If you were to draw up the “perfect” quarterback prospect, some of the boxes to check would be height, weight, athleticism and pedigree coming out of college. Ohio State’s Will Howard is 6042 and 236 pounds with slightly above average athleticism and a national championship title to his name. Perhaps a decade ago he would have been drafted over the first two days of the event. So what led him to fall all the way to No. 185 overall in the sixth round?
“I don’t know if there’s anything specific fatally as far as the flaw, it’s just inconsistency. The same description can be used on [Jalen] Milroe,” The 33rd Team’s Steve Palazzolo said via 93.7 The Fan’s PM Team on Thursday. “There was some games where his accuracy is all over the place…He will overthrow receivers over the middle of the field a couple times a game it seems.
“And his arm is not great. It’s good. I think he’s been touted as having a big arm, but it’s not great. It’s fine. And the athleticism is kind of like a lower end Daniel Jones.”
Athleticism continues to be a more and more important part of quarterbacking in today’s NFL. Almost all of the best quarterbacks right now can create plays with their legs. Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Jayden Daniels, Jalen Hurts, Jordan Love and even Patrick Mahomes are all great examples of this.
Jared Goff, Matthew Stafford, and Joe Burrow are more of your traditional pocket passers, but Burrow is an elite navigator of the pocket to extend plays with his legs and he can run for yards when needed.
Howard didn’t run as much at Ohio State because it wasn’t asked of him until certain points in the College Football Playoffs. But he did a fair amount of it at Kansas State. In 27 starts at K-State he rushed for 921 yards and 19 TDs. More importantly, he has shown the ability to manage a pocket effectively. He was only sacked 47 times in 43 starts. That is just 3.9 percent of his dropbacks compared to 10.8 percent of Shedeur Sanders’ dropbacks at Colorado, for comparison.
As for the deep accuracy and arm strength, it is by no means elite, but it was plenty good in college. At times it even looked great. Our Dave Bryan did a full contextualization of his 2024 deep passing attempts where he broke down every play in detail with video clips attached. Check that out and draw your own conclusions, but it didn’t seem to be as inconsistent as Palazzolo made it out to be.
“I think his velocity, I think his arm strength is okay, and I think that’s a big part of it as well as the inconsistency,” Palazzolo said. “If you want to dock him, his accuracy was all over the place at Kansas State and maybe it got better this year, but that’s throwing to Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka [with] Chip Kelly calling the plays. If you wanted to dock him, you would say he was more of a passenger than the driver for that Ohio State offense.”
It’s fair to point out that he was surrounded by elite talent on both sides of the Ohio State roster. But I would also point out that the same is true for Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart. They had several players drafted over the first two days at Ole Miss and Dart still went in the first round despite not even making the playoffs.
And it can’t be ignored that Howard was playing his best football in the most important moments. I don’t think anybody would argue he was a “passenger” in the playoffs, especially when he completed 13-straight passes to begin the National Championship game against Notre Dame.
Jon Gruden was very complimentary of Howard in his episode of Gruden’s QB Class prior to the draft, saying multiple times that he has the makings of a first-round talent.
All 32 teams, including the Steelers, passed on Howard multiple times until the sixth round. They obviously all saw some flaws in his game. But there are certainly a lot of reasons to love the value where they got him. Hopefully he can be the latest Day 3 quarterback to make everybody wonder how he ever fell that far.
