The Modern NFL Has Never Seen a Draft Prospect Rise Like Joe Burrow
The LSU quarterback entered this season projected to be a fifth-round pick at best. Three months later, he’s being talked about as a top-10 selection. How did he get there? And what does his ascension say about the QB evaluation process?The Modern NFL Has Never Seen a Draft Prospect Rise Like Joe Burrow
The LSU quarterback entered this season projected to be a fifth-round pick at best. Three months later, he’s being talked about as a top-10 selection. How did he get there? And what does his ascension say about the QB evaluation process?
As recently as this summer, Joe Burrow was an NFL draft afterthought. Following a forgettable junior season in 2018, the LSU quarterback was considered to be at best a fifth-round pick. One prominent scouting service ranked eight senior QBs above Burrow in the 2020 class—and that didn’t include underclassmen like Georgia’s Jake Fromm or Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa, who Burrow may face off against on Saturday. As a physically limited QB with average production as a starter, there was little expectation that Burrow would turn into anything more than a late-round project and potential backup. Well, let’s just say a lot has changed in three months.
During LSU’s 8-0 start this season, Burrow has looked like the best quarterback in college football. He leads the nation with a 78.8 completion percentage. His 2,805 passing yards rank second in the country. And he’s thrown a single-season LSU record 30 touchdown passes—with four games remaining on the schedule. In the midst of all this, he’s become the hottest name in this year’s draft class. In his most recent top 100, The Athletic’s Dane Brugler ranked Burrow as the 2020 draft’s fifth-best prospect. Last month, ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. put Burrow at no. 14 on his big board. In a written exchange with Kiper in October, Todd McShay wrote that “Burrow has gone from Day 3 prospect to potential first-rounder in six games.” And that was before Burrow completed 76.2 percent of his passes—and took a beating—against Auburn, who ranks third in defensive efficiency and is lined with NFL talent.
It’s important to note that while the most thorough draft pundits like Brugler and Kiper do plenty of homework to gauge NFL interest, they don’t always speak for the league’s top-level decision-makers. One GM I talked to this week who studied Burrow’s first several games bristled at the idea that he was worth a top-10 pick. At this stage, Burrow’s scorching start may not have teams rearranging their draft boards. But it has forced front offices to revisit their evaluations of him. And as area scouts and sports agents—both of whom spend countless hours mining the country for college talent—have retraced their steps, the buzz around Burrow has started to grow.
If the prognosticators wind up being correct and Burrow does manage to climb into the top 10 of next year’s draft, it would be an unprecedented rise. Plenty of college QBs have flown up draft boards after one great year, but those players usually either took a significant jump between their sophomore and junior seasons, or they emerged out of obscurity in their first opportunity as a starter. Burrow doesn’t fit into either of those categories. He spent two seasons backing up J.T. Barrett and Dwayne Haskins at Ohio State before transferring to LSU in the spring before his junior season. Last fall was the first time he saw action as a starter, and he had a relatively pedestrian campaign.
Other players have seen their draft stock jump after strong senior seasons, but none of them were as poorly regarded as Burrow was following his junior year. Baker Mayfield, who ascended draft boards during a Heisman-winning senior season and eventually became the no. 1 pick in 2018, inspired disparate opinions. Some scouting services slapped him with a fifth-round grade following his junior season, while other teams and evaluators thought he could sneak into the back half of the first round. Daniel Jones had just average production during his junior season at Duke, but his frame and pedigree (read: relationship with the Manning brothers and Blue Devils head coach David Cutcliffe) led some to believe he could be a first-round pick with a strong senior year. The Giants eventually took him sixth in the 2019 draft.
Coming into the season, there was no such optimism about Burrow. He would become the first quarterback in modern NFL history to make this type of leap after an initial run through the league’s scouting machine resulted in such an underwhelming consensus. And while the details of his improvement from last year to this one are undoubtedly interesting, the most intriguing part of this entire thing might be learning how an NFL team could eventually talk itself into a meteoric prospect like Burrow.
While the specifics of Burrow’s situation make him unique, several recent first-round picks have also burst on to the scene, seemingly out of nowhere. Dwayne Haskins, Kyler Murray, Mitchell Trubisky, Cam Newton, and Mark Sanchez are all examples of one-year starters who went from relative unknowns to first-rounders in a single season. Just as often, quarterbacks thought to be surefire stars can plummet.
Many of the 2013 mock drafts that were released before the 2012 season had at least four QBs going in the first round. That group included USC’s Matt Barkley (who many projected as the no. 1 overall pick), Arkansas’s Tyler Wilson, Oklahoma’s Landry Jones, and Florida State’s EJ Manuel. When the draft finally arrived the following spring, Manuel was the only QB taken in the first round. Barkley was drafted with the first pick in the fourth. Wilson was selected 14 picks later. And Jones was taken three picks after that. Players at other positions experienced draft-day falls that same year (including Keenan Allen, Sam Montgomery, and Alex Okafor), but no position comes with more volatility than quarterback. As one agent told me when describing how his company chooses its potential clients, “Evaluating quarterbacks is like evaluating a different sport.”
When I asked some current and former talent evaluators this week what that evaluation process looks like for a fast-rising quarterback like Burrow, the collective response was that teams are going back to the drawing board. Area scouts are likely passing through Baton Rouge again, asking LSU’s new-look staff (including well-regarded first-year passing game coordinator Joe Brady) what Burrow is doing differently this season. Interested GMs will get as many eyes on him as possible; if a typical high-level prospect would warrant three or four written reports for that team, Burrow might require seven or eight.
The goal, as one former GM told me, is to conduct a pathology on the player’s entire career to find where the original evaluation might have gone wrong. When scouting quarterbacks, teams generally try to tick off a more rigorous series of required boxes: physical traits, mental traits (including information-processing and decision-making), personality makeup (toughness, leadership, etc.), and production against quality competition.
Based on the information I gleaned from conversations, scouts are putting Burrow through that wringer once again. The book on him right now is that his arm is still just adequate, but his pocket mobility and knack for playmaking under pressure are vastly improved from last season. During his first year in Brady’s expertly tailored system, Burrow’s processing and decision-making have also taken significant steps forward. Understanding whether a quarterback plays in a well-designed system—and the role that system plays in his success—is a crucial part of the scouting process, especially for players whose circumstances have shifted as drastically as Burrow’s have this season.
Burrow is considered a relatively quiet, occasionally quirky guy. But he’s beloved in the LSU locker room, largely because he plays with a competitiveness that borders on fanatical. As the story goes, when Texas fans blew a cannon through Burrow’s jersey before LSU faced off against UT in early September, the quarterback turned to his center and said he was throwing for 400 yards that night. He threw for 471—and four touchdowns—as LSU beat the Longhorns 45-38. Texas may not have a quality defense, but Florida and Auburn boast excellent units filled with NFL prospects, and he toppled both teams.
Saturday’s game against Alabama looms as Burrow’s most important test yet. To this point, Burrow has ticked off nearly every box that teams look for in a quarterback. And if he continues that run against the Tide, this wave of Burrow Mania could become a full-blown tsunami.
No matter how many boxes Burrow may be checking right now, this is just the first step in a process that won’t end until April. And there are plenty of other variables to consider along the way. The Senior Bowl in late January is a crucial step for players in Burrow’s spot. Carson Wentz missed nearly half his senior season because of injury, but skepticism about his pro potential melted away after teams saw his arm talent and frame up close. He eventually went no. 2.
That week in Mobile will also be the first chance that NFL coaches have to sit down with prospects and pick their brains. Those conversations—and the ones that occur at the combine and during team visits—can have an outsized impact on a player’s draft stock, especially for QBs. The Browns, for example, appreciated Mayfield’s accuracy and impressive college production, but they may not have made such a bold choice about a nontraditional QB if not for their belief that Mayfield’s bravado would invigorate a lifeless franchise. Emotions creep into the calculus more for quarterbacks than they do for other prospects. Quarterback-needy teams want to believe that one of these guys is the guy. And that desire can lead to plenty of ill-fated rationalizing. As teams talk themselves in circles around certain QBs, the decision can boil down to which player ticks enough boxes rather than which ones have the highest ceilings—about finding an answer instead of the best answer. Which is why an early groundswell around passers can have such an impact.
That kind of desperation is one of the reasons that draft analysts have shot Burrow up their respective boards. And if Burrow continues this run, from now until late April, the media machine surrounding the draft will continue to perpetuate that idea. One executive I spoke with this week warned about how much agents can affect the process as teams get closer to the draft. Whether through direct contact with personnel executives or strategic information leaks, a player’s representatives are motivated to convince teams that their client is in high demand. After the 2017 draft, when the Bears traded up to take Mitchell Trubisky no. 2, The MMQB’s Emily Kaplan reported that the Browns and Chiefs were also high on Trubisky and considered leapfrogging Chicago to select the North Carolina quarterback. But other reports have surfaced in recent years that indicate Kansas City always had its sights set on Patrick Mahomes. Springtime in the NFL brings an ocean of misinformation, and some agents use that confusion to their advantage.
That sort of NFL Inception can have a massive influence on an executive’s thinking; even established professionals can be swung by chatter surrounding a prospect. There are plenty of stories about prominent GMs who had to be talked off the ledge about a buzz-worthy QB that their scouting departments didn’t like. For Burrow, that chatter has begun in earnest. And it takes only one GM to talk himself into the notion that Joe Burrow is the person who will save his franchise, no matter how unlikely that may have seemed three months ago. As much as his own improvement, Burrow’s potential leap up this year’s draft will be about what teams are willing to do for a quarterback. And if he ends up a top-10 pick, it’ll be unlike any ascension the league has seen in years.