[RyFo18]

Look guys, we got our Geno Smith! QB Comparables:

Ben Roethlisberger
Andrew Luck
Kyle Orton
Philip Rivers
Matt Leinart
Kevin Kolb
Geno Smith

source

Just a quick note here on the news that Chase Daniel is going to be backing up Alex Smith in Kansas City. I remembered that Daniel’s name had popped up in a QB screen with some other guys who had all started multiple games in the NFL, so I thought I would publish that information on the off-chance that it’s interesting.


When I was running QB comps for Geno Smith, I saw Daniel’s name in a group that was pretty impressive for a college QB similarity set. Trying to project QBs to the NFL is a difficult task whether you’re a scout or a spreadsheet jockey. The NFL hasn’t been very good at figuring out how to draft QBs, and even algorithmic projection systems like Football Outsiders’ Lewin Career Forecast only even tries with QBs chosen on the first three rounds of the draft. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be interesting to look anyway. Also, half of the reason that I continue to look at college QBs is because I hope that I can eventually figure out a system for projecting QBs. Based on the velocity information that I’ve seen at Ourlads, I do think that if we had velocity information for every prospect we would be a lot closer to having a serviceable QB model. If you follow that link you’ll see that Daniel was recorded at 57 MPH, which is the upper end of the range.

In any case, here is Chase Daniel’s name with some guys that he was pretty similar to in terms of college numbers. The common threads that run through this group are as follows: high completion percentage, high number of career college starts, great TD/INT ratio both in their final year and throughout their careers, high number of yards/game in their final season. One area that you’ll note that Daniel is different from these guys is that he’s quite a bit smaller. Also, he doesn’t like hot tubs nearly as much as one guy on the list.