Despite the fact that we're three full seasons into their respective careers, we're still evaluating the quarterback class from the 2018 NFL draft. In a league in which teams have to start thinking about committing to a quarterback for their fifth-year option and a possible extension after their third season, it feels like we should be able to lock in our opinions about Josh Allen, Sam Darnold and the rest of this class by now.
And yet, there are two arguments suggesting that we're still figuring out these guys. One is what happened to the top of the class of 2016. After their third seasons in the league, both Carson Wentz and Jared Goff signed four-year extensions. Wentz had been an MVP candidate in 2017 and led his team back to the playoffs in 2018, while Goff was coming off of a trip to the Super Bowl. The Eagles and Rams had traded up for those passers and expected them to become franchise quarterbacks before paying them to do so. Both subsequently declined before being traded earlier this year.
As I mentioned in April, the other reality is that the way most people would rank these players moving forward has changed after each year. The league as a whole ranked them Baker Mayfield-Darnold-Allen-Josh Rosen-Lamar Jackson after the draft, an ordering that seemed ridiculous by the end of Year 1. Mayfield might have been atop the charts after 2018, with Jackson taking that nod in 2019 and Allen at No. 1 after last season.
What happens next? Let's try to look through what we know about these five first-round passers to get a sense of how they'll play in 2021 and beyond.
To aid me, I'm going to use the index stats for quarterbacks from Pro Football Reference. These index metrics take a quarterback's performance, adjust it for era and then scale it so that 100 represents the league average in each category and each 15-point swing represents one standard deviation above or below the mean. That means 115 would be an above-average season, while 130 would represent MVP-caliber performance and 145 would be one of the best seasons ever. As an example, here's Mayfield's 2020 performance converted to their index stats:
I'll start with the most impressive performance from 2020 and work my way down.
Jump to a quarterback:
Baker Mayfield | Sam Darnold
Josh Allen | Josh Rosen | Lamar Jackson
Josh Allen
Pick in 2018 draft: No. 7 (Bills)
The transformation is complete. Allen entered the league as a big-armed passer out of Wyoming who didn't have a track record of accuracy at the college level. His adjusted completion percentage coming out of college was 56%, the lowest of the five first-round passers. He wasn't accurate as a rookie, and while he made major strides in Year 2, he was still below average by virtually every passing metric. It seemed like Allen was the next Blake Bortles or Mitchell Trubisky, quarterbacks who were propped up by their teams and surroundings into fooling fans that they were franchise passers for brief spells of their rookie deals.
Allen is no Bortles or Trubisky. He was a revelation in his third season, emerging as one of the league's best quarterbacks. He went from a quarterback who would routinely battle his footwork in the pocket to one who seemed capable of setting and resetting his feet in moments from any setting or situation. A player who once seemed to not know where the ball was going from his traditional mechanics suddenly became an accurate passer from multiple arm angles. Allen was a legitimate MVP candidate.
Was it a fluke? I don't think so. When Wentz made his second-year leap in 2017, there were obvious unsustainable elements of his performance. As I wrote about back then, Wentz's 2017 season was built upon historically great performance on third down and in the red zone, with Wentz posting one of the 10 best seasons of the last decade in either category. Performance in those areas is tough to sustain unless you're dominating elsewhere on the field, and they were a one-year fluke for Wentz; he's 21st in third-down QBR and 10th in red zone QBR over the past three seasons.
There are no obvious outliers like that on Allen's 2020 record. His receivers posted a 2.6% drop rate, which was just a little better than league average. Defenses dropped six would-be Allen interceptions last year, which was slightly below league average. He was fourth in red zone QBR and 10th on third downs. Nothing about his performance suggests he was riding his luck or building his success on an unsustainable house of cards.
Does history suggest Allen can continue to play at this level? It depends. Let's take his completion percentage, which improved from 58.8% in 2019 to a whopping 69.2% in 2020. After adjusting for era, the Pro Football Reference index stats have Allen at 77 in 2019 and 121 last season. That 44-point improvement is tied for the largest single-season improvement in completion percentage index in the modern era alongside Steve DeBerg, who went from being coached by Fred O'Connor in 1978 to Bill Walsh in 1979. Eight other quarterbacks besides DeBerg improved their completion percentage index by more than 30 points in a 300-pass season and then threw 300 passes again the following year. Here's what happened to them:
The group as a whole saw its completion percentage decline by an average of 3.4% and its completion percentage index fall by an average of 13.1 points. If Allen were to drop off in a similar fashion, he would be looking at a 108 Cmp%+, which would be somewhere around 66% by 2020 statistics. It's not the sort of decline that would stop him from being a successful quarterback; Patrick Mahomes posted a 108 Cmp%+ last season.
Quarterbacks who grow as dramatically as Allen did last season often take a step backward the following year. This was likely the first time in his entire life that he was this accurate of a passer. The most recent year is the most valuable year we have in terms of evidence when evaluating a player, but it's not the only year that matters. At the same time, he could take a meaningful step backward and still be an above-average quarterback in 2021, given how effective he was last season.
Having said that, I think you could also make a feasible case that Allen might even get better in 2021. He's getting back virtually everyone of consequence from last year's team outside of swapping out John Brown for Emmanuel Sanders. The Bills did get healthy seasons out of most of their stars on offense, including Stefon Diggs and Dion Dawkins, but Brown missed nearly half the season, and starting guards Cody Ford and Jon Feliciano combined to miss 16 games. This offense would look a lot worse if Diggs went down injured, but you could say that about a lot of teams without their top wideout. Offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, whose growth alongside Allen has been similarly shocking and impressive, also returns. The pieces are there for him to do this again.
At the very least, the goalposts have shifted dramatically with the Bills starter. This time last year, while Allen still had a lofty ceiling, his floor was still the guy who threw three interceptions against the Patriots or who seemed to self-destruct in the playoff loss against the Texans. No more. Look at the quarterbacks on that list. While many of them weren't able to keep up their completion percentage the following season, they each enjoyed long careers. Allen has established his floor as an NFL-caliber starter. He's about to get a much-deserved extension from the Bills. After his 2020 breakout, his future is blindingly bright.
Lamar Jackson
Pick in 2018 draft: No. 32 (Ravens)
Was Jackson's 2020 season a disappointment? Depends on your baseline. If you were expecting him to remain as wildly efficient as he was during his MVP season in 2019, it might have been. Given that the Louisville product posted one of the highest touchdown rates (9%) as a passer in league history in 2019, it was always unrealistic to expect Jackson to keep up his prior level of play. Just about everybody who wins MVP declines, at least a little bit, the following season.
If anything, Jackson dropped off more as a runner than he did as a passer. Owing to increased familiarity with the Baltimore rushing attack, the retirement of star guard Marshal Yanda and the injury suffered by left tackle Ronnie Stanley, Jackson wasn't as efficient of a runner in 2020 as he was the prior year. His DVOA as a runner dropped from 20.5% in 2019 down to minus-3.6%. He also was less effective as a scrambler, although he helped make up for any downturn by scrambling for a 48-yard touchdown in the playoff win over the Titans.
Offensive coordinator Greg Roman tried to shift Baltimore's rushing attack as the season went along, with the offense seemingly running more wind back and counter bash concepts than it had in 2019. Roman's rushing attack around Jackson is one of the most creative we've seen at the NFL level, but it's fair to say that his passing attack isn't quite as sophisticated. And while the Ravens added receivers Rashod Bateman and Sammy Watkins this offseason to give Jackson more weapons, I'm not sure it's going to make much of a difference unless the Ravens get more creative with their downfield passing game.
Roman's offense leverages the impact of a running quarterback on opposing defenses into their passing game. Teams lose the numbers advantage up front when the quarterback is a threat to run, so they have to bring one of their safeties into the box and make him a more viable part of the run fit. As a result, his quarterbacks expect to see more single-high coverages, such as Cover 1 and Cover 3. His deep-passing game over the past couple of years has been built around two concepts capable of stretching single-high looks: dagger and verts.
These aren't complicated passing concepts. Verts is simply having two or more receivers running vertical routes straight downfield. It's a lot to ask a single-high safety to run with someone such as Marquise Brown with a head start or to try to defend against two receivers running vertical routes on either side. Dagger combines a vertical route with a dig or deep over route underneath the go route; the go route clears out the single-high safety and opens up the middle of the field for the crosser. Every team in the league runs these two passing concepts.
Where the Ravens stand out, though, is how frequently they run them. I looked at every 20-plus-yard pass Jackson attempted from a year ago. Thirty of the 46 passes he threw came on some sort of vert or dagger concept, which meant they were using one of two deep passing concepts more than 65% of the time. The rest of the throws were mostly deep outs, boots near the goal line and the occasional Air Raid concept like Y-cross, hi-lo, or mesh. The latter produced a 45-yard touchdown on fourth down against the Browns after Jackson returned from the locker room; that was the only deep throw he attempted against Cover 0 all season. He saw a single-high safety on nearly 74% of his deep passes.
Concerns about Jackson as a downfield passer in terms of his skills are generally overblown, in my opinion. The former Heisman Trophy winner has a strong arm and can anticipate routes coming open. He actually ran a more traditional, complex deep passing attack during his time at Louisville than the one he has been using with the Ravens. He misses deep throws here and there, but not at a more noticeable rate than other quarterbacks. He posted a 90.0 QBR on those throws last season, which ranked 20th in the league, four spots behind Allen. He was 12th in QBR on those passes in 2019. I don't think he's a problem on deep passes.
Roman's offense, though, has to be up to the task. Baltimore's passing game coordinator in 2020 was David Culley, who was surprisingly poached from the Ravens staff to take over as Houston's new coach. New assistant coaches Tee Martin and Keith Williams might take over Culley's duties in one form or another, but the Ravens have to threaten teams with more concepts downfield in 2021 than they did in 2020.
They appear set to sign Jackson to a significant extension this offseason. Even if you're skeptical of his ceiling as a downfield passer, you can't form a reasonable argument against getting that deal done. Jackson was league MVP two years ago and ranked seventh in QBR last season. He has the best winning percentage for any quarterback in modern league history through three seasons. He's one of the smartest quarterbacks I've ever seen in terms of avoiding big hits, both in the open field and near the sideline. Is there some risk that Jackson loses some value as a runner and doesn't develop further as a passer? Sure. We also know his upside is truly special.
Baker Mayfield
Pick in 2018 draft: No. 1 (Browns)
Is the real Mayfield the guy we saw collapse under pressure and expectations in 2019, or the one who looked calm and collected last season? Browns fans will understandably make the argument that Freddie Kitchens and a dismal offensive line were overmatched during Mayfield's sophomore campaign, but Mayfield thrived under those same conditions in 2018. He improved as he went along as a rookie and then did the same under Kevin Stefanski in 2020. People who counted out Mayfield after 2019 ignored what he did in 2018. Likewise, people who are locking him in as a possible MVP candidate this season based on what he did in the second half last year are ignoring what we saw in 2019. You can't throw out the parts of his history you don't like and use the rest as the sole basis for understanding his future.
Mayfield improved across the board in 2020, but one of those gains really drove his leap. In 2019, he threw 21 interceptions on 534 attempts, for a rate of 3.9%. Last season, he threw just eight picks on 486 attempts, dropping his interception rate down to 1.6%. By Pro Football Reference's index statistics, Mayfield's interception percentage index improved from 71 in 2019 to 111 last year, a 40-point swing.
Can he keep that up? If we look at guys with 300-pass attempt seasons who improved by 40-plus index points and see what they did the following year, the answer is no. The eight other quarterbacks who threw 300-plus attempts the following season all dropped off, falling an average of 24.1 points in the process. Three other players who didn't hit that 300-plus attempt total the following year each saw their interception rates rise in a smaller sample. A 24.1-point drop based on Mayfield's 2020 performance would roughly double his interception total from eight picks to 15. The list includes some great quarterbacks such as Brett Favre, Drew Brees and John Elway, but it shows just how difficult it is to sustain that sort of improvement.
If I were going to guess how Mayfield cut his interception rate so dramatically, I would have guessed that he had a few more dropped picks in 2020 and was much better under pressure than he had been in 2019. I would be wrong. He had four dropped picks in 2020, which was a little below league average. His interception rate when pressured in 2019 and 2020 didn't change all that much, either.
What did change is how Mayfield performed when things were calm. In 2019, when he wasn't pressured, he posted a 67.1 QBR and threw 17 picks on 449 attempts. The only other quarterback who threw more than 12 picks while unpressured that season was Jameis Winston, at 20. This past year, Mayfield posted an 83.7 QBR while unpressured and threw six picks on 422 unpressured dropbacks.
Anecdotally, there are reasons to think this makes sense. Mayfield looked frazzled throughout the 2019 season and seemed not to trust his pocket even when there wasn't much pressure. Browns quarterbacks coach Alex Van Pelt rebuilt Mayfield's footwork during the offseason. And as we suspected, Stefanski's arrival helped spur a dramatic improvement from Mayfield in one key category: play-action passing.
One year after a heavy dose of play-action led Kirk Cousins to a career year, Mayfield's return to form was driven by success with play-fakes. He was better across the board in 2019 when he used play-action as opposed to a standard dropback, but he was dominant using play-action in 2020. His play-action rate only jumped from 26.8% to 28.2%, but he posted a 93.0 QBR when the Browns used play-action, the second-best figure in football, behind Aaron Rodgers. Mayfield's interception rate using play-action in 2020 was a mere 0.4%. Cleveland's boot game helped narrow down the field for him and got him out of the pocket. It was the most important change the Browns made to this offense schematically, and it might have saved Mayfield's career as this team's starter.
He might have more riding on 2021 than any of these guys. Allen and Jackson have done enough to earn massive extensions. Rosen is fighting for a practice squad spot. Darnold had his fifth-year option picked up, but there was no suggestion that the Panthers were about to give him a significant new contract.
Somewhere in the middle, there's Mayfield, who has said he's not worried about negotiating a contract right now. If anybody in the NFL looms as a dangerous second contract among quarterbacks, it's the Browns starter. He's playing in a scheme that we've seen elevate Cousins, Goff and Jimmy Garoppolo, who are good enough to win but not typically good enough to do it as the primary driving force of the offense. Mayfield was more efficient last season, but the Browns rarely put the game on his shoulders, as he threw the ball just 486 times. The only regular starters who threw the ball less frequently were Darnold, Jackson, Ryan Tannehill and Cam Newton.
The Browns also massively upgraded their offensive line and kept those guys on the field in 2020. Their starting five combined for 73 out of 80 total starts; the only lineman who failed to start at least 15 times was run-mauling guard Wyatt Teller. Mayfield was without Odell Beckham Jr. for most of the year and had to start a critical game against the Jets with replacement-level receivers, but he had much more help last season. If he needs an excellent, effective offensive line to exhibit above-average efficiency, is Mayfield worth a significant raise? He was a mess behind Greg Robinson & Co. in 2019, similar Wentz melted down behind an injury-riddled line last season.
There are two reasons to believe Mayfield might exceed expectations. One is the classic second-year leap we've seen for quarterbacks in the Shanahan/Kubiak scheme, which led to MVP seasons for Matt Ryan and Rodgers in recent seasons. I don't think we have a big enough sample to tell whether the effect really exists, and I suspect that most quarterbacks improve at least a little bit when they get a second season with the same offensive coordinator in the same scheme, but we know that sort of leap is within the range of possibilities for a quarterback in this offense.
The other argument is that we saw two Mayfields in 2020. He threw six picks through the first six games of 2020 while posting a passer rating of 84.3; from Week 7 on, he posted a 16-2 touchdown-interception ratio, and his passer rating jumped to 102.3. His QBR jumped from 14th in the league across the first six weeks to seventh. It took a few weeks for him to learn the offense, this theory holds, but he looked like a franchise quarterback once he did.
In reality, I'm skeptical that Mayfield really stumbled onto some secret. Fans have adopted this split because the first set ends with a dismal performance in a blowout loss to the Steelers, who were one of the league's best pass defenses. Guess who he played the following week? Unsurprisingly, he posted huge numbers against the Bengals, who had the league's sixth-worst pass defense by DVOA.
Over that 10-game run to end the year, Mayfield played whatever the opposite of a murderer's row of pass defenses would be. Eight of his 10 games were against pass defenses that would finish the season ranked 22nd or worse. The exceptions were the Ravens (against whom he posted a 87.5 passer rating) and the Steelers (who played their backups in Week 17). He did play well against Pittsburgh's starters in the wild-card round, but that was also in a game in which the Steelers handed Cleveland four short fields in the first half.
Just about anything is on the table for Mayfield in 2021. He could be challenging for an MVP trophy on the high end and be stuck fighting for his job in 2022 on the lower end. Unless the offense around him totally falls apart, I think he should still be an effective midtier passer, albeit one with a higher interception rate than the one we saw last season.
Sam Darnold
Pick in 2018 draft: No. 3 (Jets)
I wrote a little bit about Darnold in April, when I wrote about the rise in quarterback selections. The track record for quarterbacks who start their career with three seasons of a sub-90 ANY/A+ since the merger isn't great; it's a group consisting solely of Darnold, Kyle Boller, Christian Ponder, Jeff George and Dan Pastorini. Those five quarterbacks combined to make one Pro Bowl, and that was in 1975, when quarterbacks typically got more time to develop. Even two bad seasons out of the first three has usually been an ominous sign for signal-callers.
The argument for Darnold, of course, is that he'll look like a different player in Carolina, away from Adam Gase and the Jets. Does the evidence suggest he was held back? Not particularly. The Jets' line was a work in progress during his time in New York, but when Darnold was able to throw the ball without pass pressure from 2018 to 2020, he posted a QBR of 65.7. While that number sounds decent, every quarterback gets better when they're not pressured; the league average QBR for an unpressured quarterback is 77, and he ranked 32nd out of 36 quarterbacks over that time frame when he had time to pass.
What about the scheme? One interesting trend with Darnold is that he often played better during the first 15 snaps, plays Gase presumably would have scripted and prepared before the game started. Darnold ranked 13th in QBR in his two years with Gase across the first 15 offensive snaps, but he ranked last by 12 points over the remaining plays.
It's difficult to parse whether Darnold made the right decision on every single play, but when the game's win probability was within the 25% to 75% range from 2018 to '20, 41.7% of his passes went to open receivers. That mark was below the league average rate of 44%, but it was ahead of quarterbacks such as Matthew Stafford, Andrew Luck and Ryan Tannehill, who were more successful than Darnold.
Darnold's CPOE, which takes into account the location of his receivers and the defenders on the field, was 1.7% below expectation. While that could be influenced by drops, his drop rate over the past three years was 3.3%, which is right around the league average (3.4%). I don't think all of this proves he was the problem in New York, but there is not some glaring evidence suggesting he was being held back.
Consider the play most people bring up when they talk about Darnold's upside: his incredible scrambling touchdown pass to Braxton Berrios against the 49ers. You can temper your enthusiasm when you consider that the score was 31-6 and there was about 90 seconds left in the game, but it's absolutely fair to say that this is the sort of play only a handful of human beings on the planet can make.
In a vacuum, it's a fantastic play. In the context of being down 25 points in the fourth quarter of a blowout, it's a risk he should absolutely take. The problem is that Darnold takes this sort of risk and throws late over the middle of the field in more meaningful situations, and it more often leads to picks. His first interception of the year was a pick by Matt Milano on the same sort of decision. There's this interception against the Dolphins, where Darnold bails prematurely from a clean pocket, runs away from what would have been a wide-open receiver crossing his eyes, and throws late against his body for another turnover. This is something young quarterbacks typically get out of their system; Darnold continues to make these same mistakes, even when they sometimes work out in his favor.
Other quarterbacks have been able to get away from bad situations and emerge as useful players elsewhere, with Steve Young as the most famous example. Young was going to play with Jerry Rice in San Francisco in the league's most devastating offense, though, and he spent four years as a backup before taking over as a starter. The idea that Darnold is about to step in with the Panthers and turn into an above-average quarterback seems more hopeful than anything else.
Josh Rosen
Pick in 2018 draft: No. 10 (Cardinals)
If you thought Rosen might be cursed, last season gave you another piece of evidence. The UCLA product left Tampa Bay's practice squad in December in the hopes of getting reps with the injury-hit 49ers under Kyle Shanahan. The Niners never got Rosen on the field and then traded three first-round picks to move up to draft Trey Lance in April. Meanwhile, because Rosen left the Bucs' practice squad before the season ended, he isn't in line to get a Super Bowl ring. Life isn't fair.
Has any quarterback started a career this inauspiciously and eventually grown into a starting role? Not really. Rosen has a 62 ANY/A+ through his first three seasons, the seventh-worst mark since the merger for passers with at least 200 attempts by Year 3. The only other player in the top 20 who went on to be a successful starter was Wade Wilson, who stuck around on the Vikings' roster as a part-time quarterback for six years before making it to the Pro Bowl in 1988. Trent Dilfer, who is 27th on the list, eventually won a Super Bowl with the Ravens, but the positives here are few and far between.
Rosen re-signed with the Niners, but his future is with yet another organization. San Francisco is Rosen's fourth team, after he was traded to Miami in 2019 when the Cardinals drafted Kyler Murray, then picked up by the Bucs after the Dolphins released him before the 2020 season (after drafting Tua Tagovailoa).