2024 NFL Draft Scouting Reports: J.J. McCarthy, Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams

This is what we’ve been waiting for, fantasy football enthusiasts. The NFL Draft is under way, and we finally get to see where the rookie prospects are going to launch their professional careers. And NFL Draft landing spots allow us to start to zero in on fantasy football and dynasty rookie draft pick values.

As the players are selected, let’s dive into what our NFL Draft expert, Thor Nystrom, has to say for each pick made. Here you can find all of Thor’s 2024 NFL Draft Rankings and player comparisons. Below we’ll dive into a few notable names expected to be selected this week.

Fantasy Football Rookie Draft Outlook

Thor’s NFL Draft Profile & Player Comp

1. Caleb Williams (USC)

6011/214 | RAS: N/A
Player comparison: Aaron Rodgers

Caleb Williams is an electric playmaker with a huge creative bent to his game. Supremely confident, he believes in his ability and what he’s seeing to a ludicrous degree. When things are going well, Williams is as dangerous as they come. When they aren’t, his propensity to turn down easy profits hunting for explosive play bogs down drives.

Williams is a very good athlete with a live arm. He has effortless velocity and doesn’t need both feet under him to zing it on the money to any sector. He is very good at throwing on the run. Some of his biggest jaw-dropping throws have come without both feet under him, and some have even come with one of them off the ground.

Williams’ tape is littered with accuracy, touch and placement. He can make all the throws, and he knows it. As a thrower, he’s audacious without being reckless. Williams only threw 14 career interceptions over 1,099 attempts.

Williams is extremely dangerous out of the pocket. He consistently puts defenders into conflict and coaxes them into bad decisions. He loves getting out to the perimeter and throwing on the run. Williams can also tuck and move the chains in a blink when the look isn’t there.

This makes him especially dangerous in the red zone, where he was elite in college. Williams rushed for 27 TD over two-and-a-half seasons as a starter. If he doesn’t like what he’s seeing, he’ll try to steal the touchdown himself.

I love the way he moves in the pocket, shuffling and sliding around to manipulate angles and keep a halo of safety around him. Pressure does not sneak up on Williams, who consistently makes pass-rushers miss. He’s very difficult to corral, even for free rushers.

Williams’ prerogative to extend plays is a two-way street. He has a highlight reel full of electric plays out of structure. Still, he has a bad habit of extending plays into a bridge-to-nowhere plank, leading to stalled-out drives or slap-the-ball-out fumbles. Williams fumbled 32 times over 35 career games.

Last season, Williams posted the highest pressure-to-sack ratio (23.2%) of my top-20 quarterbacks ranked in this class. That was way up from the year before, when Williams had a solid 16.0% pressure-to-sack ratio. Williams won the Heisman that year while throwing for 4,537 yards with 52 total TDs. Williams regressed a bit on a struggling USC team that went 7-5 in 2023. His play under pressure, elite in 2022 (85.1 PFF grade), utterly devolved in 2023 (41.6).

You can only blame so much of that on his offensive line, as Williams’ play style forces linemen to hold blocks longer and can sometimes scramble him into corners he cannot escape from. Williams led the FBS with 50 dropbacks in which the ball didn’t come out within six seconds of the snap. His 3.16-second average throw time was second-highest in this draft class, .01 of a second behind UTEP’s Gavin Hardison, who reads the field like it’s covered in Sanskrit.

Williams actually improved in this area after averaging 3.44 seconds per attempt during his outstanding 2022 season. Further improvement will be necessary to become an NFL star, as taking that long to throw in the NFL is not viable. Last year – and I’m sorry to have to mention this, Bears fans – Justin Fields led the NFL with a 3.39 average time to throw. That, plus Fields’ elevated pressure-to-sack rate – the two are correlated – was the biggest red flag of Fields’ evaluation coming out of Ohio State.

The path for Williams to improve entails mastering in-structure timing routes. The bad news is he did very little of that at USC. The good news is that it’s theoretically coachable, whereas Williams’ out-of-structure magic is not. But the fact remains that, at present, Caleb Williams doesn’t throw receivers open; he buys time until they are. There will be moments in every NFL game when that inclination is appropriate. There will be many more when he is going to be asked to manufacture completions in-rhythm from within the pocket.

If Williams busts, the reason will be because he never becomes more than a see-it, throw-it quarterback.

The question comes down to this: “Is Williams using scrambling as a crutch to give his receivers time to get out into space and break off routes, where he can easily identify them as open before releasing because he is incapable of anticipating? Or was that more a function of USC head coach Lincoln Riley letting Williams play playground ball because no player was more talented on any field that Williams stepped onto?”

Williams’ ceiling is the highest of any quarterback in this class. He has legitimate special ability. You don’t have to squint to envision him as a top-five NFL quarterback. Because of that, he’s my QB1. But there is risk in the profile. Williams needs his Andy Reid in the NFL, someone who can teach him how to differentiate between the times it’s appropriate to put on the superhero cape and when it’s best to take the short profit and move on to the next play.

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2. Jayden Daniels (LSU)

6033/205 | RAS: N/A
Player comparison: Randall Cunningham

Jayden Daniels brings two superpowers to the pros: He will, from Day 1, be one of the most dangerous running threats the NFL has ever seen at the position. He also has a downfield cannon with a feathery touch. Both of these things will translate, embedding a reasonable floor and the makings of a theoretically sky-high ceiling.

Originally signed by Herm Edwards at Arizona State to be the face of that program, Daniels’ development as a passer had stagnated by Year 3. He transferred to LSU, where his career was salvaged by Brian Kelly and the Tigers’ new staff.

The biggest thing LSU did to improve Daniels’ game in 2022 was to get him to take care of the ball and reset him back to factory default settings. Following a 10/10 TD/INT rate in 2021 at ASU, Daniels posted a 17/3 TD/INT ratio at LSU in 2022. This was more in line with the two years before that at ASU when Daniels posted an aggregate 22/3 TD/INT rate.

In 2023, everything came together during Daniels’ national coming out party. He finished No. 1 in the FBS in PFF deep-passing grade and No. 3 in big-time throw rate while finishing 98th percentile in avoiding negative plays.

He had learned how to take care of the ball while becoming hyper-aggressive in situations that called for it, that ever-rare dichotomy of explosion and discretion. Combine that with his absurd rushing output – his 2,329 run yards the past two seasons were nearly 600 yards higher than the next-highest quarterback – and you can see why he won the Heisman.

Last season, Daniels bent the spatial rules of the football field. He forced opposing defensive coordinators to decide where they were going to rob Peter to pay Paul schematically. Whatever they decided, Daniels made them pay.

Do you spy on Daniels to contain him behind the line of scrimmage? If so, how are you going to keep a second safety deep to protect against the long ball? Do you try to speed things up by ramping up the blitz? You better get home quickly if you do that. Daniels was PFF’s highest-graded quarterback against the blitz in 2023.

I love Daniels’ snap-decision profit calculator. When he has the best of it, he pushes all his chips to the middle of the table. If it’s not, he will seamlessly revert to taking whatever profit is available to him. He doesn’t bail the pocket until he has to; Daniels is a full-field reader who is not looking to pull the down until he has to. But when he does, he shoots into the second level before defensive backs realize he’s broken containment.

Daniels’ pocket management has grown by leaps and bounds as the game has slowed down for him over the past few years. He has quiet feet and a sturdy platform under him as he calmly surveys his options. His 82.2 PFF pressure grade last year ranks No. 2 in this class. Daniels’ accuracy and placement are high-level at all three levels.

The concerns about Daniels are his fifth-year breakout, his rail-thin frame with his propensity to take big hits while running, his lack of work attacking the middle of the field and his high pressure-to-sack ratio. He must learn to slide in the NFL or he will get hurt.

Last season, per PFF, Daniels was only 9-for-18 with a 2/1 TD/INT rate between the hashes 10-20 yards down the field. This makes him a tricky projection to offensive systems such as Minnesota’s, which regularly peppers the middle of the field. It’s unclear whether Daniels is uncomfortable with this sort of thing or whether it was simply the constitution of LSU’s attack.

The issue that has been discussed most this offseason is his pressure-to-sack ratio. We’ll start with the positive: It improved from a truly ghastly 30.8% in 2022 to a far more manageable 20.2% in 2023 (Drake Maye territory). But it absolutely needs to keep improving. This is the last frontier of Daniels’ renaissance as a player – mastering decision-making under duress.

I’m not as concerned by the fifth-year breakout as some others are. Daniels was a highly-touted recruit with obvious ability who played all five seasons and showed consistent improvement outside of the bizarre 2021 outlier. It’s more likely that his leap up last season is indicative of more improvement to come than it being a mirage. The arrow is pointing up developmentally, and Daniels was already the nation’s best QB last year.

Check out more NFL Draft profiles and player comps from Thor in our 2024 NFL Draft Guide

3. J.J. McCarthy (Michigan)

6024/219 | RAS: N/A
Player comparison: Rich Gannon

J.J. McCarthy emerges from Jim Harbaugh’s NFL factory, where he just won a national title as a 20-year-old third-year junior. McCarthy displaced Cade McNamara as QB1 as a sophomore. McNamara had previously taken the job of Joe Milton III, another top-10 QB prospect in this class.

McCarthy is a good athlete (ran the sixth-fastest 3-cone at the NFL Combine at 17 pounds heavier than his Michigan listing) with a big arm (his 61 mph max-velocity throw at the Combine was one mph away from the record). Importantly, these two things work in conjunction on the field.

McCarthy had a 72.3% completion percentage in 2023. When scrambling, he completed an absurd 71.4%. McCarthy keeps his eyes up with his upper body cocked to throw and his feet under him while he maneuvers around. He doesn’t lose accuracy on the move because he takes his mechanics with him. He fires frozen ropes to all three sectors on the move.

One of the most encouraging aspects of McCarthy’s 2023 breakout season was his work under pressure, a problem area as a first-year starter in 2022. He has the lateral agility and acceleration to get out of sticky situations, and he’s comfortable ad-libbing. The improvisational aspect of McCarthy’s game could be special at the next level.

McCarthy is a smart, tough player. His toughness is a key part of his NFL evaluation. One of the rarest traits you see on quarterback film – college or NFL – is a quarterback who doesn’t fade away from hits or brace for them while throwing. McCarthy is a player who steps into his throw every time and eats the biggest possible hit to make the most accurate pass possible.

After sometimes struggling to move off his first read as a true sophomore in 2022, McCarthy’s 2023 tape showed a young prospect becoming increasingly comfortable moving to his second and third options. He still needs work in this area, but his improvement was encouraging.

McCarthy also has gotten very good at timing concepts, a key component in Jim Harbaugh’s pro-style system. He mercilessly attacks the middle of the field, a skill the NFL loves. Last season, McCarthy had the most completions in the intermediate range over the middle of the top quarterbacks in this class. He finished with an absurd 85.6% adjusted completion percentage and 91.2 passing grade between the hashes while ranking No. 17 in the FBS with 97 such attempts.

The narrative was flipped on McCarthy to begin this process. That narrative focused on his counting stats. Those were skewed by the 11 Michigan leads of 21+ points in 15 games that led to McCarthy not taking a fourth-quarter snap in seven games last fall. McCarthy’s stats were also not inflated by empty-calorie first-down screens, nor were they pumped up by pouring it on against bad defenses. When taking out screen passes, only one quarterback in this class had nearly half of his passing attempts come against top-25 defenses: McCarthy (49.7%).

McCarthy’s per-pass and high-leverage stats sparkle. He is the only quarterback in this draft class who finished 72nd-percentile or higher in all seven of these PFF categories last season: standard dropback percentile, at or the beyond sticks percentile, avoids negative plays percentile, under pressure percentile, outside the pocket percentile, third/fourth down percentile and positively graded throws percentile. No other quarterback in this class was 54th percentile or higher in all seven of those categories.

McCarthy does, however, need to improve his sideline accuracy. Last year, he managed to rank No. 5 in the FBS in catchable throw rate despite finishing No. 48 outside the numbers. When he’s off, it’s due to his tendency on those throws to take an exaggerated lead step and then swing his upper body on the follow-through. Michigan’s offense didn’t feature as many of these throws as those of the other top quarterbacks, so some level of natural improvement should come through experience and mechanical tweaking.

Lastly, McCarthy could stand to modulate his touch on certain throws. What he does really well is hum tight spirals at high velocity, but he will improve as a passer if he learns to trade heat for trajectory or touch on throws that call for them.

McCarthy is 61-3 as a starter since high school (he went 27-1 and won a national title as Michigan’s QB1). He’s a winner who former coaches and teammates fawn over. Harbaugh, now the Chargers’ head coach, believes McCarthy is the best prospect in this entire class.

McCarthy offers a stellar analytical profile and projectable traits. He has a rare skillset to play out of structure, proving he could play within structure at Michigan. He’s early on the development curve, with an unteachable aspect to his game that, if fully realized, will make him a legitimate menace at the next level. His floor and ceiling have both been undersold. He’s a worthy top-five bet in April’s draft.