After weeks of speculation over whether he would opt for another year of college football or toss his name into an iffy quarterback class, we have our answer: Quinn Ewers is NFL bound. Let's dive in.
Background
A native Texan, Ewers grew up in Southlake, TX, a Dallas suburb of choice for the well-heeled. Ewers wasted no time burnishing his folk hero status, famously being offered a scholarship by former NFL quarterback Graham Harrell upon his return to the Lone Star State as the offensive coordinator for the University of North Texas - when Ewers was in sixth grade.
Ascending to the starting quarterback job for national powerhouse Carroll Senior High as a sophomore, Ewers immediately lit it up: 4,003 yards and 45 TDs through the air, with a scant 3 interceptions and a sparkling 72.4% completion percentage, leading the Dragons to a runner-up finish in the 6A state finals. Despite missing nearly half of his junior season due to injury Ewers was perhaps even better as a junior, passing for 2,442 yards and 28 TDs across just eight games in service of another another Texas 6A playoff berth. Having dominated at one of the very highest levels of high school football in the nation, Ewers had established himself as the crown jewel of the 2021 recruiting class.
After spending a season at the very bottom of the Ohio State depth chart Ewers transferred back to the University of Texas, to which he had originally committed the year prior. As the face of a resurgent Longhorns program, the second-year freshman helped second-year head coach Steve Sarkisian to begin turning things around in Austin. With Bijan Robinson in hand Ewers wasn't asked to do much, but he managed to make enough plays to enable the Longhorns to score 34 points a game on offense and get Xavier Worthy to 760 yards and 9 TDs.
Ewers hit his stride in 2023. The loss of running backs Bijan Robinson and Roschon Johnson, combined with the arrival of Georgia transfer Adonai Mitchell put the onus on the quarterback to spearhead a change in offensive identity, and the sophomore Ewers responded with 3,479 yards (289.9/game) and a 22:6 TD-to-INT ratio, leading Texas to a Big 12 championship in their farewell season in the conference and a No. 3 ranking in the final AP poll.
The 2024 campaign was poised to be perhaps both Ewers' final season of college football and his most challenging yet: a mass exodus of NFL caliber talent erased all of the most familiar faces from the previous season; Xavier Worthy, Jonathon Brooks, Adonai Mitchell, Ja'Tavion Sanders, and Jordan Whittington were all taken in last spring's draft. Combined with making their long-awaited SEC debut and the long shadow being cast by Arch Manning behind him, the stage was set for Ewers to potentially crater. And while they did ultimately come up short of a national championship berth thanks in large part to a disastrous late redzone turnover by Ewers, the Longhorns won 13 games and came up just short of winning the vaunted SEC, and Ewers overcame the loss of every significant playmaker from the year before to throw for 31 TDs, comfortably a personal best (although his passing yardage, completion percentage and interception totals all took on water - welcome to the SEC).
Tape
As you'd expect for a guy with his pedigree and production, there's a lot to like when you look at Ewers' film. He has an effortless, lightning quick release, and uses a natural three-quarters arm slot to generate nice exit velocity on throws in the short to intermediate ranges of the field without needing to have his feet set. And while he's never gonna be mistaken for Lamar Jackson nor even Daniel Jones as a runner, Ewers has enough scrappy athleticism to maneuver in the pocket and should be able to scoot out toward the sideline for extra time at least occasionally in the NFL; he's won a few footraces to the pylon down near the goal line.
Ewers has been at his best as a Longhorn off of play action, where he was consistently able to come directly off of the play fake onto his first read and deliver accurate strikes from sideline to sideline; generally great-to-excellent at hitting receivers moving across the field in stride, hugely important in current NFL landscape. Ewers shows a knack for not just leading receivers but flat out throwing to a spot, especially on deep balls; Ewers certainly doesn't have a howitzer, but he's largely made up for it by throwing high, steep 'moon balls' that allow receivers to stack their defender and run under the throw when Ewers sees his receiver has his man beat. Ewers definitely has a nice feel for altering trajectory/velocity to allow his playmakers to go be playmakers.
But I think Ewers has more of a knack for extending plays and making things happen off-script than people are giving him credit for, and those traits may well prove to be his most marketable ones in the NFL. Ewers is good at feeling pressure and hanging in the pocket for as long as he can, yet he also has the athleticism to bail and re-establish a second pocket without taking his eyes off his receivers. Ewers can also get rid of the ball abruptly from virtually any body position or situation; flat footed in the pocket, on the run, spinning dump-off screens, the works. Three and four-yard completions aren't exactly front-page news, but having a tool for mitigating the negative plays that can be absolute drive killers could ingratiate Ewers to NFL coaches.
Now for the bad: Ewers is not what comes to mind physically when one hears the term "five-star quarterback"; he's a sinewy (and probably a touch generous) 6'2" and 210 pounds and looks undersized even in the rib armor that a lot of quarterbacks wear these days. This lack of ideal height exacerbates the problem of his throwing motion, which is a decidedly low-slung snap of the football out of his hand. Not an issue with a pristine pocket with no pressure up the middle, but I'd wager that batted balls are going to be an issue early on. And while Ewers' natural arm angle lends itself to a nice velocity-to-windup time ratio especially on shorter throws, the trade off when attacking more than 15 yards downfield is that those throws run out of gas before they reach the receiver a lot of the time; he struggles to throw a tight spiral on these throws, leading to some 'dying quail' action on a lot of his deep shots. Tony Romo famously mostly got away with this sort of thing, but he was the exception that proved the rule.
But the biggest knock on Ewers is that his ability to interpret defensive looks and make pre-snap reads and adjustments is not believed to be pro ready, and considering he was a three-year starter in Sarkisian's pro-style offense that suggests his abilities in this area may already be as good as they're going to get. In 2024 Ewers consistently had strong outings against the Floridas and Arizona States of the world, but when Georgia made it a priority to show him confusing and deceptive pre-snap alignments and mixed man/zone coverages they were able to consistently move him off of his first read and slow his processing time way down, leading to Ewers eating several sacks and throwing three interceptions between their two meetings this fall. The book on how to cripple Ewers is most definitely out there, and he'll have a lot to prove to NFL teams in the next couple months that it isn't the definitive text.
Projection & Fit
Let's get the obvious out of the way: the 2024 quarterback class, this ain't. The University of Miami's Cam Ward and Colorado's Shedeur Sanders are the only two QB prospects with a snowball's chance of going in the top 10 this year. But that may create a bit of a premium for 2025's next-best options, as there is certainly no shortage of NFL GMs under immense pressure to find difference-makers at the position. It appears to be between Ewers and Alabama's Jalen Milroe to be the third quarterback off the board this year, and considering both will likely be Day 2 picks it could just come down to scheme fit. While Milroe and his Newtonian athletic traits is the better bet to see his draft stock soar between the Combine and the draft, Ewers offers better scheme compatibility with more teams without having to be 'built around' specifically. Considering their lack of anything resembling a succession plan at quarterback, their recent run of success finding quality contributors on offense later in drafts and their head coach's friendliness with Steve Sarkisian I'd be inclined to send Ewers to the Rams in the late second round. But Los Angeles traded that pick to the Panthers to move up and grab Braden Fiske last year and don't currently pick until 90th overall on Day 2.
The Rams will be my guess if Ewers slides as far as the middle of the 3rd round, but for now I'm sending him to South Beach. In Miami, both GM Chris Grier and HC Mike McDaniel have a unique mandate to fortify the position despite having what they believe to be their long-term plan already in hand, and paid. Franchise signal-caller Tua Tagovailoa's well-publicized concussion struggles and a late season recurrence of a hip issue that briefly put his playing career in question has Dolphins fans (and presumably ownership) clamoring for a (much) better fallback option in 2025 than Skylar Thompson and Snoop Huntley. McDaniel shifted the Dolphins fairly hard toward an offense built around short passes for much of 2024, and while that was largely in response to massive run game and offensive line deficiencies there figures to be some carryover of those concepts going forward, and it's an area where Ewers has mostly shined.
While he certainly has physical limitations and major questions about his ability to process at NFL speed, Ewers has ample starting experience and familiarity with pro style concepts and terminology, as well as just enough zip on his fastball and improvisational skills to intrigue teams. He'll never be a superstar, but a multi-year run as an NFL starter also isn't out of the question.
Draft: 2nd round, 48th overall to the Miami Dolphins
Ceiling: Jeff Garcia
Floor: Mac Jones
Next Up: Shedeur Sanders
—Luke Wilson