Are any of these quarterbacks in the NFL Draft worth taking?
On the Purple Insider podcast former NFL scout and player personnel director Jim Monos told the story of one of his biggest scouting misses: Byron Leftwich.
Monos was a Northeast scout for the Philadelphia Eagles when he went to watch Leftwich practice at Marshall. In a downpour, Leftwich gunned passes all over the yard.
“I’m out there with an umbrella and he was just whipping the ball around in the rain and I’m like, ‘This guy!’ And we all know the story of how he played hurt. So smart, so tough, accurate passer.”
The Eagles’ scouting director Marc Ross wasn’t as sold.
“[Ross] was like, ‘Jim, I know you love this guy but he does have some issues,’” Monos said. “Slow feet. Slow release. He can’t get out of things. That’s going to be an issue in the NFL because things are happening so fast. I was like, ‘No, he’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.’ Marc proved to be right.”
The Jaguars took Leftwich seventh overall and he had some success, going 24-20 over four seasons in Jacksonville and led 10 game-winning drives in that span, but he never became a franchise QB and spent his final six seasons as a backup.
“Do you have fatal flaws?” Monos said about what he had missed with Leftwich. “Those things aren’t getting better. His feet aren’t going to get quicker, the release isn’t going to change that much.”
The following year, Monos was a big Philip Rivers believer despite criticisms about his funky release. When he was with the Buffalo Bills, Monos was high on Dak Prescott and the Bills would have taken him had the Cowboys passed. He was also a big Nathan Peterman guy.
Over the years, Monos tried to learn from his hits and misses. He learned that you can’t forget to see the forest through the trees. He decided to focus mainly on three essential parts of college prospects’ games that correlated to success: Physical ability (athleticism, arm strength), smarts, toughness.
“You don’t need to over-analyze these quarterbacks,” he said. “I don’t know how you rank those three things but if something is elite…look at Mahomes, the physical ability was — you couldn’t even believe it. Then you spend time with him, he’s crazy smart, crazy tough. Should have been the first pick in the draft. The whole NFL missed on him in college because he was a little wild in college with the way he played…find the three things, physical, smart, tough. If they’re all elite, he should be your guy.”
“I always used to tell our scouts: The more you write, the less you know,” Monos said.
This year there has been a lot written about the five quarterbacks who have a chance to be taken in the first round of the NFL Draft — Malik Willis, Matt Corral, Kenny Pickett, Desmond Ridder and Sam Howell — but nobody knows which players the league will value most.
The website Grinding The Mocks, which compiles mock drafts to project expected draft position, has Willis and Pickett in the top 15 and Corral, Ridder and Howell to land between picks 31 and 39. But even the wisdom of the mocking crowds isn’t all that accurate when it comes to QBs. Last year, Grinding The Mocks’ order projected Mac Jones as the third QB off the board. In 2018, Sam Darnold was the most mocked No. 1 overall pick, not Baker Mayfield.
It isn’t just the mock drafters who have struggled to figure out the proper order for QB prospects. The NFL’s accuracy has been far from stellar. While they got it right with No. 1 picks Kyler Murray and Joe Burrow being the best QBs coming out, the league was way off in 2017, selecting Mitch Trubisky over Patrick Mahomes and DeShaun Watson. They were just as inaccurate in 2018, picking Mayfield, Darnold and Josh Rosen way ahead of MVP Lamar Jackson. And in 2020, the Dolphins selected Tua Tagovialoa over budding superstar Justin Herbert.
Throwing a wrench in this year’s group of QB prospects is the fact that they all have the flaws that Monos mentioned.
Willis was poor throwing the ball under pressure, receiving just a 43.3 PFF grade when under duress. Pickett was a one-year wonder who held onto the ball for the second longest time per snap of any college QB. Per Football Outsiders, 36% of Corral’s throws were RPOs and when he didn’t have the schemed-up run-pass options, he completed just 55% of his throws. Howell’s numbers sunk without a great supporting cast and Ridder’s three highest graded games were versus SMU, East Carolina and Tulsa.
But parsing out which flaws are fatal and which are fixable is tough. There have been similar criticisms of quarterbacks who turned out to be good — or at least good enough to win with on a rookie contract. Patriots QB Mac Jones had a breathtaking supporting cast at Alabama and his NFL.com draft profile listed under weaknesses, “would like to see him play with more grit” and “doesn’t play with the poise of a desired NFL starter.” The NFL’s website compared him to Daniel Jones. As a rookie, he was more poised than any other rookie by a country mile and outperformed Daniel Jones’ entire career two-thirds of the way through his first year.
Superstar QB Josh Allen was given the same prospect grade by NFL.com as tight end Ian Thomas and guard Connor Williams. He was compared in his draft profile to Jake Locker and scrutinized for his having his accuracy decline when he was on the move and “spotty” ability to read the field.
That’s not all that different from what we find in Malik Willis’s profile under the weakness category: “Accuracy plummets when scrambling.”
The crazy part is that NFL.com’s nitpicks were probably right at the time. We can go through criticisms of Daniel Jones or Paxton Lynch and they’ll look a lot smarter in the light of day. Back when Monos was scouting Byron Leftwich, he overestimated the ability to overcome certain issues. Can Willis overcome the fact that 30% of pressures turned into sacks? How would anyone be able to figure that out?
Well, PFF’s Kevin Cole has tried. He found that QBs who were better under pressure in college had a better chance to be successful in the NFL, where things happen at lightning speed and QBs are often asked to ad lib. The chart below demonstrates his findings:
The issue with this year’s draft class is that all of the possible first rounders were mediocre-to-bad under pressure. Ridder had the highest grade of the group with a 63.1 (out of 100). Corral’s grade was below 40.
But by Monos’s three-category evaluation tool, there are QBs in this class with the physical ability and intangibles. Willis and Howell have monster arms and flashed plenty of toughness last year.
Ridder’s intelligence and leadership have been been repeatedly praised. NFL.com wrote: “Confidence and field command has really helped him mature at the position. He plays in rhythm and operates with consistently repeatable footwork and mechanics. He's intelligent and processes quickly, which should help him find where the football needs to go regardless of passing scheme.”
Dane Brugler of The Athletic wrote that Pickett has a “high-level awareness in almost every facet of playing the position.”
Brugler wrote of Corral: “The son of a marine, proved his toughness on each game tape … has battled through his share of off-field adversity and is better for it.”
Football Outsiders’ statistical model for projecting quarterbacks from college to the NFL doesn’t find any of the 2022 prospects as standing out above the others. However, Football Outsiders' model also spat out this stat: “There's a 28% chance that at least one of them becomes an elite starter and a 68% chance that at least one becomes an upper-tier starter.”
So there’s a seven-in-ten shot that one of these QBs is really good but we don’t know which one it will be and there isn’t a great way of figuring it out.
Does that mean it’s worth spending a pick on a quarterback?
In studying the team success of the clubs who have picked quarterbacks since the CBA created a rookie wage scale in 2011, PFF found this: “While not failsafe (nothing is), using high draft capital to acquire a quarterback in an era where the NFL is begging teams to do so has been extremely successful.”
Because of the pay gap between rookie and expensive veteran QBs, the baseline for production from the rookie QB to have team success is lower than the veteran. History has proven that starting quarterbacks like Teddy Bridgewater, Baker Mayfield, Jared Goff and Carson Wentz clearly fall below the “upper-tier starter” category, yet each led a season of at least 11 wins during their rookie QB contract.
When you look at Football Outsiders’ odds of the present prospect group becoming at very least an adequate starter, which might be all that’s needed to produce at least one highly competitive season during a rookie contract, things look a lot brighter for our much-maligned class. The FO projections give Corral and Pickett a 50% chance of being at least adequate and the rest a shade over 40%.
Being given coin-flip odds to find a quarterback who is good enough to compete when given a strong roster seems attractive, especially when strong supporting casts have pushed up the performances of QBs who have proven to be mediocre. Wentz ranked fifth by PFF in 2017, Goff eighth in 2018, Mayfield 13th in 2020. Their peak performances were not the same as Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers but they were good enough to put their teams in position to legitimately contend in the postseason.
That doesn’t mean that teams should take any old prospect. The league may have struggled to identify order but they have not missed on which QBs belong in the first round. Since Derek Carr and Jimmy Garoppolo became quality starters from the second round of the 2015 draft, Jalen Hurts is the only second-round pick to have even mild success. Though the chances of each player becoming decent are similar according to Football Outsiders, if every team passes once, it’s usually a huge blow to the odds of hitting on that QB.
The Minnesota Vikings in particular have a difficult choice when it comes to this crop of QBs. Signing Kirk Cousins to a short-term extension was a signal that they aren’t convinced Cousins will retire a Viking. But picking one this year combined with Cousins’ no-trade clause risks missing out on two years of the drafted QB’s rookie contract. Plus next year’s draft class is allegedly chock full of better prospects.
But Cousins can be moved with only an $18.7 million dead cap hit before 2023 — if he agrees to the trade, of course. And a coin flip’s chance becomes a 0% chance by waiting. And a better class might mean that there are more guys with physical ability, smarts and toughness but it doesn’t guarantee the Vikings would end up with Philip Rivers rather than Byron Leftwich, who were both drafted within three spots of each other in their respective years.
“We have information today and you watch a player and then you see in five years what they are like, those things don't always line up,” Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said at the NFL Combine. “People come through, they improve their mechanics, they get different coaching, they get in different schemes that fit their skillsets. I'm not going to sit here and stamp that this isn't a great quarterback because I see a lot of good stuff on film from these guys. We interviewed them yesterday and, man, it's incredible.”
Still the odds aren’t high of the Vikings taking a quarterback. By the mock drafts, the chances are close to zero percent. But there remains an unpredictable element of the new leadership — namely that we have no idea what they will do because this is their first season at the helm.
If they pick a QB, it might not be as much of an endorsement of any particular prospect as it is a statement on the unpredictable nature of scouting quarterbacks and the team upside of picking one who can command an offense at an average level.
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