Evaluating the draft's top quarterback prospects

Who you got: Bryce Young, CJ Stroud, Anthony Richardson, Will Levis?

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On a recent podcast, Jon Ledyard and I dug into our evaluations of the four main candidates: Bryce Young, Alabama; CJ Stroud, Ohio State; Anthony Richardson, Florida; Will Levis, Kentucky.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll write full evaluations on each. For now, here’s a brief synopsis. For a deeper dive into the rest of this year’s draft class, you can subscribe to The Read Optional — each week I’m diving deep — DEEP! — into subscriber’s questions. This week, I answer questions on the top players in the class, the mid-round sleepers, where the class looks light, the late risers, and a whole bunch more.

Now: Quarterbacks!

Bryce Young, Alabama

I’m guessing you’ve heard: Bryce Young is small. And it’s not just that he’s small height-wise, it’s that he’s slender. He looks more like a yoga instructor than a professional quarterback. For Young to be a quality NFL starter, he will have to break all of the conventions for the position.

We’ve had some short quarterbacks in recent years, but all of those players have been thicc. Russell Wilson, Tua Tagovailoa, even Baker Mayfield. They were broad athletes even though they were short.

Young is not. There is no corollary for what he will attempt to do in the NFL. Even after adding some beef ahead of the Combine (and it’s fair to wonder how much of that was water weight and how much was real weight) he will still be the lightest first-round quarterback since at least 2006, as well as one of the shortest passers drafted since the AFL-NFL merger in 1967 at 5-foot-10⅛. 

It’s not just the discussion of the size in the abstract, either. You hear that a lot: so what that’s he’s short. Who cares that he’s thin? Can he play?

It’s not just about the concern that, given his size, he might get hurt – something you can never know with any prospect. It’s the impact the size has on the makeup of the offense. At Alabama, the team had to use exaggerated drops in the deep passing game to buy Young the time to move, navigate and create throwing lanes, something that put a ton of extra pressure on the two starting tackles.

You can see the extra depth he has to sink to be given a chance to move and navigate — which puts both pressure on the tackles and line as a whole and on Young as a thrower.

Even in quick-game, the Tide had to use deep drops — deeper drops than traditional with different timing — that put extra strain on their tackles.

Those are choppy waters for a coach to navigate. They’re going to have to adapt and adjust the specifics of their concepts to work with Young. 

There is no comparison for Young. The closest thing I can come up with: Steph Curry. Young will have to redefine what it means to be a pro quarterback in 2023 the way that Curry forever altered the math of the NBA, changed what was understood of three-point ‘range’, and what is acceptable as a perimeter shoot. 

Is that possible? You bet! I’m buying all the stock.

Young is a pocket wizard. He drifts and glides and slips and slides to create space and throwing lanes unavailable to anyone this side of Patrick Mahomes. As stick-slide-climb throwers come (the essential NFL move), they don’t come more refined than Young:

He is accurate. He can create offense all by himself. He delivers under fire. He can hit every single throw. He works through traffic and cramped office space unlike any player in college or the pros. There have been some comparisons to Mahomes’ bobbing and weaving style in the pocket, but even those fall short: Young is a more sudden pocket manipulator than the bulkier, lankier Mahomes.

Good GAWD, Bryce.

There is no one like Young. And that could either be the start of something really, really exciting — revolutionary, honestly. He could serve as a reminder that sports are most fun when the conventions are broken. Or he could be a reminder that the conventions are the conventions for a reason.

CJ Stroud, Ohio State

Stroud is the from-the-pocket guru who spent the bulk of his career being dinged for playing in an offense loaded with talent. By the time things are done, when all of Stroud’s receivers at Ohio State hit the league, he will likely have played with five (!) first-round picks at receiver – and a pair of first round tackles. Separating his game from the Ohio State offense is tough. But within that structure, Stroud was bordering on perfect.

Accurate. Precise. Nimble. A good athlete. Stroud has been hit with the ‘not a playmaker’ mantra, which is online-speak for ‘not exciting enough’. You know what’s great? Throwing versus leverage; throwing receivers open; throwing where a receiver will not be collisioned, upping the odds of a completion; hitting all the easy throws, and ripping a couple of the how-the-hell-did-he-fit-that-in-there ones a game.

Stroud is the most precise thrower in this class. He is the smoothest pocket operator. He has enough speed and wiggle as a runner that he can create in the second-phase of the offense, something he was rarely asked to do at Ohio State — until his final couple of games as a starter when he embraced the jump-on-my-cape role. 

Stroud will be the #1 QB on the board for the vast majority of quarterback coaches. He’s the cleanest prospect. And talk of a lack of upside — that he doesn’t have as strong an arm as Levis or Richardson, or the wheels of Richardson, or the stop-start quicks of Young, Young’s creativity – will be overlooked for the fact that he does all of the, you know, quarterback things at the highest level possible. He is the best bucket thrower. He is the best intermediate thrower.

He threw to NFL routes, within NFL concepts, with NFL timing — the pass protection be damned.

And with his last two starts in college, he proved that the idea that he cannot create of structure, that he was being elevated only by the talent around him, was nonsense.

Anthony Richardson, Florida

Richardson is the best athlete to have ever tested at the quarterback position.  That’s not hyperbole. It’s an objective fact. There has never been a prospect so explosive. He is twitchy in everything he does, be it as a runner or thrower. As an actual quarterback? Not so much.

I find comparisons between Richardson and Cam Newton to be borderline offensive. I get it. Everyone wants to grab as much Richardson stock as possible before he hits the league. No one wants to miss on the next Patrick Mahomes. And there’s a whole online contingent that does not want to boil down the excitement around Richardson’s game solely to athletic traits because of the gross, racial overtones that have followed minority quarterbacks for generations. It’s an impulse that, I believe, is coming from a good place. And there’s some truth there: The one year explosion in college, the raw tools as a passer, the dominance as a runner.

But to compare Richardson at Florida to Newton at Auburn does a disservice to how nuanced a passer Newton was when he came into the league. Newton may have been a one-year starter at Auburn, but he had taken a ton of reps before he started: first at Flordia and then in junior college. And in that year, the greatest quarterback to have ever played in college. Not only as a runner, but as a developed passer who could hit all of the throws. Newton just played in a basic offense that lacked the systematized passing game he was asked to orchestrate in the NFL. 

Was he Payton Manning? No. Did he have more subtlety to his game as a passer than a number of scouts and outside evaluators gave him credit for (back to that racial bias component)? Absolutely. It’s kind of why Newton torched the league from the second he stepped foot in it, shattering all rookie records.

Richardson is not that far along as a consistent passer — he’s not particularly close. What he is is a bundle of tools, an athletic phenom, and a quarterback who has shown he can everything, even in the tiniest of bursts.

There’s this concept floating around that Richardson’s athleticism gives him the highest ceiling of any of the top-four QBs. That’s wrong. It’s his athleticism that provides him his flaw. At worst – in the VERY WORST CASE SCENARIO – he will be the most explosive athlete to ever play the position. In the run game, he is a cheat code. Slot him into the kind of power-spread the Eagles ran with Jalen Hurts last year and, hoo boy, good luck slowing that thing down in short-yardage situations or in the red zone.

That’s the kind of Day One install play that will be just as effective in the pros as in college. A quarterback running stretch-lead is not really about skill or will. It’s a math problem, one defenses cannot solve.

That’s the baseline: A one-of-a-kind athlete who can maul defenses on the ground via a power-spread, option-based attack. And if he can hit just enough explosives through the air, any offense will be, at worst, effective. It might not be efficient, but it would be explosive.

The ceiling would be something we haven’t seen since peak-Newton: someone who can do alllll that stuff on the ground, but who develops as both a rhythm-based passer and off-script playmaker. Those are not strengths for Richardson right now. I will dig into both when I write about Richardson in detail in the coming weeks. But in short: his lower body mechanics are a mess. At times, it looks like he’s never played football before. At times, he is using footwork that bares no relation to the passing concept he’s trying to attack.

But here’s the thing: This isn’t a raw, undercooked prospect who needs a complete overhaul. The exciting thing is that all the good, quality footwork is in there! When he’s forced to speed up his process, Richardson’s footwork isn’t just fine, it’s damn near perfect! It’s about consistency, and the knock-on effect that consistency will have on his general lower half, his mechanics as a whole, and therefore his accuracy. 

And that’s the biggest concern: it’s not just that the footwork is fractured or ugly, it’s that it leads to some of the widest misses you will ever see from a prospect. Even when Richardson completes passes, he misses. Wide-ass open receivers are forced to leap for the sun or slide on the ground just to corral a basic 10-yard comeback. 

But again: this isn’t a from-the-ground-up rebuild. The correct mechanics are in there. Often, it feels like a case of overthinking things rather than just going out there and playing. There are snapshots when Richardson is forced into being uncomfortable, when he’s pressured or blitzed, when he’s forced to speed up his process, and, hey presto, he has the ideal lower body mechanics and the accuracy flows with it. And there are flashes when you see the kind of second-reaction playmaking that only a handful of QBs have ever been able to make:

That’s the tantalizing part. Richardson is typically dubbed a ‘raw’ prospect. And that’s fair. But what’s probably more realistic is that he is oftentimes just flat-out bad. He misses basic throws, botches his mechanics, and bails on concepts before they’re allowed to develop. But in some ways that rawness is overstated, because the right-ness, all the correct stuff, is in there. If Richardson is able to find consistency with his base and how he relates his lower body to eyes, then some of the more nuanced traits (throwing to leverage, layering throws, throwing with anticipation), all stuff that Newton had mastered despite playing in gimmicky offense in college, will flow from there.

You can see the promise. When the mechanics are good or when the mechanics are bad, the velocity is effortless:

And effortless velocity (a good name for a racehorse) is always intoxicating. Can Richardson correct his feet enough to add more touch and accuracy to his game? Can he become more a playmaker in the second-phase of the offense? If he can tick off the first question, does the second even matter? If he ticks off the first, then that’s Cam Newton — and Cam Newton was bleeping awesome.

There’s a decent ways to go. And it’s the kind of development project that, given the constraints placed on practice time by the CBA, will have more to do with the work Richardson does with his private quarterback coach and his willingness to develop in the offseason rather than anything a team can do. What a team can do is start to marry Richardson’s skills and wants to concepts in year one, to make life easier as he builds out and finds consistency with his mechanics. Does Richardson want to be great? Is he committed to what it will take? Those are questions only he can answer.

If you’re looking for comparisons — and they feel compulsory during draft season — Trey Lance makes more sense than Cam Newton. Lance did not play a lot of football prior to being drafted. Like Richardson, he was a height-speed-arm-power-based prospect who had accuracy concerns and had to develop a more stable and consistent base. 

Will Levis, Kentucky

Levis is the big-armed bomber of this class. He has a howitzer for an arm. He also happened to play in the most pro-ready offense of the group. Rattle through any randomized ten plays from the Kentucky offense, and you can be forgiven for thinking you’re watching the Chiefs — conceptually. He also happened to play on an offense devoid of future NFL talent, which makes it tough to evaluate a string of his games.

Like Richardson, Levis is a high-upside gamble. He is inconsistent. He is reckless. But he doesn’t have the innate athleticism of Richardson, which lowers his floor. A whole bunch of his film, like Richardson, is just bad. You could be forgiven, at times, for wondering whether he should be a Day Two pick, let alone a top-10 one. For the record: I do not have a first-round grade on Levis.

Levis will go in the top-10, though. Any team selecting him will be gambling that they can mold a thrower into a quarterback.

Your mileage on that idea will vary.

What I will say, for now, is this: There is something in there. Levis has been panned by critics for not knowing what he’s doing. He’s a see-it-chuck-it type of player. That analysis is fair. But I do think it’s overstated. Scan Levis’ tape and something jumps out: his eyes always go to the right spot at-the-snap. He knows where he should go with the ball based on concept vs. coverage. He has a good understanding of the pre-snap picture and where he should jump to at-the-snap if his pre-snap indicator is confirmed. 

The only problem… he doesn’t throw the bleeping ball. There’s a hiccup in what he does. Sometimes, he’ll come off that primary read, quick-scan elsewhere, then return to the primary. That pitty-pattering of the feet will mess with Levis’ overall mechanics. He tap-dances as he tries to figure out whether to let go of the ball or not, and in doing so he will either elongate or narrow his base, forcing the ball to come out inaccurately. Too often, he will wind up no longer being aligned to his target — something that was fine early in the rep but that was corrupted by his indecision.

It’s an issue. Was it an issue with Levis or due to a lack of trust in his supporting cast? If it was because Levis, will the light ever turn on? Is it an issue you even correct or is it a basic instinct that the best of the best are blessed with? Is it due to a lack of tape study or an issue with carrying over the tape study to the field?

Levis, more than the other top QB prospects, is someone that evaluators will have to sit down in a room with, with a clicker, with the tape, to figure out the deal. As an outside evaluator, I’d rather have the quarterback whose eyes are always jumping to the right spot at the snap but who’s not pulling the trigger than the QB who doesn’t know where he should be looking. It feels easier to tell a quarterback: Hey, you have a green light. You’re making the right at the snap assessment. Let it fly!

In a matchup-based offense at Kentucky, Levis got to the right places upstairs, then failed to deliver physically — but one was a consequence of the other. And that feels correctable. By bailing on the correct, initial, at-the-snap read, Levis got himself into all kinds of issues down the road — inaccuracy, turnovers, missed reads, skipped reads.

Zoom out and take in Levis’ play on the whole, and there’s not much to separate him from a prospect like Sam Howell: A deep bomber who uncorks some wow throws but who lacks consistency. And while Levis is plenty athletic (and has drawn some crude Josh Allen comparisons) he was not like Levis was some off-script maverick who moved around and created offense. Unless that athletic stuff it was baked into the system — roll one way; throw the other — Levis wasn’t creating an awful lot.

For some, that means there’s more meat on the bone, more talent to discover. For others, it will be a flaw fundamental in his game: the should-be playmaker who doesn’t create enough plays.

I get both. But the more I think about it, the more I return to his natural instinct as a processor. He knows where to go with the ball at-the-snap, the execution just isn’t there. And one feels more correctable than the other.

Levis is the type of prospect you want to take when sat behind a laptop rather than when your mortgage and your kids college fund is on the line. 

Team building is hard.