but I have found it to be a decently worrying indicator if a quarterback ranks fairly low in it. Here’s 1^st/2^nd round prospects with a BTT rate under 5%:

Now, obviously there’s some good quarterbacks in here. You know how I feel about Jayden Daniels and Bo Nix, but your mileage may vary. Jalen Hurts has done well for himself, although there are certainly questions about how much of that success is him vs his supporting cast etc. Lamar Jackson is obviously amazing. So it’s not damning, but I do think when you look at similar players in terms of ADOT and BTT to Mendoza like Daniel Jones you get the sense that Mendoza in the NFL may be more the kind of quarterback who relies on quick throws and accuracy underneath than generating a ton of big plays. That is no doubt where some of these Goff and Cousins vibes are coming from, but I worry he takes a bit too many sacks and has a fairly high turnover-worthy play rate for someone who wants to live like that in the NFL. His P2S rate of 21.1% is bottom five for a first round quarterback prospect, and while guys like Lamar Jackson (20.4%) and Joe Burrow (22.2%) have been successful in the NFL the P2S rate has proven fairly sticky nonetheless. Both Burrow and Lamar have had above-average sack rates in the NFL, and while they more than compensate for it with their ability to generate big plays, both were much more aggressive passers in college than Mendoza. The fear here is that Mendoza might be more like Daniel Jones, who eats sacks and often fails to offset them with explosives.

Also concerning to me is the turnover-worthy play rate from Mendoza. While 3.5% isn’t historically bad by any means, TWP% has been on decline for most first round prospects over the last 5-7 years. Mendoza’s 3.5% is the highest for a first round pick since Anthony Richardson, and just the sixth TWP of 3% or higher out of the 18 first round QBs since 2021. TWP isn’t as sticky as P2S rate and we’ve seen guys cut down turnovers in more structured situations in the league (think Texas Tech Pat Mahomes vs NFL Mahomes), but I still don’t think the combo of high turnovers+high sacks is a great sign for a guy who, again, isn’t consistently generating explosives with them. Mendoza had an interception rate of 1.7% from clean pockets in college, again second only to Anthony Richardson among first round QBs since 2020. Not all of his recklessness can be blamed on the poor supporting cast he had at Cal.

The main reason I fear Mendoza won’t generate much in the way of explosives in the league is that his deep attempt % is very low for a first round prospect:

This has proven almost as sticky in my research as pressure to sack rate. Guys who don’t push the ball downfield consistently in college rarely find more courage in the NFL where windows close faster, coverages are more complex, and wide receivers rarely gain clear separation. Marcus Mariota is the only one of the passers on that list to have an above average NFL yards per completion average in his career. It’s not a super promising combination with a guy who will likely lose yards to sacks and commit his fair share of turnovers. The comp again that comes to mind is Daniel Jones: big, strong, accurate underneath, athletic—but not particularly dynamic.

Now, there are some things that are very strong about Mendoza. He’s very good and accurate on short throws. While that sounds like damning with faint praise, I assure you it’s not. Short passing success actually is one of the best predictors of NFL success in a league where the quick passing game has become so predominant. Mendoza’s 81.3% completion rate on 0-9 air yard throws in college is second only to Joe Burrow among 1^st round prospects with at least 300 short passing attempts since the 2015 draft.

Another thing I like to look at is a quarterback’s clean pocket numbers, since it can help to filter out some noise caused by bad situations (again, Mahomes at Texas Tech). Mendoza’s closest comp in clean pocket situations is fairly encouraging as well given that he’s also going to be the point man in a Shanahan system under Klint Kubiak:

A Brock Purdy variant that’s 6’5” and has a rocket arm sounds pretty good, although Purdy was also quite hard to sack (12.9% P2S rate vs 21.1 for Mendoza) and that has been a large component of his NFL success. Purdy also loved attacking the intermediate and deep middle of the field in college, with almost 24% of his non-screen pass attempts going between the numbers 10+ yards downfield. He graded out very well in the department as well, with an 88.1 career PFF grade on those throws. Mendoza attacked the MOF at a slightly below-average rate of 21.2%, and more concerningly his 78.7 grade on those throws is the 4^th-lowest of any 1st round QB since 2015, above only Trey Lance, Dwayne Haskins, and (again) Daniel Jones. He may not see as neat of a transition to the NFL as Purdy did, since Purdy’s love of digs and crossers etc fit the Shanahan offense like a glove, and Mendoza may need more time to get comfortable testing those windows in the pros.

In conclusion, Fernando Mendoza is a land of contrasts. Yes, he’s accurate and efficient in quick game, like the Goff and Matt Ryan comps indicate (that’s good) but he’s also a bit more reckless with the football and more likely to take sacks than that archetype (that’s bad). He’s also more capable of creating with his legs than those guys (that’s good). Unfortunately he’s also less likely to quickly acclimate to working the middle of the field in the passing game than them (that’s bad). He’s got way more arm strength than them (he comes with a free frogurt!), but his passing profile indicates he’s a bit more conservative with that big arm than he should be (the frogurt is also cursed). Ultimately I think Mendoza falls solidly in the middle of the pack as far as recent first round quarterback prospects go, and while there’s potential there I think the dominant narrative that he’s some kind of super processor and genius who can hit the ground running as a Goff-style pocket operator is unfair to him. I’d expect he’ll need a bit of time to become whatever it is he’s going to be.

When you’re losing in the fourth quarter of a football game you throw the ball, right? I think that’s what we all expect. Nobody loses more than rookie quarterbacks, either. Out of 38 rookie quarterbacks to start at least seven games since 2015, just nine of them have had winning records. What this means is that rookie quarterbacks usually spend their fourth quarters chucking the ball over and over while trailing in the majority of their games. The average rookie quarterback throws around 30% of their passes in the 4th quarter. Exclude those with winning records and that rises to almost 32%. Those rookie quarterbacks average 10.5 pass attempts in the 4^th as they attempt to will their team to victory.

Except Jaxson Dart, that is.

Dart went 4-8 as a starter this season. He lost seven starts in a row at one point. Despite this, he threw an average of just seven pass attempts in the fourth quarter. The % of his pass attempts that came in the 4^th was also the second-lowest of any rookie QB on a losing team over the last decade. The Giants ranked 26^th in the NFL in Pass Rate Over Expectation, and almost all of the teams that ranked below them were playoff teams or teams that ranked well ahead of them in rushing success rate. They were not running the ball more than expected because they were particularly effective at it or nursing leads. The Giants did not let Jaxson Dart throw the ball very often in the situation where most teams ask their rookie quarterbacks to throw the ball the most. Why do we think that is, and does it tell us anything about his future?

I have spent a lot of time lately bemoaning the rise of what I call “Gremlin Rules Quarterbacks.” If you’re young and unaware of the movie Gremlins the titular monsters start out as adorable little creatures called Mogwai who will transform into monsters called Gremlins if you do not follow very precise rules for their care. I think a lot of young quarterbacks nowadays are Mogwai. They operate just fine if you can keep them in a nice, neutral game script and let them run a mix of play-action passes, RPOs, designed QB runs, and screens. As long as you never feed them after midnight (ask them to throw in situations where the defense knows they have to throw the ball) things look just fine. Break the rules and you get a horrible gremlin creature that ruins everything.

Jaxson Dart was tough for me to evaluate coming out of college because no offense in history is more Gremlin-oriented than Ole Miss. He ran just a handful of concepts, often limited to one read or one side of the field, that Ole Miss repackaged in order to run them repeatedly. He was featured heavily as a runner, averaging over 40 yards per game on the ground.* Ole Miss rarely asked Dart to do anything resembling a comprehensive NFL dropback passing game and it made projecting his performance in the NFL extremely difficult.

Now a year into his career I still don’t think we really have any idea if Jaxson Dart can run an actual NFL passing game. The Giants mostly let Dart throw only in scripted situations where they could lean on RPOs, screens, or the threat of designed QB runs to keep defenses from teeing off on him. Almost 25% of his pass attempts were either RPOs or Screens, 8^th-most in the NFL, and 20% of his passing yardage came from those plays. The Giants were great when keeping defenses off-balance like this, ranking 9^th in the NFL in dropback EPA in non-expected pass situations, but they sank to 19^th in dropback EPA in expected pass situations. That EPA differential between non-expected and expected pass situations ranked 26^th in the NFL.

When Dart was on script and comfortable the results were great, as evidenced by how well he performed in the 1^st quarter. Dart’s 111.7 passer rating in the opening period ranked 7^th out of 47 quarterbacks this year with at least 20 1^st quarter pass attempts, and his 1^st quarter ANY/A of 7.27 ranked 10^th. By the 4^th quarter, however, Dart’s passer rating plummeted to 73.9, which ranked 47^th out of 56 QBs with at least 20 4^th quarter attempts, and his ANY/A fell to 4.72, good for 42^nd.

His rushing totals also declined, with team’s mostly wising up to the designed QB run concepts the Giants used early in games. Dart rushed for 115 yards on 12 1^st quarter attempts (9.6 yards per carry), with almost 60% of those carries going for first downs. In the 4^th quarter he managed just 50 yards rushing on 25 carries (2.0 YPC), with just 40% of those runs moving the chains. In pretty much every measurable way Dart’s production declined precipitously late in games and when defenses knew he had to throw, which is almost certainly why the Giants did their best to avoid those situations entirely,

Now, rookies are allowed to suck. It’s not usually a surprise when a rookie quarterback struggles at basically anything because rookie years are chaotic and noisy and often mean little in the grand scheme of things. I’m sure Giants fans would (correctly) note that Dart’s receivers were not particularly great. I’m not here to slam Dart for not being a particularly great passer, but I’m more concerned with the very weird way he was utilized and how the disparity between his early game success and late game struggles compares even to other rookies.

Dart’s 37.8 point difference between his 1st and 4th quarter passer rating is the fourth-worst of any rookie with at least seven games started since 2015, and the company he’s in isn’t hugely encouraging. Obviously Lawrence and Herbert are quality starters (is that obvious? I hope that’s obvious) but the rest is not what you want.

Passer rating is a somewhat wonky stat that doesn’t account for sacks and can often reward checkdown merchants so if that’s not convincing evidence that this might be a problem I understand, which is why I also pulled data for ANY/A and I can’t say it looks much better for Dart there:

Again, most of the same names and the ones from prior years are not encouraging. At least Dart can take solace in this being a common problem amongst 2025 rookies, and perhaps that itself means the environment for rookie quarterbacks this year was more arduous than in recent years. Regardless, Dart’s struggles beyond the opening game-script can’t be solely written off as normal rookie growing pains when the disparity is greater than it is for most rookies.

It was also a problem for Dart in college, as Yahoo! Sports’ Nate Tice noted in his pre-draft profile :

I agree with Tice’s assessment and I believe the data from his rookie year does as well. When the opening script ran out and Dart was uncomfortable with what he saw his first instinct was to drop his eyes and run. Dart bailed from a clean pocket on 9.7% of his dropbacks, the highest rate in the NFL, and well over double the league average of 4.1%. Even in the current golden age of mobile quarterbacks that is an exceptionally high bail rate. Amongst the 23 starting quarterbacks who left the pocket on at least 20% of their overall dropbacks the average bail rate from a clean pocket is still only 5.3%. The extent to which Dart abandons clean pockets and is eager to run is concerning, even when when his poor process occasionally works out.

Dart’s discomfort in the pocket and overall skittishness combined for one of the more dubious records of the last 20 years. Since their initial season in 2006, Pro Football Focus has tracked what they call “Quarterback-Responsible Pressure” where they determine, based either on the quarterback running himself into trouble or taking too long to get rid of the ball when they had options to get rid of it earlier in the down, what % of a quarterback’s pressured dropbacks and sacks are their own fault. Per PFF the average quarterback was responsible for around 15% of their own pressures and around 30% of their own sacks in 2025. Jaxson Dart was credited with at least some responsibility on a simply staggering 39.1% of his own pressures, and was blamed for a whopping 68.6% of his own sacks. Dart was credited with 24 of his 35 sacks on the season, as his unfairly maligned offensive line actually ranked 10^th in PFF pass block grade and 11^th in ESPN’s Pass Block Win Rate. Both Dart’s QB Responsible Pressure Rate and his sack total were records since PFF began tracking.

In Dart’s defense, plenty of great QBs have ranked fairly high in QB-responsible pressures because they hang onto the ball long enough to make plays downfield. Lamar Jackson has made a living near the top of that particular leaderboard. Still, Dart’s 39.1% is almost six percent higher than the next-highest mark since 2006, Lamar’s 33.9% in 2022, and Lamar was much better at avoiding sacks on those pressures. Dart essentially turned 18.8% of his pressured dropbacks this year into a sack of his own making, while Lamar in 2022 only turned 11.1% of his pressures into a QB-responsible sack. The previous record holder for QB-responsible sacks in a season, rookie Kyler Murray, caused 23 sacks on 162 total pressured dropbacks vs Dart’s 24 on just 128. Dart’s propensity for getting into trouble entirely of his own making is by far his most worrying trait, and the fact that he does it to an extreme we’ve never seen before makes it hard to determine if this flaw is correctable.

Given Dart’s struggles late in games and expected pass situations, and his predilection for creating his own sack trouble it’s hardly surprising then that the Giants ultimately did their best to limit his passing attempts overall. Out of 53 rookie quarterbacks to start at least 12 games as a rookie since 1998 Dart finished 49^th in total pass attempts. Despite his respectable finish in overall EPA per play for a rookie (19^th per Sumer Sports, 17^th in ESPN’s QBR) he finished 21^st in the overall “play” part of the “per play” calculation. Both ESPN and Sumer had him 29^th in Pass EPA, with the majority of his value coming from his legs. Like Jayden Daniels before him he had a productive season by rookie standards, but the question of whether that production is sustainable and a solid foundation for further development is a major question.

Now, while I just went on about Daniels and my skepticism that he can change his reckless scrambling ways, I don’t think Dart is necessarily doomed yet. While things like scramble rates and pressure-to-sack rate tend to stabilize fairly early in a quarterback’s career, rookie campaigns are often noisy and misleading as I’ve said. Dart was not a particularly egregious scrambler in college, with a scramble rate of 7.7% that isn’t that far off from the average of 6.4% for all 1^st/2^nd Round QBs since 2014. His P2S rate of 15.1% was actually a tick better than average, even. We’ve seen rookies scramble and take more sacks than they did in college before adjusting to the speed of the NFL game and looking more like themselves in year two, with guys like Caleb Williams and Kyler Murray being notable examples. If Dart can revert back to form early in his sophomore year then things might be fine.

Dart’s college numbers may have been misleading, though. As Tice noted in his pre-draft profile, Dart often looked like two different quarterbacks in the same game as defenses adjusted to Ole Miss’ simplistic scheme. If rookie Dart’s discomfort and panic in the pocket as a rookie was just an extension of second-half Dart in college, and both are the product of a poor processor who drops his eyes and runs when he doesn’t get what he’s expecting post-snap, then he may struggle as a new Giants coaching staff attempts to make him run a more comprehensive passing attack in year two.

To close I wanted to share a comparison between Dart and two other quarterbacks who had unusually low passing volume as rookies. All three of these guys started 12 games on bad teams that did their best to avoid throwing the ball. I think they offer a very nice Best Case/Worst Case path for Dart going forward:

In Maye’s case I suspect the low volume had more to do with the Patriots abysmal pass protection than anything (the 2024 Patriots were 31st in both PFF Pass Block Grade and ESPN’s Pass Block Win Rate). While Maye’s overall attempts were low the Pats nonetheless didn’t go as dramatically out of their way to avoid passing, ranking 20^th in PROE vs 26^th for Dart and the Giants this year. Maye also threw 33% of his pass attempts in the 4^th quarter vs 24.8% for Dart, and did not see dramatic differences in his 1^st and 4^th quarter production. Maye was also much more consistent on a per-down basis, with a 46.0% success rate to Dart’s 41.7%. I would argue based on the numbers and my own opinion of the film** that Maye’s numbers were more about a Patriots team trying to protect him from a poor supporting cast than his own issues. Nonetheless, if you want to believe that overall numbers matter more than the situational splits I’ve been looking at be my guest and assume that Jaxson Dart is the next Drake Maye. There’s no law against this, Giants fans, go nuts.

Trubisky has a bit more in common with Dart, I’d say. The Bears had a perfectly average offensive line in 2017, ranking 18^th in pass block grade, but Trubisky still managed to get himself into a fair bit of sack trouble and often looked nervous in the pocket when his first read wasn’t available. Trubisky experienced a similar drop-off in production after the opening game script to Dart, and struggled mightily at the end of games in obvious passing situations. Dart was certainly more productive than Trubisky overall and especially as a runner, but he is a cautionary tale that it might mean something if a coaching staff insists on keeping a rookie quarterback on a leash even when it would seemingly benefit the team to air things out.

I’m sure it’s probably fine, though. I’m sure he’s not Mitch Trubisky for the TikTok Era, and even if he was, what are the Giants gonna do? Turn him over to Matt Nagy to develop? I mean, come on, that’d be ridiculous.

*I use PFF rushing totals for college quarterbacks because the NCAA stubbornly insists on counting sack yardage as lost rushing yards in the year 2026.

**But nobody cares about my opinion from watching film because I’m just some guy, so I cite numbers to back up my argument, and then people say I don’t watch the games because I cite a lot of stats. It’s fun to talk ball on the world wide web.

Bo Nix is fascinating to me. Let’s look at quarterbacks this century to throw at least 1000 NFL passes with a career yards per pass attempt of 6.5 or worse:

It’s not a pretty list. It’s loaded with career backups, horrific busts, and some of the most boring game managers you can possibly remember in the twilight of their careers. I’d love to say this wraps up my Bo Nix argument nicely, but you kids know how much I love Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt, and just look at Bo hanging out well at the top there. We have not seen anyone else this century perform so perfectly average while gaining so few yards per pass attempt. In 2024 the average NFL ANY/A was 6.13 yards. Bo was at 6.12. In 2025 the average ANY/A was 6.04 yards. Bo was at 6.02. Two years in and he’s performed as the very model of a modern major median quarterback, despite ranking 26^th in both regular yards per attempt and yards per completion in that time. Heck, among all 222 quarterbacks with at least 1,000 career pass attempts since the NFL merger in 1970 Bo’s career 10.1 yards per pass completion ranks 221^st.

Despite his anemic production on a per-pass basis, Nix gets results. In addition to ranking 17^th overall in ANY/A since entering the league he’s also finished 15^th and 14^th in SumerSports’ EPA per Play in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The Broncos have won 25 games with him as their starting quarterback. While their defense has been their stronger unit, the Broncos offense hasn’t exactly slouched, finishing 10^th in points and 19^th in yards in 2024 and 14^th in points and 10^th in yards in 2025. It’s genuinely baffling how he’s managed to do this.

The first guess would be “hey, he’s probably super accurate!” But no! He’s finished 19^th in both of his first two seasons in adjusted completion percentage. This isn’t Minnesota Sam Bradford, with his damn near 50% success rate and 71.6% completion rate while averaging just 9.8 yards per completion. However abhorrent I find the tenets of that particular approach to quarterbacking at least it’s an ethos. Bo Nix somehow combines below average accuracy and historically low yards per attempt/completions and spits out average or better results.

Maybe it’s his legs? You’d think, but Nix was only 10^th in rushing yards among QBs this year despite the 4^th-most rushing attempts. He’s not a majorly productive runner, either.

No, Bo Nix isn’t good at doing things so much as he is very good at not doing things. What Bo Nix doesn’t do is take sacks or throw (that many) interceptions. Among 68 quarterbacks who’ve thrown at least 600 passes in their first two seasons since 1998 Bo Nix has the 4^th-lowest sack rate, at 3.76%, and the 7^th-lowest interception % at 2.0%. Bo Nix doesn’t do the two worst things a quarterback can do very often, and he avoids doing them so well he’s managed to back his way to average quarterbacking not from producing good plays but avoiding bad ones. Nix lost the least amount of EPA this season on sacks and lost the 8^th-least amount of EPA on interceptions. That was just enough to get him to near league-average as a passer in terms of ANY/A and combined with the timely nature of scrambling (almost 30% of his scrambles went for 1^st downs or touchdowns) boosted him just above-average overall in terms of EPA.

Now that we’ve figured out how Bo has managed this so far the next question is A) can he ever do more than this? and B) if not, can he keep this up anyway?

For the first question I’m going to guess no. The reason for this is pretty simple. If Bo Nix was going to take a substantial leap in his pro career there’d have probably been signs of it this year. While quarterbacks don’t have to be finished products in year two of their careers, throughout history year two has been the most significant year in terms of young quarterbacks showing if they are on an upward trajectory or not. Below are Nix’s stats in year one and year two in various categories, with rankings in parentheses. You can see Nix at best stayed mostly the same this year, with minor decreases in some categories:

Out of 56 1^st round picks at quarterback who threw at least 200 passes as rookies, 36 of them improved their ANY/A+ (ANY/A relative to league average) from year one to year two. The 20 that did not broadly fall into four camps: busts (Joey Harrington, Patrick Ramsey, things of that nature), guys with rookie years so great that a fall in year two was almost guaranteed anyway (CJ Stroud, Jayden Daniels), the guy who was kinda both of those things (RG3), and then Teddy Bridgewater and Bo Nix hanging out in the “guys who were pretty okay as rookies and just kind of stayed there” category. Basically none of these players, good or bad, went on to show any great leap in year three. Most of them played the best football of their careers as rookies. Bo Nix seems extremely unlikely to experience a historical outlier of a third year breakout, and that’s before you get into him being basically the oldest and most-experienced of all of these quarterbacks when he entered the draft.

None of this is particularly surprising when I revisit what I felt about Bo Nix pre-draft and what concerns I had about his college tape and production. Bo Nix had the lowest ADOT (8.1) of any 1^st round quarterback taken since at least 2014, so it shouldn’t be shocking that he’s proven to be a conservative passer in the NFL, although Broncos fans often object to this characterization of Nix as a guy who throws primarily short passes, noting for example that he has the most 20+ air yard touchdown passes in the NFL since entering the league. It’s true Nix does throw deep a fair bit, with his 159 deep attempts since the start of 2024 ranking 3^rd in the NFL, but he’s also completed just a league average 40% of those throws, and the kind of deep throws he attempts also matters.

Nix is averse to the middle of the field, targeting between the numbers 10+ yards down the field on just 8.8% of his attempts in 2025. That attempt % was 41^st in the league, ahead of only Justin Fields and Kyler Murray among “starting” quarterbacks. Nix takes largely safe and often inefficient deep throws down the sidelines where either his guy or nobody (usually nobody) can get it. The deep digs and crossers and posts where the top-tier passing attacks in the league make their money are not on the menu in Denver. Nix also ranked 36^th in the NFL in Intermediate (10-19 air yards) Attempt % at just 16.6%. So his overall % of pass attempts traveling 10+ yards is just 29%, good for 35^th out of 43 QBs with at least 150 pass attempts this season.

Again, this is not surprising. In college Nix had the 3^rd-lowest % of 10+ air yard attempts of any first round pick since 2014, while ranking 38/43 1^st Round QBs in INT/Deep MOF attempt % and 32^nd in that group in terms of completion % on those throws. He has never liked working intermediate passes or between the hashmarks, and considering he had over 2,000 dropbacks in college and now has over 1,400 in the NFL this is perhaps the most fully-cooked second year quarterback in history. We can almost certainly predict these traits aren’t likely to change, but if you don’t believe me let’s go back to the history books.

As I noted last week in my Jayden Daniels article we have 20 years of ADOT data showing that quarterbacks almost never meaningfully change their ADOT in years 3-4 from where they were in year two. It is very unlikely Bo Nix will meaningfully change where and when he chooses to throw downfield. This is also borne out in the history of low Y/A quarterbacks. Out of 20 1^st round quarterbacks who threw for 6.5 or fewer Y/A in their second seasons since 1998, not a single one of them broke the 7 Y/A mark in year three. The odds of Bo Nix being the first to make a massive leap in production downfield while also being among the oldest and most experienced second year quarterbacks ever seem very low to me.

So if Bo Nix can’t meaningfully improve, can he at least stay where he is as a basically league-average quarterback? That’s not nothing, right? Quality quarterback play is hard, the Broncos win a lot of games with this version of Nix, maybe they can squeeze a couple more years out of this version of him and sneak in a ring somewhere in there. I can’t say that’s not possible, heck I’ve already admitted to underrating the possibility he could do what he’s done so far, but still, I remain skeptical going forward.

One reason I am skeptical is that Sean Payton has already pulled every single trick in the books to maximize what Bo Nix is. The Broncos called RPOs on 13.4% of Nix’s dropbacks, 6^th-most in the league, and ranked second in total RPO plays. Nix also led the NFL with over 100 screen dropbacks and his screen dropback % ranked 3^rd in the league. 11.7% of Nix’s dropbacks were designed bootlegs or rolls, moving him outside the pocket to simplify his reads and cut the field in half. That % also led the NFL and was well above the league average of 7%. Leading the NFL in any one of these things isn’t inherently bad (Pat Mahomes throws a lot of RPOs, Matt Stafford rolls out a lot, etc) but leading the NFL in basically all of them paints a pretty clear picture of a quarterback who is not asked to run a comprehensive dropback game, make complicated reads, or throw to dangerous areas of the field very often. It is hard to imagine how new playcaller Davis Webb can find a way to mash even more easy buttons than the Hall of Famer Payton was already mashing for Nix.

Before anyone counters that this is “just how Sean Payton likes to run an offense” because Drew Brees also threw short in New Orleans I’m just going to insert this graphic here comparing Payton’s last four starting quarterbacks of note:

Yes, 41-year old Brees with a shoulder filled with sawdust threw short a lot in his final years in New Orleans. He was nowhere near as reliant on screens or RPOs as Nix, nor did he avoid the intermediate/deep middle of the field as much. Even Taysom Hill was less reliant on throws behind the LOS and RPOs than Nix. Nix’s usage (and production) is far more reminiscent of Russell Wilson, who was considered such a poor fit for Payton and so antithetical to how Payton wanted to run his offense that they ate all of that dead cap money just to get rid of him and draft Nix in the first place. I do not believe this is how Payton wants to use his quarterback. I believe this is how he needs to use his quarterback to hide his deficiencies.

Nix is walking quite a tight rope as it is. If he’d lost just 50 more yards in sacks, less than three more yards per game, that would have been enough to drop him from 21st in ANY/A to 26th. He stands right on the edge of the cliff between an average passer and a bottom-tier one. There’s also reason to believe such a drop is possible, even likely.

Yes, Nix has an excellent pressure-to-sack rate. At the same time he’s also had the benefit of playing with an OL that has been PFF’s top graded pass blocking unit in each of his first two seasons. Despite that, Nix still creates some of his own problems. PFF tracks pressures where they deem the quarterback at least partially responsible for getting himself into trouble as well as sacks that they attribute to the quarterback’s responsibility. Nix led the NFL in QB-responsible pressure % at 24.2% last year and was 9^th at 20% this season. He was credited with responsibility for 11 of his 22 sacks on the year, and his 50% QB-responsible sack rate was 3^rd-highest in the league. He was also responsible for 53% of his sacks as a rookie. No team since PFF began grading has ever led the NFL in pass block grade for three seasons in a row, so the odds the Broncos pass-protection unit falls off a tad leading to a bit more sack trouble for Nix seem high. He’ll likely never be bad at taking sacks, but even a minor drop from “elite sack avoidance” to “very good sack avoidance” could be enough to turn Nix from an average quarterback into a pumpkin.

Should Nix decline, even slightly, that may be enough to spell disaster for Denver. For all the attention given to the Chicago Bears and their late-game heroics this year, the Bears were a legitimate top 8-10 offense in yards, points, success rate, and EPA/play and ended the year just 7-4 in one-score games, the usual harbinger of luck and likely regression. The Broncos were 15^th in EPA/play, 19^th in success rate, 14^th in scoring, and 16^th in yards per play despite their 10^th overall ranking in yards. Their offense straddled the same barely-average line as its quarterback in most respects. This meant despite one of the league’s best defenses they eked out a league-leading 11-2 record in one-score games.

In the end we’re two years into the Bo Nix experiment and he mostly remains the same surprisingly athletic, occasionally electric, but ultimately conservative passer he was in college. To his credit I underestimated how well that skill set would translate to the NFL. I did not think the Broncos could get an entire productive season out of a player whose main attributes are avoiding negative plays rather than generating positive ones, let alone two. Nonetheless, if I was too low on Nix’s floor I don’t think I’m wrong about his ceiling. I’d bet he and the Broncos have already hit it, and the decline toward sea level begins next year in the Mile High City.

I have never seen the same Jayden Daniels as many members of the NFL community. When he began climbing up draft boards a few years ago, surpassing Drake Maye (a player I considered to be a vastly superior prospect in terms of age, frame, and analytics), I struggled to find evidence for this Lamar Jackson clone that people kept describing. Lamar Jackson has always been underrated as a pocket passer and for his creativity throwing the ball on the run as opposed to just scrambling. Lamar’s operation of a pro-style offense under Bobby Petrino and his willingness to aggressively attack downfield and over the middle led to overblown accuracy concerns in the draft among people who can’t look beyond completion %. Daniels was an overly conservative passer who rarely threw the ball outside of ideal circumstances and used his legs as a crutch. I was quite adamant the Jayden Daniels narrative was incorrect, and that Washington was making a mistake.

Of course that looked foolish, at first, as Daniels had “The Greatest Rookie Year Ever^TM”. The Commanders fans were quick to let me hear it, and I can’t say I blame them. Rookie years often lie, however, a lesson that the NFL media ecosphere refuses to learn no matter how many times guys like Mac Jones, RG3, or Baker Mayfield struggle to recapture their rookie success in year two. Now that Daniels’ injury-riddled sophomore season has taken some of the shine away from him perhaps we can discuss him honestly again. In this article we’re going to revisit what I said about Daniels pre-draft, how those concerns were apparent even in his rookie year, how they spoiled his follow-up season, and most importantly whether he can change his ways to protect himself going forward as the Washington media insists.

I had two main concerns about Jayden Daniels coming out of college: his caution as a passer and his recklessness as a runner.

The first was a surprise to most people. Daniels’ 2023 Heisman campaign was one for the ages and he led the nation in explosive plays. His deep ball completion % of 63% led the country as well. Washington was enamored, with their basketball-oriented ownership group comparing Daniels’ deadly accuracy downfield with Steph Curry’s 3 point shot.

Deep ball completion % is highly-misleading, however. Any quarterback playing with Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas Jr. at wide receiver should have success throwing to those guys downfield against college secondaries. Plenty of college passers were accurate deep passers who proved to be incapable of threatening NFL defenses down the field. Mac Jones and Bailey Zappe rank as two of the ten most-accurate deep passers in college since 2014, for example.

Daniels’ success throwing downfield in 2023 hid the fact that A) his career deep completion % in college was still just an average 45.3% and B) he didn’t go deep very often at all. Daniels for his career threw deep on only 13.9% of his pass attempts. Among 35 1^st round quarterbacks between 2015-2024 that ranked 29^th, and the names below him (Mac Jones, Bo Nix, Josh Rosen, Bryce Young, Dwayne Haskins, Daniel Jones) hardly inspired confidence. Even in that final Heisman season, with Nabers and BTJ on hand, Daniels ranked 61^st in the nation in deep attempt percentage. Quarterbacks who only attempt deep passes when it is “safe” to do so will generally rank higher in accuracy metrics because it’s much easier to deliver an accurate football to a wide receiver with clear separation, but they’re also unlikely to throw deep very often in the NFL where the picture is rarely so clear and taking risks is necessary to generate explosives. I did not believe that Daniels would be the next Lamar Jackson (who went deep over 20% of the time in college) because I simply didn’t think he had the stomach for it.

Were I not already worried about Daniels’ risk appetite with his arm, I’d have been terrified simply because of how often that turned into a much more reckless approach with his legs. Daniels scrambled on 14% of his college dropbacks, the second-highest total of any drafted quarterback between 2014-2024. His clean pocket scramble rate, meaning how often he took off running despite no pressure from the defense, was also second-highest at 9.4%. On pressured dropbacks Daniels threw the ball only 50.6% of the time and either scrambled or took a sack on the other half. This was by far the lowest % of any 1^st-round pick, and the closest comparisons of Trey Lance (55%) and Justin Fields (57%) were not encouraging. We have never seen a successful NFL quarterback willing to take off at (or before) the first sign of trouble like this. Given Daniels’ slight frame I was quite adamant this was a fatal combination for a quarterback prospect.

Of course, for one year everything worked out splendidly. Daniels had, again, The Greatest Rookie Year Ever^TM. But the red flags I identified in the pre-draft process were still there if one wanted to look under the hood. The argument for Daniels as the best rookie ever hinged mostly on his EPA. EPA, however, is far better explaining what has already happened than predicting what will happen going forward. Daniels finished 4^th in ESPN’s Total QBR in 2024, an EPA-derived metric. That’s good! However, 42.9% of Daniels’ total EPA per ESPN came from running the ball. Since QBR began in 2006, only six quarterbacks had ever finished in the top 10 in QBR with over 40% of their EPA coming from rushing vs. passing. Only one, Cam Newton, had ever managed to repeat that feat. It is historically not very sustainable for a quarterback to generate that much of their production with their legs.

As for my concerns about Daniels and his willingness to push the ball downfield, they proved well-founded. Daniels finished the 2024 season ranked 31^st in deep attempt %. His overall ADOT of 7.7 ranked 27th in the NFL. The Commanders offense, despite all of its success, was only 13^th in explosive play rate, with most of those coming on the ground. In lieu of the explosive 3-point shooting contest that Washington expected they got an offense built entirely around layups as Daniels completed 78% of his 0-9 yard throws (and attempted the 8^th-most such throws in the league) and 92% of his throws behind the LOS (3^rd-most attempts). 42% of Daniels’ total yards in 2024 came from screens, RPOs, and rushing, the most of any quarterback in the league. Fortunately his high completion rate, his low turnover-worthy play rate, and the timeliness of his scrambles meant Washington converted the highest % of their fourth down tries in NFL History.

I emphasized the timeliness of Daniels’ scrambles there because it’s important to note he’s not actually a historically great scrambler. While his 87 scrambles in 2024 were the most since PFF began tracking scrambles in 2006, his 669 scramble yards were third behind Justin Fields in 2022 and Michael Vick in 2006 (who had 70 and 73 scramble attempts, respectively). So far in his career Daniels has averaged 7.3 yards per scramble, well behind the marks set by Vick (9.7), Lamar Jackson (8.2), or even Fields (8.8). While a seven yard scramble on 3rd and 6 is a tremendously valuable play according to EPA, a seven yard scramble on 3rd and 8 is a massive loser. What actually tends to remain more stable, however, is the seven yards regardless of the situation. Daniels’ yards per scramble dropped from 7.7 in 2024 to 6.5 in 2025, and the % of his rushing attempts that went for 1^st downs dropped from 35% to 24% accordingly. The predictive value of his “clutch” scrambles in 2024 proved to be very little.

Daniels’ over-reliance on scrambling, his emphasis on hitting a crazy number of short passes rather than generating explosives on longer throws, and Washington’s reliance on fourth down magic to sustain drives all meant that regression was inevitable in 2025, which obviously occurred, but that is actually understating the issue. The truth is that Daniels’ great rookie season was mostly just two great months. For eight games in September and October of 2024 Daniels ran wild, but his success was fueled largely by the innovation of offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury in the screen and quick passing game. Over that eight game stretch Daniels ranked 4^th in the NFL in yards per attempt on throws behind the line of scrimmage, at 6.8 Y/A. He ranked 10^th in Y/A on throws 0-9 yards downfield while completing nearly 80% of them, well above his college mark of 74.8%. Kingsbury scripted up tons of short yet productive throws for his rookie quarterback, and Daniels dominated on easy mode. Through those eight games he averaged 8.4 Y/A and a staggering 10.3 adjusted net yards per attempt.

Daniels’ high completion % as a rookie was somewhat of an illusion because of this high volume of short, easy throws, but also because it’s very hard to throw under pressure and he largely just ducked that entirely. The average NFL passer completes 49% of their pressured throws. Daniels was no better than average in that department, either, completing 49% of his pressured throws as a rookie. But where the average NFL quarterback attempts to throw the ball on 71% of their pressured dropbacks, Daniels as a rookie threw on just 57% of his. It’s very easy to look accurate if you simply drop the hardest throws, deep passes and passes under pressure, from your list of options.

Daniels ran out of easy throws when the calendar rolled over to November. Over the last nine games of the 2024 regular season he ranked 25^th in Y/A on throws behind the LOS and 22^nd in Y/A on 0-9 yard throws. His overall performance as a passer plummeted accordingly without that easy production. His overall Y/A dropped to just 6.7 and his ANY/A to a pedestrian 5.70. That presaged his production in 2025, where he ranked 27^th in the NFL at 6.7 Y/A again and 27^th in ANY/A at 5.86. This means for 16 games now Daniels has produced like a bottom-tier NFL passer, averaging only 193 passing yards per game with an ANY/A of 5.76. The onus is quickly going to be on the third-year quarterback to prove the first two months of his rookie year was the real guy and not the aberration, because so far two-thirds of his career looks like a lot like the guy who wasn’t considered a 1^st round prospect at all before 2023, let alone a top three pick.

This brings us to 2025 and the future. As noted above, Daniels regressed massively in year two. While his ADOT remained largely stable at 7.8, his production on short throws mirrored his second-half in 2024 and not his early hot streak. His completion % on 0-9 yard throws fell to 72%, more in line with his college accuracy in the quick game than the mark from his rookie year. With the Commanders struggling to stay on-schedule as well as they had the year before, Daniels faced more obvious passing situations and struggled mightily. His -0.08 EPA/play in Pure Dropback situations (no play-action or screens) ranked 33^rd in the league. His predilection for running the ball when under duress has carried over from college and we’ve seen him take an absolute beating due to the high volume of scrambles and hits on his skinny frame. Injuries limited his season to just seven games.

Now the story in Washington is that, with Kingsbury and his fondness for the QB run game (which ignores that scrambles aren’t designed plays at all, but whatever) gone, Daniels can turn over a new leaf and become a real boy at quarterback. He’s going to stay in the pocket more, work under center for the first time in his life, and become a more prolific pass-first quarterback. But is this really possible? I am…skeptical.

Through two seasons Daniels has scrambled on 12.8% of his dropbacks, the most of any quarterback since at least 2006. Most concerning is the fact that where most scramblers see their scramble rate decrease in year two as they learn to work within an NFL offense (like Josh Allen, who went from 11.9% as a rookie to 7.9% as a sophomore), Daniels scrambled more often. His overall scramble rate increased from 11.8% to 15.6% and his clean pocket scramble rate nearly doubled, from 5.5% to 10.2%, again more in line with his college mark of 9.4%. Before Daniels only 11 quarterbacks since 2006 had ever scrambled on 10% or more of their dropbacks in a season (minimum 200 dropbacks). None of those 11 ever cut their scramble rate to anything resembling league average (5.5%). Daniel Jones is closest at 6.2% but he also scrambled on exactly 10%, and also did it just once in his career. Of the six quarterbacks who were repeat offenders, like Daniels, the lowest career scramble rate is Lamar Jackson at 9.3%. The average difference between these scramblers’ highest scramble rate in a season and their career scramble rate is only 1.9%, meaning the likelihood that Daniels ever drops his scramble rate below 10% is extremely low. Considering how much his current scramble rate has impacted his health it would also seem foolish to bet he’ll be durable if he does not buck history to cut it dramatically.

Even if Daniels could cut his scramble rate, there’s the question of whether his passing production would be enough to compensate for the decline in rushing production (and the change in how defenses would approach him without fear of him taking off on any given play). As noted above we’re now 16 games into a stretch of him performing like a bottom 10 passer overall. Without his rushing production to buoy him he and the Commanders offense would likely drown. As for him improving as a passer that would likely require a more aggressive approach downfield, which is also historically rare.

Most young passers need to be coached to be less aggressive as time goes on. Coaching one to take more shots is much less common and rarely successful. Out of 40 starting quarterbacks to start at least 40 games in their first four seasons since 2006, 31 of them saw their ADOT decrease in their third and fourth seasons vs their first two. Just one saw a meaningful increase of more than a yard: Tua Tagovailoa.

The addition of Mike McDaniel and Tyreek Hill in Miami meant an unusual amount of separation downfield for the normally timid passer and he responded with an unprecedented increase in ADOT. This has proven to be illusory, however, as defenses adjusted to McDaniel’s scheme and Tyreek’s decline and Tua reverted back to ranking dead-last in the league in ADOT in 2024 and 35^th in 2025. If Washington can add a devastating deep threat and David Blough proves to be the next great scheme lord perhaps they can briefly replicate the Tua explosion for Daniels over the next few years, but Tua himself is proof that changing a passer’s actual nature and risk profile is a largely futile endeavor.

So here we are. Two years in and Jayden Daniels is in the exact dilemma that I saw coming for him pre-draft— trying to be more disciplined when he runs and learn to let loose when he throws. History says he’s unlikely to make much progress at either, so the question now is if the current version of him is good enough to justify Washington making him the second overall pick. If he can stay healthy and repeat the exact cocktail of quick-passing success and opportunistic scrambles that fueled his 2024 campaign then perhaps the answer is yes, but he’s already shown how fleeting that style of success can be.

Not all is lost, though, Commanders fans. If he can cut his scramble rate down enough to keep him healthy, even if he doesn’t make major changes as a passer, there is a comp of a 14-year NFL starter available. This man also made a habit of throwing accurate short passes (7.5 ADOT vs Daniels’ 7.7), avoiding turnovers (2.4 TWP vs Daniels’ 1.9), struggled a bit with sacks (20.4% P2S vs Daniels’ 19.4), but was opportunistic with his legs (7.1 yards per scramble vs Daniels’ 7.3). Heck, it’s even a guy you know pretty well. Of course, if he can’t stay healthy, and if the league has adjusted to his particular style of One-And-Run passing, the other comp is a guy you’re familiar with, too.

For 2025 it wasn’t a problem. The Bears finished 9th in points scored, 6th in yards, 10th in net yards per pass attempt, 10th in passing yards, 10th in passing touchdowns, 8th in EPA/play, 9th in dropback EPA. They won 12 games. Caleb individually finished 7th in passing yards and 6th in passing touchdowns. It would be hard to argue that the Bears did not have a top ten offense and a top ten passing attack regardless of Caleb’s woeful accuracy.

This isn’t as hard to reconcile as Caleb’s detractors would have you believe, because completion % has no value of its own and is one of the passing stats with the lowest correlation to wins:

The stat at the top there is Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt, my personal favorite passing metric. ANY/A adds a bonus for passing touchdowns to a quarterback’s passing yardage while subtracting a penalty for sack yardage and interceptions thrown. It’s a comprehensive metric that captures the full value of a player’s contributions on passing plays. Caleb ranked 11th in ANY/A this year, and given that ANY/A has nearly twice the correlation to wins as completion % it shouldn’t be a surprise that outweighed the 38th ranked completion % when it comes to the Bears’ success.

The angry nerds who harp on Caleb’s completion % might begrudgingly grant all of the above, but the argument as best I understand it is that the inaccuracy is real and the rest of his success is fake. Whether it was getting “lucky” on scramble throws or Ben Johnson dialing things up, for one year fate conspired to hide the reality of how bad Caleb Williams actually is, but the smoking gun of his completion % is there to tell us what he’ll be going forward.

On the one hand it’s actually easy to understand the allure of this argument. In today’s NFL a sub-60 completion % is usually a very bad sign. Just look at this list of quarterbacks since 2019 to throw 200+ passes in a season and finish below 60% completions:

Ahh!!! Scary!!! There’s a Zach Wilson on it! My God, he’s sandwiched between Nine and Mayonnaise Boy. Case closed, kid sucks.

BUT WAIT! What if we sort that list by ANY/A instead of completion %?

Huh. That’s interesting. Notice how he’s a lot…better? Than all of them? At basically everything? Most touchdowns and highest touchdown %, lowest interception rate, highest passer rating, lowest sack rate. Notably Josh Allen, the next guy down on the list, did just fine for himself the year after this and took a massive leap. Even then the difference between Caleb’s production in terms of ANY/A and Allen’s is over a full yard, which would be good for the difference between 11th and 28th in the NFL this year. Caleb doesn’t need a Josh Allen-sized leap next year to be great as he’s already on the cusp, but it’s worth noting that Allen is still the closest comp in this group because it proves not all low completion % are born from the same issues.

Most of the players on that list are inaccurate because they were slow processors. Accuracy in the NFL is more often about timing and seeing the field correctly than a player’s raw ability to put the ball where he wants. Justin Fields was one of the most accurate quarterbacks in college football history but make him read things out against NFL defenses under live fire and that elite ball-placement disappears as he throws late into coverage or takes brutal sacks due to his indecision. For these players, too, the completion % is nothing but a trailing indicator, the actual damage they do is shown in their sack rates and the interceptions they threw. Even if there weren’t All-22 analysts far better than me saying so, we could safely conclude from the data that whatever the cause of Caleb Williams’ low completion %, it is not the same as many of the players on this list.

I also don’t think it’s the same as Josh Allen, either, though I can see some similarities. Even though the Josh Allen Comp is incredibly fraught and largely used incorrectly by coping fanbases who flatly reduce the narrative to “he was bad until he wasn’t so there’s hope for my guy still,” the truth is he was an extremely talented player who showed the requisite decision-making, pocket presence, and sack-avoidance to become a top-tier quarterback even as he struggled with accuracy largely due to mechanics. Caleb certainly is also an extremely talented player who, with the lowest interception rate in history through 1,000 career pass attempts, has shown good decision-making and demonstrated elite-sack avoidance. I don’t think mechanics are primarily to blame for his inaccuracy, though. For that context we have to go back a little further in history than 2019.

Going back too far in history is always complicated when comparing quarterbacks as the passing game has changed so dramatically through the decades. When Troy Aikman drew the ire of Bears fans this year and those fans opted to compare Caleb’s box score stats with Aikman’s to make a point about how much better Caleb was I absolutely screamed “Passing stats do not work that way, good night,” in my best Morbo voice. The very reason Caleb’s completion % is drawing so much consternation is that in the context of the modern, efficiency-pilled NFL it looks significantly worse to complete only 58% of your passes than it did 20 years ago. But what if that context is changing? What if it’s changed most specifically for Caleb?

The average NFL passer is not magically more accurate than the average NFL passer of 15 years ago. What has changed for most quarterbacks is the menu of pass plays. In 2006 when PFF first began tracking NFL quarterbacks the Average Depth of Target (ADOT) for all plays was around 9.5 yards. The average completion % was 59%. In 2025 the average ADOT is 8.4 yards with an average completion % of 64.3. The quarterbacks haven’t gotten more accurate: the passes have just gotten shorter and easier to complete.

The rise of the spread offense in the NFL started when the 2007 Patriots were the first team in NFL history to take more than 50% of their snaps from shotgun during the season. Since then that style of offense has proliferated until in 2025 only 20.3% of pass attempts this year came from under center. 11 different quarterbacks this year threw screens or RPOs on at least 19% of their pass attempts as well. All of this creates an illusion that Caleb Williams is a particularly horrifically inaccurate passer in an age where many offenses are oriented on “finding a completion” above all else.

The Bears offense in 2025 was NOT an average offense, however. Williams ranked 6th in the NFL in ADOT among players with at least 300 dropbacks. He ranked 3rd in pass attempts from under center behind long-time veterans Matthew Stafford and Sam Darnold. He was 27th in the % of his pass attempts that were targeted behind the line of scrimmage. He was 23rd in the % of his pass attempts that were screens or RPOs. The offensive environment for Caleb this year resembled that of the average passer from 2010 more than 2025. Ben Johnson is part of the leading edge of offensive innovators in the NFL, and he has seen that the future of NFL offense lies more in the past with a power run game and under center play-action and deep five and seven step drop concepts working to generate explosives. No layups, only three-pointers.

If we want to find the closest comp to Caleb Williams at this stage in his development the answer is not to sort the 2025 leaderboard by completion % and make nonsensical comparisons to JJ McCarthy. It’s to ask when was the last time we saw a young, exceptionally-talented quarterback produce like a significantly above-average passer despite some accuracy issues in an offense that asked him to handle significant dropback pass volume from under center and without a ton of “easy” throws that have come to dominate most schemes since. The answer is 2013 Andrew Luck.

The comparison is actually startling. While Williams was a bit more productive overall in terms of ANY/A I’m going to give Luck a little credit here and note he was dealing with a much worse offensive line than Caleb this year. Otherwise the results are quite similar. Both quarterbacks attempted roughly 31% of their pass attempts from under center, both threw 10+ yards down the field on roughly 35% of their pass attempts. Both threw 20+ touchdowns and had 3,800+ passing yards with fewer than 10 interceptions. PFF graded the two remarkably similar and gave them the exact same Big Time Throw rate and similar Turnover Worthy Play rates. Their adjusted completion % was quite close as well. We’ve seen this exact movie before.

Now, it’s important to note that even in 2013, Andrew Luck was not particularly accurate! He was 27th in adjusted completion %. That just didn’t freak anyone out back then because a second-year quarterback was expected to be inefficient at times while handling 700 dropbacks with little-to-no training wheels. People at the time rightly focused on his overall production, which was impressive for his age and experience, and that kind of development curve was much more normal then.

They were right not to freak out, either. While Luck’s completion % only marginally improved in his third season in 2014 to 61.7%, he threw for 4,761 yards and 40 touchdowns as the Colts repeated their 11-5 record. While his 2015 and 2017 seasons were derailed by injury because Ryan Grigson is a war criminal who should be tried at The Hague, he did eventually find the balance between his explosiveness and efficiency. In his last two seasons as a starter before his premature retirement he completed 65.5% of his throws while averaging over 4,400 yards and 35 touchdowns. What Luck had shown early in his career in terms of sack avoidance and his ability to generate explosives and avoid turnovers was far more predictive of his future success than his pedestrian completion rate. It wasn’t hard in 2013 to see where Andrew Luck was headed and avoid being bogged down in an all-time “missing the forest for the trees” argument about his below-average accuracy compared to his above-average production. It shouldn’t be hard to do the same with Caleb Williams right now.

So I guess in the end, maybe those guys are right. When it comes to Caleb Williams’ success, maybe it is Luck.