Every few years, we get to November wondering how a quarterback nobody was talking about over the summer suddenly became a first-rounder. Burrow, Daniels and Jones didn't take the same path to the first round, but their eventual landing spots would've been difficult to predict before their final college seasons. That got me wondering whether we're looking at this the wrong way: Instead of arguing every summer about which well-known name should be QB1, could we identify the quarterbacks most likely to become first-round picks before everyone else catches on?
That's the question I wanted to answer with the 2027 class. I went through every draft class back to 2015 and looked at the quarterbacks who made big late-career jumps, the supposed first-rounders who slipped and the strange cases where the league's evaluation ultimately went somewhere the numbers didn't. Then I went back to my 2027 notes to see where the history matched what I'd seen on tape -- and, maybe more importantly, where it didn't.
For context: Based on my summer scouting, Dante Moore and Arch Manning are my top two quarterbacks, and both carry top-five grades on my overall board. Brendan Sorsby and Julian Sayin round out my current first-round quarterbacks, followed by Jayden Maiava and Darian Mensah early in Round 2. That's the scouting baseline for our purposes here.
Now let's see what history thinks. Also: Ran Carthon, my co-host on the "With the First Pick" podcast, and I have already done deep dives on our favorite quarterbacks in the 2027 draft class, and you can check that out below: I built a model around the question I really wanted to answer: How close is a quarterback to looking like a future first-round pick? The result is the First-Round Readiness Score -- or FRED, for short.
FRED looks at the things that have historically separated first-round quarterbacks -- passing efficiency, touchdown and interception rates, QBR, experience and, importantly, a quarterback's best three- and five-game stretches. The idea isn't to predict whether he'll succeed in the NFL; it's to measure how much his college performance, at that point in his career, resembles what we've historically seen from future first-round picks. The scale is intentionally easy to read: 50 is the historical first-round threshold.
But for what we're trying to learn here, when a quarterback gets there may be just as important as whether he gets there at all. The most revealing FRED score turned out to be the one before his final college season because it tells us which quarterbacks had already started playing like future top picks with another season still to go. And here's where FRED gets interesting: 22 quarterbacks in our historical sample had played enough football to reach a FRED score of 50 before their final seasons.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
