No debate in the NFL feels more susceptible to recency bias than the one over the best rookie quarterback season ever, but Washington Commanders first-round pick Jayden Daniels might have just ended the discussion. Throughout modern NFL history, more than two dozen rookie quarterbacks have been part of playoff runs, and plenty of rookies have thrown a lot of touchdowns or been among the league leaders in passing efficiency. Daniels has done all of that.
He has already led the Commanders to a stunning turnaround in his first season—14 wins, including two this postseason—and he’s just one win away from becoming the first rookie quarterback to reach a Super Bowl. He’s been remarkably accurate and efficient as a passer, dangerous as a scrambler, and extremely poised in crunch time, leading five game-winning drives—including a Hail Mary touchdown he threw against Chicago in Week 8.
Eagles defensive play caller Vic Fangio is one of just three NFL coordinators over the age of 60, and if there’s anyone who can speak to whether a player has earned his press clippings, it’d be the grumpy, old man who’s spent more than half of his life in the NFL. And, when Fangio was asked this week whether Daniels was having the best rookie season he’d seen from a quarterback, his shrugging affirmation may as well have been a shouting endorsement. “Yeah,” Fangio said. “He’s a young quarterback by birth certificate [but] not by the tape. The guy is playing extremely well. You can tell how much they think he’s playing good by the things they trust him to do, and he’s come through for them in a big way.”
Let’s put Daniels’s performance in context with the other contenders for the best rookie season ever—most of which have happened in the past 20 years, as it’s become far more common for rookie quarterbacks to play right away.
For decades, Dan Marino was the gold standard for rookie passers: In 1983, he threw 20 touchdowns and just six interceptions while leading the league in adjusted net yards per attempt. He was a second-team All-Pro and finished third in MVP voting. In the aughts, we got Ben Roethlisberger, who in 2004 took over a championship-caliber roster and went 13-0 as the Steelers’ starter in the regular season and lost in the AFC championship game, and Matt Ryan, who threw a touchdown on his first career pass and led the Falcons to the playoffs and a seven-win improvement from the previous season.
The 2010s were the golden age of rookie quarterbacks: Cam Newton throwing for more than 4,000 yards and rushing for over 700 yards in 2011; Andrew Luck setting the rookie records for passing yards in a season and a single game in 2012; and Dak Prescott leading the Cowboys to 13 wins in 2016 while putting together one of the most efficient rookie seasons for a passer the league has ever seen, as measured by expected points added per dropback. More recently, there was Justin Herbert nearly breaking Luck’s season yardage record in 2020 and C.J. Stroud actually breaking Luck’s single-game record and throwing for 4,100-plus yards, 23 touchdowns, and just five interceptions in 2023 while leading the Texans to the AFC South title and a wild-card-round playoff win in his first season.
Statistically, Daniels has been on par with or surpassed all of them.
Jayden Daniels Stats and Ranks Among Rookie QBs Since 2000 (Including Postseason)
But Daniels is not just in rare company when we look at raw passing production. He checks the quarterback wins box, too, joining Brock Purdy, Joe Flacco, and Mark Sanchez as the only rookies since 2000 to win multiple playoff games—and all it takes is a quick comparison of the playoff box scores to see the difference between Daniels and those others. Flacco and Sanchez were merely passengers on their teams’ rides to the conference title game, and Purdy was playing with football’s version of the Avengers in 2022.
Washington beat the NFC’s no. 1 seed last week with a resounding road win in Detroit and reached the conference title game because of Daniels; this Commanders team would’ve been sent home weeks ago if it had to win in spite of him. As far as the combination of impact and raw production goes, Daniels has my current vote for the best rookie campaign we’ve seen from a quarterback. He’ll cement that legacy if he can lead Washington to the Super Bowl.
Daniels progressed on a steep developmental arc this season, but especially in the past few weeks, to get his team here. He hasn’t just played like a better quarterback than we saw in the regular season; he’s played like a different one at times. We expected Daniels to be a game breaker with his legs in the playoffs after he led the NFL in EPA on scrambles this season—and he’s gained 65 yards on his 10 scrambles in these playoffs—but in January, he’s proved that he understands that the mere threat of him running is just as valuable as the run itself. Defensive coordinators have to approach Daniels differently than almost any other quarterback, and the defenses that haven’t adjusted to his dual-threat skill set have been diced up.
That brings us to that tape of Daniels that Fangio has been watching. Washington’s wins over Detroit and Tampa Bay are filled with reasons why Fangio should be careful with his game plan for Daniels. The question becomes how aggressive a defense should be when blitzing Daniels: If you send more rushers than Washington’s offensive line can block, you might be able to cut off Daniels’s escape lanes as a rusher, but you leave your defense vulnerable to quick passes that have become the bread and butter of Washington’s passing game.
In the wild-card round, the Buccaneers tried overloading the Commanders with a five-man rush and an interior stunt, but as you can see on the play below, none of those rushers made enough headway to keep Daniels from calmly pushing the ball downfield to receiver Terry McLaurin.
Detroit’s defensive coordinator, Aaron Glenn, who on Wednesday was named head coach of the Jets, watched that film and seemingly tried to learn from it, but turning the pressure knob up higher proved to be a mistake. In the clip below, the Lions are running a “cross” blitz path, where the inside linebackers are trying to manipulate center Tyler Biadasz and get a free rusher through the interior. This blitz was so effective at capturing the offensive line’s attention that the Commanders abandoned their original pass protection rules, and the entire line squeezed to stop interior pressure, leaving both edge rushers uncovered. This blitz resulted in more rushers than Washington was expecting, but Daniels wasn’t fazed. Daniels stared down the pressure and delivered the ball accurately to tight end Zach Ertz.
The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze when it comes to selling out to blitz Daniels. On this next play, you see Detroit send six rushers again, with four rushers attacking one side of the protection—guaranteeing one of them will get through unblocked against this empty look from Washington. Because the Commanders are anticipating pressure, they chip-block Detroit’s edge rushers, opening the pocket up just enough for Daniels to see and outrun the incoming rushers until he can find his dump-off option. That checkdown is guaranteed to be open against this aggressive style of defense.
By using his arm, and not his legs, to beat the blitz during his recent hot streak, Daniels has neutralized what defenses did to stop him earlier this season. There was a stretch of three games that Washington lost in the middle of the regular season in which the blitz was kicking Daniels’s ass. The Steelers and Cowboys sent more than four rushers at him a combined 35 times in two of those games, and Daniels had a passer rating of 60.9 and 47.0, respectively, against those defenses. It looked as though the league had a bead on how to stop him. Even though his scramble rates held steady across the first 12 weeks of the season, whether he was blitzed (11 percent) or not (12 percent), his success rate, passer rating, and EPA per dropback all fell when defenses brought the heat.
Daniels Vs. Blitz
Something changed after that cold stretch, though, and Daniels came out on the other side trusting his arm and offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury’s scheme. Including his pair of playoff wins, Daniels has scrambled on just eight of the 75 blitzes he’s seen since the Week 12 loss to the Cowboys. His trust in his arm has paid off to the tune of a 143.4 passer rating, a completion percentage of 72 percent, and a blistering EPA per dropback of .805 when defenses send extra bodies. For context, Lamar Jackson’s .305 EPA per dropback against the blitz led all starting quarterbacks across 17 games.
That’s not to say that scrambling isn’t still a big part of Daniels’s game or that he’s gotten less effective at it. It does mean that he can be more selective in when and, most importantly, why he’s running, and his scrambles essentially serve as his own checkdown—the final option for a quick, positive gain.
The clip below is the best example I found of how devastating Daniels’s scrambling can be to an opposing defense and how valuable it is when he’s in total control of his game. Here, you’ll see Detroit send another overload blitz, leaving the defensive end matched up against Washington’s running back, so Daniels doesn’t have an easy outlet for a checkdown. Once it was clear to Daniels that the quick pass wouldn’t be there and Detroit’s rush flushed him from the pocket, Daniels used his rare speed to make Detroit’s Pro Bowl safety Brian Branch look as slow as a defensive end. Even in instances like this where defenses use a “spy” or blitz defensive backs in hopes of getting quick pressure, Daniels has speed nobody on the field can match.
Now, he’ll get to test his skills against the NFL’s best defense in Philadelphia. Daniels and Washington split regular-season series with the Eagles, and Fangio threw two totally different game plans at Daniels in those matchups. Per Next Gen Stats, the Eagles blitzed Daniels at nearly triple the rate in Week 16 (35.6 percent) as they did in Week 11 (12.5 percent), and they instead tried using simulated pressures to confuse Daniels in the pocket.
If Fangio once again goes for a more blitz-heavy game plan, Washington will combat it again by dictating matchups and taking deep shots downfield.
A more likely game plan, however, would be for Fangio to dial down the blitzes and rely more heavily on split safety coverages on the back end. Two of Daniels’s three worst performances against these coverages all season came against the Eagles. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Philadelphia take an extreme approach by playing two-deep coverage shells as often as possible. In the clips below, you can see how Fangio’s unit disrupted Daniels’s timing by playing Cover 4, forcing unsuccessful scrambles and bad throws into closing windows.
Of course, no defense, even one as talented and well coached as Fangio’s, can dictate terms for everything an offense can do, so there’ll be opportunities for Washington to attack. Because Fangio likes to play those two-deep coverage shells, his defense has been susceptible to running quarterbacks over the years. The Eagles have allowed the 10th-most scrambles this season (37, tied with Tampa Bay) and lost the seventh-most EPA to scrambles. In Miami in 2023, Fangio’s defense lost the second-most EPA on quarterback scrambles—and his defenses during his three years as head coach in Denver ranked just as low.
Washington will likely put the ball in Daniels’s hands and ask him to solve their problems, and his legs should be the right answer in the NFC championship game. Daniels is first in EPA gained on third- and fourth-down scrambles, and he moves the chains 80 percent of the time.
Few rookie quarterbacks have even made it this far. Daniels deserves plenty of credit for the massive leap he’s made as a pocket passer in his rookie season and the way he’s learned to extend plays with his arm. But getting to the Super Bowl is usually reserved for the teams and quarterbacks that always have the right counterpunch, and I expect Daniels to need a transcendent rushing performance to punch his ticket and do something no rookie passer has ever accomplished. If he delivers against Fangio and this Eagles defense, his 2024-25 campaign won’t just be the greatest rookie quarterback season ever—it’ll be in the running for the greatest story of how one player changed the course of a franchise.
