All things being equal, draft an experienced quarterback

As the New York Giants and their fans burn for (seeming) eternity in quarterback hell, watching Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels carve up the Detroit Lions defense to reach the NFC Championship Game, “How can we get one of those?” is the question of the day. It’s been the question for a better part of a decade now.

The team definitely needs a bridge quarterback for the 2025 season, but the bigger question is where to find someone younger and with more potential for the long term in the 2025 NFL Draft. Maybe there are none worth drafting, or at least none that will still be on the board when the Giants pick at No. 3. Or maybe there will be several, but the trick is deciding which one is worth the investment, if not at No. 3, then in Round 2.

I don’t have the expertise to answer that question; I’ll leave it to Chris Pflum to tell us whether any of the prospects out there this year have the potential to make it as an elite starting NFL quarterback. Mostly that evaluation is about physical and mental traits that the best quarterbacks have: arm talent, accuracy, pocket presence, anticipation, ability to go through read progressions, etc. You’d have to think that all general managers know this, yet they often get it wrong, as evidenced by the number of failed quarterbacks on NFL rosters.

One thing I don’t hear discussed much – and when I do, it’s backwards – is the role that age and experience play in QB success. More often than I would have imagined, you hear people downgrade an older college prospect for one of two reasons: You’ll only have them for 10 years or so before they begin to decline (as if none of us would sign on for a decade of elite play), and if they’re good enough to succeed in the NFL, why did they have to stay in college so long?

Let’s look at every quarterback drafted in the NFL since 2016 in the first or second round and see whether age and experience at the college level play any role in their NFL success. There are 39 such QBs. We’ll use four different measures: Calendar age at the start of the year they were drafted, college games played, pass attempts, and pass attempts per game. None of these by itself is definitive, e.g., some QBs get into blowout games early in their career and just hand the ball off, some play for coaches who are more or less pass-oriented, etc. Collectively, though, hopefully they show us some trends.

Age

Here are the six oldest and six youngest Round 1-2 quarterback draftees since 2016:

Data from Sports Reference

Age and experience aren’t everything – some quarterbacks are just not good enough to succeed at the NFL level. Kenny Pickett at least started for a while, while it looks like Will Levis’ starting days are over given that Tennessee has the No. 1 pick. The other four oldest rookies are an interesting group, though. Bo Nix was the least heralded of the six top QB prospects in the 2024 draft – terrible at Auburn, better at Oregon only because he played in their RPO system, so it was said. But Nix got a ton of experience. After a rough opening month of his NFL career, he clicked in Sean Payton’s offense and led Denver to the playoffs. Michael Penix Jr. only started the last three games of the season, but he looked good in two of them. including a final game with seven (yes, seven) big-time throws and no turnover-worthy plays according to Pro Football Focus. Then we have Daniels, who spent three years at Arizona State, then transferred to LSU for two years and hit his stride. Five years in college seem to have served him well. Finally, Joe Burrow followed a similar path – two years at Ohio State and two more at LSU, and like Daniels, he hit the ground running when he reached the NFL, coming within a play of a Super Bowl ring in his second year.

The six youngest quarterbacks tell a different story. Lamar Jackson is unique among them. He, like Burrow, is one of the top five QBs in the NFL today. But he mostly sat through the first half of his rookie year, and when he did become a starter, he was mostly a runner rather than a passer (56.5 PFF passing grade). By year 2, though, he had become the unstoppable force he is today. For Christian Hackenberg, Josh Rosen, and DeShone Kizer, though, that moment never came. Sam Darnold didn’t seem to put it together until this, his seventh, season, although his final two games put even that into question. Finally, we have Anthony Richardson: Jaw-dropping traits, but so little experience – only 393 passes in college, vs. 1936 for Nix and 1438 for Daniels. He was arguably the worst starting QB in the NFL this year despite being the No. 4 pick in 2023. He should have stayed in school another year.

Games and Pass Attempts

Below we sort the QBs by least (30 or less) and most (40 or more) college games played:

Data from Sports Reference

The list of quarterbacks with the fewest college games played includes some of the most spectacular failures in recent NFL draft history: Trey Lance (No. 3 after the 49ers traded up), Dwayne Haskins (too small an NFL sample to judge, but unsuccessful until his tragic accident), Richardson (who may yet succeed but clearly wasn’t ready yet), Deshone Kizer (a starter for one year, out of the NFL after two), Kyle Trask (11 NFL pass attempts in three seasons), Zach Wilson (did not throw a pass in 2024 after three years as sometimes-Jets-starter), and Rosen (out of the league after three seasons). It also includes Josh Allen, a bad QB as a rookie but better in year 2 and spectacular since; Kyler Murray, possessed with elite physical traits that sometimes translate into success on the field but not often enough; and Drake Maye, with too small a sample to judge but looking very promising so far. C.J. Stroud is the only quarterback on the list who has been an immediate NFL success.

Among the quarterbacks with the most college games under their belts, we unsurprisingly have Nix, Daniels, and Penix. We also have Jalen Hurts, who was OK in a limited sample as a rookie but got the Eagles to the playoffs by his second year; Baker Mayfield, who has been up and down but up often enough to be considered a success; the enigmatic Justin Herbert, who looks like one the NFL’s best QBs but hasn’t won a playoff game. Then there are puzzles like Carson Wentz, seemingly headed for elite status and a ring before his injury but a failure since then; Trevor Lawrence, on the way to stardom after two years but a question mark since then; and J.J. McCarthy. More on him in a moment.

Below are the quarterbacks sorted by highest and lowest pass attempts. This is perhaps the purest metric of experience, combining the effects of years, games played, games started, and the type of offense the QB operated in:

Data from Sports Reference

Unsurprisingly, the lists lean toward the older/younger quarterbacks for the most/least college pass attempts. Lots of experience throwing passes against college defenses isn’t everything – Pickett, Drew Lock, and Daniel Jones all make the top 10 list. But Patrick Mahomes and Jared Goff, two of the NFL’s best, are both in the top 10 in pass attempts not because they came out at an older age but because they played in offenses in which they threw the ball a lot (more than 40 pass attempts per game on average).

On the other end of the spectrum, not a single one of the quarterbacks with the lowest college career number of pass attempts was an immediate NFL success. Lance and Richardson didn’t even throw 400 passes in their college careers; Bo Nix threw about five times as many. Tua Tagovailoa didn’t become a successful QB until his third year (maybe the Tyreek Hill trade had something to do with that), as did Josh Allen (after the trade for Stefon Diggs, admittedly). But we also see that quarterbacks like Wentz, Murray, Mac Jones, Justin Fields, Haskins, and Mitchell Trubisky, all first-round picks, most of them top 12 picks, had relatively little college passing experience, playing mostly in offenses that passed fewer than 20 times per game (though that number may be biased low by games they did not start).

J.J. McCarthy did not make the bottom 10 in passes thrown, but he wasn’t far behind, with only 713 pass attempts, less than half the number attempted by fellow 2024 classmates Nix, Penix, and Daniels. This was one of the questions about McCarthy coming out of college: Did he do enough in Michigan’s run-first offense to be confident about success in the pass-oriented NFL?

The 2025 draft class

All of this is the long way around to the question everyone really cares about: What quarterbacks in the 2025 NFL Draft might be worth drafting by the Giants? Toward that end, here are the same statistics for 11 quarterbacks of interest:

Data from Sports Reference

I’ve included a couple of quarterbacks who have decided not to come out for the draft, just because they were part of the discussion until recently. Drew Allar decided to return to Penn State for another year, and Carson Beck transferred to Miami.

The prospects have a wide range of age and experience, ranging from Allar, at only 20 years of age, to Dillon Gabriel, who is 24. Gabriel has had an almost NFL career’s worth of experience, having thrown 2,111 passes in an amazing 64 college games at UCF and then Oregon (I’m embellishing a bit; it’s about 25% of the number of passes Eli Manning threw as a Giant). No one else is close.

Among the highest ranked prospects, Cam Ward has had a good deal of experience, playing in 38 games and throwing 1,436 passes. Shedeur Sanders has only played for two years and has only 24 games under his belt, but he’s attempted a fairly representative (for a quarterback entering the draft) 907 passes. That’s because the next rushing play Deion Sanders calls will be his first (not quite, but the Buffaloes passed 482 times to only 341 rushes in 2024).

On the other hand, Jalen Milroe has only passed 663 times in 38 games at Alabama. That’s not as bad as Anthony Richardson, but it’s in DeShone Kizer territory. If you’re going to draft Milroe with the second pick of Round 2 or by trading back into the first round as Baltimore did for Lamar Jackson, you’d better have a good bridge quarterback to hold the fort in 2025 while Milroe sits and learns. There’s no shame in doing that – Patrick Mahomes, who had much more passing experience in college, didn’t throw an NFL pass until the final game of his rookie season. Milroe might turn out more like C.J. Stroud, who attempted only 830 passes in 27 games at Ohio St. before hitting the ground running as a pro in Houston. You wouldn’t want to assume that, though.

All of the other prospects have enough college experience to conceivably step into a starting role next season at some point…but that’s where all the traits of a successful pro quarterback come into play in deciding which if any of them will succeed at the NFL level. Jayden Daniels had the experience and the traits. Kenny Pickett, Drew Lock, even Daniel Jones had plenty of experience at the college level but did not have the traits. Is there one with the traits and the experience in this draft once Ward and Sanders are off the board?