The Athletic’s consensus draft board had Malik Willis going 20th overall. The website Mock Draft Database notched him as the 14th best prospect in the NFL Draft. NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah, largely considered the most dialed-in draft analyst in the universe mocked Willis to the Seattle Seahawks in the first round in a mock draft two days before the real thing took place in Las Vegas. The NFL invited Willis to the red carpet event, assuming he would be a first-round selection.
NFL.com’s draft profile for Willis projected him as a first-round pick, with this analysis: “Even if Willis fails to reach his passing potential, running ability doesn’t slump and he has the talent to produce on the ground at a level between Jalen Hurts and Lamar Jackson.”
Yet when Day 2 ended, Willis was the 86th overall pick. It turned out the NFL did not even remotely believe that Willis was the caliber of prospect that the draft reporting and film-watching world believed.
So what happened?
Willis is hardly the first player to fall from grace in the NFL Draft. Most times there is a clear explanation though. A few years ago defensive tackle Maurice Hurst slipped to the fifth round because of a heart issue. This year linebacker Nakobe Dean dropped from a projected first-round pick to the 83rd selection because he reportedly decided not to have a needed surgery.
Usually with quarterbacks, if they are projected in the first, the farthest they fall is the back half of the first round or into the second. Teddy Bridgewater, for example, was once expected to go in the top 10 and then a poor pro day drew concerns and he slid to the 32nd selection. Lamar Jackson’s stock fell during the pre-draft process and again he went 32nd. Drew Lock had first-round grades but ended up being selected in the second by Denver. Jalen Hurts was projected as a fringe first-round pick and got taken at No. 53.
Related: Vikings used Day 2 picks on players with plenty of concerns
Related: Get to know Vikings first-round pick Lewis Cine
Related: We will judge the Vikings by star power and what happens next
We could go on forever. Christian Hackenberg and his monster arm went in the second. Heck, Jimmy Clausen was estimated as the potential No. 1 pick by some and landed at the 48th pick. Ryan Mallet higher in 2011 than Willis did this year. So did Brian Brohm, Drew Stanton, Charlie Whitehurst, Andrew Walter, Josh McCown etc. in their respective years.
Willis didn’t have any old tweets unearthed. There weren’t reports of him being bad in the locker room — though both of those things have happened to projected first-round QBs in the past and it still hasn’t sent them flying down the draft board. Willis seemed to have a decent showing at the Senior Bowl. His NFL Combine workout flashed deep throws and earned a darn-near celebratory interview afterward. But when the time came, the entire league watched him and decided he wasn’t even worth a second?
And when the league decided somebody isn’t worth it, they are way more right than wrong. That doesn’t mean Willis can’t someday shine as a starter but history just went strongly against him. Since Dak Prescott bucked the trend in 2016 by turning into a star QB out of the fourth round, 10 quarterbacks have been taken in the third or fourth round and zero have sniffed a chance at becoming a starting QB. Since Russell Wilson and Kirk Cousins in 2012, it’s 1-for-24.
The selling point on Willis was his potential upside. PFF’s “big-time throws” metric ranked him at the top of the class — though their stats also showed him as the QB who turned pressures into sacks like it was going out of style. At the end of the day, the NFL didn’t believe there was any chance that upside would come to fruition. Because if there’s any chance of hitting on a QB, somebody is going to take it. The upside of getting a star at that position is simply too great.
There were numerous suitors who could have taken a swing at him. The Saints traded up for a receiver. The Steelers went with Kenny Pickett. The Vikings had a case for a project QB to the point that NFL Network was touting the idea in the buildup to Day 2. The Panthers are starting Sam Darnold, for goodness sakes. Wait, wasn’t Darnold a high upside guy with lots of warts, once upon a time? The NFL loves those guys, generally. Look at Jordan Love. Apparently Willis was nowhere close to Jordan Love?
It wasn’t just him. Desmond Ridder and Matt Corral were taken much later than expected. Nobody even picked Sam Howell. The website Grinding The Mocks projected all of them to go in the first 42 picks.
Last year the mocks were pretty close. They predicted five QBs in the top 10. That was only a few picks off. Same as Davis Mills, Kyle Trask and Kellen Mond going in the late-second or third. In 2020 Grinding the Mocks’s expectations had Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovialoa and Justin Herbert in the top eight and Jordan Love 25th and Jalen Hurts 57th. Almost dead on.
This year wasn’t even in the parking lot of the ballpark.
Did teams go out of their way to mislead draft reporters and analysts followed along with their film studies? Did the NFL actually underrate these guys and wait too long? Did the teams that picked them get amazing steals? Is next year’s QB draft so much better that nobody wanted to waste their time with middling prospects?
Should the Vikings have taken a shot on Willis just for kicks? It has to have higher upside than a guard, right?
Not if you think that it wouldn’t be any better than flushing a pick.
It might have been based on assumptions that the league was looking at QBs who run fast and have big arms as moths to flame, but it turned out that QB evaluation is a lot more nuanced than that. Teams in need of QBs might also be waiting until after the draft to get Jimmy Garoppolo or Baker Mayfield, so why bother with a swing-for-the-fences pick.
Nobody has offered an explanation.
Does this change the way we view the Vikings’ decision to extend Kirk Cousins? After all, the NFL agreed that none of these prospects were worth making them the future of the franchise. It’s not like the Vikings decided to trade down out of a falling Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson, who each still went in the first. Did they feel they had no other option than to keep Cousins and pick a QB next year because of the weakness of the class?
Maybe. One QB still did go in the first round. So there was at least one worthwhile prospect, according to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who we assume have decent evaluation skills. There’s the part about extending Cousins through 2023 to make room for defensive free agents rather than letting his contract play out and having flexibility next year. The no-trade clause limits what they can do with their veteran QB after 2022, even if they pick a QB in the magical 2023 draft. It also took them in a “competitive rebuild” direction, forcing the front office to fill holes short term because they can’t tear it all apart with a quality quarterback in place.
But it does provide them with more leeway for the decision. They were more painted into a corner than we anticipated. If five QBs had gone in the first round, it would have been easy to question the Vikings passing on a bunch of Jimmys and Joes that the league thought were potential stars. And based on history, some of them would have hit. But based on that same history, we shouldn’t expect any of this year’s crop to hit outside of Pickett.
Since the Vikings didn’t come away with their future QB, this year becomes vital to the future of Cousins, which could be determined by how well he fits with new head coach Kevin O’Connell.
And as for the draft analysis and reporting world, they’ll have until next April to figure out why their reports and opinions were so far away from the NFL’s this year.
