Big Blue View
A persistent question dogged Jaxson Dart throughout the draft process, from the Senior Bowl to when the New York Giants traded up to select him at 25th overall in the 2025 NFL Draft.
Nobody disputes that Dart has the raw tools to be a starting quarterback at the NFL level. He has good size at roughly 6-foot-2, 225 pounds, with a strong enough arm to drive the ball. Likewise, he might not be a true “dual threat”, but he can extend plays or hurt the defense with his legs.
He also put up gaudy numbers his final year at Ole Miss, throwing for 4,276 yards and 29 touchdowns to just 6 interceptions. Dart led the FBS in yards off of deep passes, was sixth in average depth of target (11.9 yards), and was fifth in Big Time Throw rate (7.1 percent).
And yet there were persistent questions as to whether that would translate to the NFL.
Draft history is littered with failed quarterback prospects who pass the eye test with flying colors, but couldn’t make the mental leap. The worry was that Dart would fall in that category.
After all, Dart put up his numbers in Lane Kiffin’s offense. It’s an undeniably effective scheme at the collegiate level, but it also exploits the wider hashmarks to use extreme spacing to stress the defense. It’s also a relatively simple scheme that doesn’t put much of a mental load on the players and uses a wide variety of wrinkles with a relatively limited number of distinct concepts.
The questions weren’t whether Dart could physically execute at the NFL level – there was never really any doubt of that. The question was whether he could process at the NFL level.
That was the same question Sean Payton had when scouting a young quarterback at Texas Tech by the name of Patrick Mahomes. Mahomes was capable of truly impressive feats of creativity, but also did so in Kliff Kingsbury’s take on the Air Raid offense. While Kingsbury’s scheme had some concepts in common with the NFL, it was much more wide open and simple than what he’d see in the pro’s.
So, Payton set out to see if he could find some way to quantify a quarterback’s processing speed.
So he looked at quarterback stats and tried to see artifacts of processing speed. Rather than look at the positive stats – raw yardage, yards per attempt, or touchdowns, all of which could be impacted by scheme or surrounding talent – he looked at the bad plays. He settled on the rate at which a quarterback was sacked, fumbled, and threw interceptions.
He added those rates together, and decided that a lower sum generally signaled a faster processor.
The formula is, P = (S+F+I)
P = Processing score
S = Sack rate
F = Fumble rate
I = Interception rate
The rates all being over total dropbacks.
To bring this back to the New York Giants and Jaxson Dart, I decided...
