Polarizing QBs on parade

September 11, 2024

Interesting day in college football on Saturday when two of the top 3 QBs in this year’s draft class to date – and arguably the two most polarizing prospects in this year’s draft class – were on the road playing Big Ten opponents. However, that’s quite literally where the similarities end as the two had quite different experiences. last weekend. On the one hand, Quinn Ewers had a terrific game as he led Texas to a dominating win over defending national champion Michigan, in the process putting himself very much in the early season Heisman debate. On the other hand, it was a struggle for Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders at Nebraska where he was harassed all evening by the Huskers’ aggressive pass rush. Bottom line, though, is that its not entirely clear if anything really changed in their current draft status.

Let’s start with Ewers who was brilliant in leading the Longhorns to a dominating 31-12 win over the defending national champs. On the day, Ewers was 24 of 36 passes for 246 yards and 3 scores as he showed a quick release, good vision and that rare ability to make off-platform throws. In fact, Ewers looked to be very much out of the Patrick Mahomes-Caleb Williams school with his ability to make off-script plays;indeed, he looked at times more like a point guard than a QB. And that might be the issue with grading Ewers as a pro prospect because, at least based on the Michigan game, he really wasn’t tasked with making many more traditional NFL throws where he sets up in the pocket and has to pinpoint the ball into a tight window downfield.

In many ways, the Buffs’ Sanders was harder to grade in the loss at Nebraska as he was under constant pressure from the Huskers’ defence; indeed, he was eventually sacked 6 times and hit or pressured multiple other times. For his day, Sanders completed 23 of 38 passes for 244 yards with a TD and a pick, but he was 13 of 13 when throwing from a clean pocket. One also saw a number of similarities with the Horns’ Ewers in that he sees the field well, has a quick release and can make those unscripted passes. What one also may have seen with Sanders, though, was the fact that he appears to need to be able to set his feet and step into throws to get the ball down the field with the kind of velocity required to fit passes into those tight windows at the next level, which in turn lead to more questions about his overall arm strength.

At the same time, all this leads us into a topic that we have been thinking about of late. And that’s that football is a team sport and the reality is that players on good teams are almost by definition going to look better on game day than players on bad teams. And that in turn leads to something of a juxtaposition regarding this year’s draft class. In particular, 2 of the top three QBs at this time – Carson Beck of Georgia and Texas’ Ewers – play on teams that are currently ranked 1-2 in this week’s polling. In contrast, Colorado’s Sanders plays on arguably one of the worst teams in the country, at least within the FBS ranks which almost by definition is going to have scouts asking ‘how much is it the player and how much is it the team?’ when evaluating these guys. One way scouts get around that is that they don’t really grade games; they grade plays. So for a QB, for example, they’ll grade their performance on plays broken down by whether they have a clean pocket or are facing pressure and then weight them so their stats will have at least some comparability. But its still really an inexact science.