Cam Ward Leads 2025 QBASE Projections

ESPN Radio: Unsportsmanlike host Evan Cohen once said that NFL teams should draft a quarterback when they want one, so they will never need one. A corollary to this idea is that teams should avoid drafting a quarterback they do not want, even if they need one. This scenario resembles that in Brian Billick and James Dale’s book The Q Factor: The Elusive Search for the Next Great NFL Quarterback, in which the 2003 Baltimore Ravens overlooked Kyle Boller’s accuracy-related red flags and drafted him 19th overall.

Multiple teams have taken that advice this offseason by filling their quarterback vacancies before the draft. The New York Giants signed Russell Wilson while the New York Jets signed Justin Fields The Las Vegas Raiders traded for Geno Smith and the Seattle Seahawks replaced Smith with Sam Darnold. The Pittsburgh Steelers are the favorites to sign Aaron Rodgers. However, the Tennessee Titans and Cleveland Browns, picking first and second overall, will likely head into draft day still needing a quarterback. The Giants and Raiders may also take a quarterback in the top 10, since Wilson and Smith are not long-term solutions.

All that would be fine if this year’s quarterback class were like last year’s, led by Heisman winners Caleb Williams and Jayden Daniels, along with top-12 picks Drake Maye, Michael Penix Jr., J.J. McCarthy and Bo Nix. But while Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders headline this year’s class, they are not as highly regarded as Williams or Daniels. The rest of the class is even less highly regarded and comes with question marks we address in our projections. Therefore, quarterback-needy teams may have to settle for a non-first round prospect or wait until 2026 to draft their quarterback of the future.

With that background, we present this year’s QBASE 2.0 projections for the 2025 quarterback class. QBASE 2.0 is a combination of Andrew Healy’s (2015) original QBASE model and Alexandre Olbrecht and Jeremy Rosen’s (2018) functional mobility model. It factors in a quarterback’s college passing statistics adjusted for the quality of his teammates and opponents, plus how many years he started in college. It also incorporates his rushing ability, and while it rewards improvements over time, it penalizes one-year wonders.

The quarterbacks below are listed in order of ranking on a consensus big board, and interpreting each quarterback’s projection is straightforward. A value of Total Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement per Attempt (TDYAR/A) is replacement-level, whereas any value over 1.5 is indicative of a Hall of Fame career. We run 50,000 simulations to provide a distribution of the number of times that each quarterback falls within a particular range. Here are our 2025 projections.