What if the NFL doesn't like the rookie crop of QBs?
How the Seahawks plans must change in that event
In Tuesday’s Seaside Joe, I outlined some of the obvious reasons that a general manager’s job is harder than trying to predict the outcome of a draft by running through countless mocks. Still, Seaside Joe will read and watch a lot of NFL mock drafts in the next four months. What better way to pass your time on the shore?
I want to call attention to a YouTuber who makes it into my suggestions almost everyday for the simple fact that he uploads practically every other day. Hail Mary Sports is a channel with less than 10,000 subs, but I appreciate the fact that Alex Barbour makes independent decisions based on his own analysis and that many of the rankings on his personal big board are vastly different than the average NFL draft account.
Case in point, Alex’s number two overall prospect in the entire draft—Missouri edge rusher Isaiah McGuire—is the consensus 114th overall prospect at NFLMockDraftDatabase and projected as a day three pick. Some would argue that de-legitimizes Alex’s rankings, but I feel the opposite. Whether he is proven right or wrong on McGuire, it takes guts to push against popular narratives and I can respect that more than I can respect most analysts in a world populated by copycats.
And Alex doesn’t mock McGuire to the Seahawks in the top-five or anything. As long as there is an awareness of what others are saying and where you differ, there’s nothing wrong with being different than others. Imagine the ridicule an analyst would have faced for arguing that Maxx Crosby could be the top edge rusher in 2019—even though Crosby had an elite combine, ideal size, and dominant college stats.
The biggest hurdle many prospects must face is beating down a popular narrative.
At no position do narratives control the conversation of the draft more so than at quarterback.
That’s definitely one reason why mock drafts usually tend to overrate the quarterbacks in a given class. I compared the 2022 quarterback class to the 2013 iteration because I felt that none of the prospects really belonged in the first round, but similar to nine years earlier, mock drafts would put four or five on day one. For me, I had Kenny Pickett going in the first round and expected Malik Willis, Desmond Ridder to go in round three. Mock drafts often had Willis and Ridder in the top-10.
This sounds like something that is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but those of you who were here last year can back me up on this. And back in 2013, names like Ryan Nassib, Mike Glennon, and even Tyler Wilson were being projected as first round—sometimes top-10—picks.
It sure does make for better mock draft intrigue when you can push more quarterbacks into your article because quarterbacks drive clicks, page views, comments, and commentary. (Case in point: Welcome to Seaside Joe!)
I have an article planned in which I will again own up to some predictions and analysis that I got wrong last year. Perhaps one admission will have to be that I expected teams to forego quarterback options in the 2022 draft because the 2023 class was going to be a lot better.
Well, it’s not a lot better. It’s better certainly. But without Bryce Young, himself even a controversial top-five pick for some of you, the 2022 and 2023 quarterback classes may be difficult to distinguish. I expected certain players to keep improving, but they got worse. I expected many more quarterbacks to declare, and they didn’t. The intrigue of more NIL money is partly to thank, but the truth is that most of them, including Bo Nix, just are not good enough.
We might be able to attribute at least part of the reason for that back to NIL money. It used to be that you had to give it your all in college so that you could be drafted into the NFL, less you risk getting nothing. Now you can make millions before you do anything.
It’s always “too early” to do an NFL Mock Draft. We could be minutes before the draft begins and you’re still going to be mostly wrong. But doing a mock draft in mid-January means opening yourself up to be really, really wrong about team needs because on top of many other issues, you’re making projections before some of these teams have even hired head coaches (including three of the top-four picks right now), before free agency, and for today’s article, before these teams might have already secured a starting quarterback for the foreseeable future.
The Seattle Seahawks are set to pick fifth and 20th in the first round of the 2023 NFL Draft and we’ve been assuming that at least two, perhaps three quarterbacks would go in the top-five. This impacts the Seahawks in many ways, including which players will still be on the board when they’re on the clock, how interested teams actually are in trading up with the Seahawks, if Seattle should consider trading up, and how Pete Carroll and John Schneider should approach their own quarterback situation in the draft.
That’s what I want to address today: What if teams just don’t like this quarterback class very much? How will that impact the next four months? It’s not purely speculation that exists in another dimension. This is not the strong class that we expected it to be and though we can never count out teams from being “overexuberant” on quarterback prospects anyway, the GMs who need quarterbacks right now may not be willing to take that risk on a rookie.
I’ll start by talking about the QB class itself.