2024 NFL Draft: QBOPS previews J.J. McCarthy

He might be a Viking, but would that be a good thing or a bad thing for Minnesota’s NFC North rivals?

It’s officially QBOPS Time!

There are no major changes to QBOPS and QWOBA this year, as they continue to work quite well. That has been especially true when paired with a few other stats to provide additional context, like pressure to sack ratio, turnover worthy play percentage, and a new addition this year, screen-to-deep ratio. I’ve compiled and color-coded several metrics for the draft class of quarterbacks here, and you can see the full QBOPS/QWOBA rankings here.

And of course, if you’re new to QBOPS, QWOBA, WROPBS, SOD, WRGPC, or what any of this is, please see the glossary.

Let’s talk about one of the most controversial quarterbacks in the class: JJ McCarthy. The next post I write will be on Drake Maye for some contrast, and I’m probably a good person to discuss both because my numbers (and yes, my tape-watching) generally support what’s happened so far with these two: namely, that McCarthy has moved up draft boards, while Maye has moved slightly down.

First, let’s do some table-setting. I like this quarterback class a lot, and I won’t be surprised at all if some of the lower-tier prospects like Bo Nix, Michael Penix, or Joe Milton become solid NFL quarterbacks. No one will be surprised to see four prospects go in the top ten or to see six go in the first round, and ultimately, my analysis here is just splitting hairs. While my numbers like McCarthy and have some issues with Maye, I would still draft Maye over McCarthy if I were in charge of a front office. Numbers — even sophisticated, predictive numbers — are only a small part of the case for or against a prospect. I know many smart scouts and analysts personally and read the work of many more who I don’t know. The consensus among people I trust is that Maye is an outstanding prospect, and that McCarthy has some tendencies and issues that can hold him back. Ignoring those people would be a mistake.

But I’m still higher on McCarthy than many and lower on Maye than most, and I think my analysis does reflect why consensus has moved that way as well. Let’s take a look at what exactly is going on here.

J.J. McCarthy, QB, Michigan

2023 Stats: 240/332, 72.3%, 2991 yards (9 Y/A), 22 TDs, 4 INTs
QBOPS: .427/.611/.1.037. QWOBA+: 121.

Why should you care about JJ McCarthy? The rumor is that the Vikings are extremely interested. If he were to fall down the board, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see the Lions take a shot.

First and foremost, McCarthy is one of the youngest QB prospects in this draft, even younger than Maye. Quarterbacks who both are young and show college success for multiple seasons are much more likely to work out in the NFL. Indeed, youth is one of the biggest selling points for Maye and McCarthy over Jayden Daniels, who will turn 24 this year, or Bo Nix, who already has. Younger quarterbacks are more likely to develop physically and issues like poor mechanics are easier to fix.

But aside from youth, there are several other positives for McCarthy on par with the best of this class on a per-play basis. He is extremely similar to Oregon’s Bo Nix when using raw, unadjusted numbers. McCarthy finished with a 1.037 QBOPS and a 122 unadjusted QWOBA. Nix finished with a 1.064 and a 132 unadjusted QWOBA. Keep the word “unadjusted” in mind, because while they’re similar on the surface, McCarthy’s performance was far more impressive.

First and foremost, McCarthy had the fourth-highest completion percentage in college football this season. Two of the quarterbacks that finished ahead of him, UAB’s Jacob Zeno and Florida’s Graham Mertz, accomplished this by checking down on virtually every play. The leader in completion percentage this year was Nix. McCarthy finished 39^th in yards per completion (out of 105 qualifiers), while Nix finished 42^nd. Although they’re in the same ballpark, let’s start turning that “unadjusted” into adjusted.

McCarthy put up these results against the third-hardest defensive schedule of any quarterback in college football, while Nix faced the 56^th-hardest schedule. In fact, McCarthy played the most difficult schedule of any draft prospect this season, and the numbers he managed to put up were truly impressive in that context.

McCarthy was throwing to talented receivers like Roman Wilson and Cornelius Johnson, and we should take that into account as well. After all, it’s easier to succeed at quarterback when your receivers can help you out. The average target from McCarthy found a receiver with an average PFF grade of 73.91 (the league average is 66). That’s very high, but this class is odd in that almost every quarterback prospect in this draft was playing with multiple studs. Bo Nix had the second-best receiving corps (76.53) in all of football per PFF grade, followed by Michael Penix (74.74) and then Jayden Daniels (74.3), all higher than McCarthy. Caleb Williams and especially Drake Maye had drastically inferior receivers, but we’ll get to that later.

In addition to having great receivers, Nix also benefitted from the actual work of his receivers, in terms of YAC, more than any other quarterback in this draft. Nix gained 745 passing yards on screens, the highest amount for any prospect in the draft, versus just 999 yards on deep throws. His “screen/deep ratio” of 43% is behind only Jordan Travis and Joe Milton, his 4.1% Big Time Throw Rate only eclipsed that of Spencer Rattler, and his ADOT of 6.8 was the lowest of any quarterback on my draft sheet by far. McCarthy had just 134 screen yards and a 16% screen/deep ratio. While Nix was throwing the ball 6.8 yards per throw on average, McCarthy was hitting a robust 9.4. McCarthy’s receivers also dropped 7.7% of his targets, compared to 7% for Nix.

McCarthy played with slightly worse receivers than Nix, against a much harder schedule than Nix, threw the ball downfield more often than Nix, and put up almost identical accuracy numbers as well as better explosive play numbers. Once we adjust for these factors, McCarthy’s 121 QWOBA+ eclipses Nix’s 117 and every other quarterback in the class except Jayden Daniels and his amazing 139. There are four quarterbacks in the class to put up consecutive seasons with a QWOBA+ over 115: Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Bo Nix, and McCarthy.

Finally, McCarthy’s 16.8% pressure-to-sack ratio is well within the acceptable range for NFL quarterbacks. Nix and Michael Penix lead the prospect class at 7.6%, while that number is somewhat alarming for Caleb Williams (23.2%) and Daniels (20.2%). Once you start to see this number routinely over 20%, it’s an issue. McCarthy is completely fine under pressure.

So, what’s wrong with McCarthy?

I think there are a couple of real concerns, a few fake concerns, and some that land in the middle. The biggest real concern centers around his outside deep passing. McCarthy’s big plays tended towards the middle of the field, and while there is nothing wrong with that, at the next level he’ll need to be able to extend defenses on the outside. PFF charts a statistic they call “big time throw rate” and McCarthy’s 5.9, while respectable, (Caleb Williams put up a 6.2), is far below Daniels (8.4), Maye (7.5) and Penix (7.3), and his limited outside passing is a big reason why. It’s a real problem, but I suspect it’s a fixable, one for one big reason: arm strength.

One of the most difficult things about scouting quarterback is, bizarrely, getting accurate measures on arm strength. It’s easy to see guys like Drake Maye throwing darts but, outside of the elite QBs, arm strength grades tend to be wildly inconsistent. I personally think that McCarthy has a well above average arm (I’d put him at a 60 on baseball’s 20/80 scale. For context, Josh Allen/Brett Favre are 80s, Love a 70. Many backups, like post shoulder-injury Matt Flynn land in the 30s. Anything above a 50 is fine for an NFL quarterback, and the Chad Pennington-line is somewhere in the 40s.) He outthrew everyone at the combine except Joe Milton (75-80) in terms of raw power, and his issues throwing outside seem much more like mechanical flaws than lack of an ability to drive the ball.

I know that since I write about the Packers, I see Jordan Love in everyone, but with McCarthy I think there’s a lot of truth to the comparison. He doesn’t have Love’s raw arm strength, as few do, but his outside throws look a lot like early Love throws. Those throws primarily fail on ball placement and repeatable mechanics, not lack of power, and given his combination of raw power and demonstrated accuracy over the middle of the field, there’s no reason he can’t develop a better outside game.

McCarthy also tends to throw certain intermediate passes on too much of a line and with too much velocity, typical of a prospect who trusts his arm too much. He doesn’t layer the field particularly well. For a taller prospect, he did have quite a few balls batted down. This too, seems mostly like a sin of youth more than anything else, and learning when to shake off a fastball is just part of quarterback development.

These concerns are legitimate, and while McCarthy made plenty of big plays and had a respectable ADOT, his big time throw percentage was pedestrian. It’s also clear that Michigan understood these limitations as well, which leads us to one big criticism of McCarthy that’s a bit overblown. Michigan ran a very quarterback friendly offense, featuring a solid running game, a lot of play-action, and some easy, scripted middle-of-the-field throws.

That said, there are a lot of ways to run a QB-friendly offense in college, and they’re not all created equally. The Air Raid varieties lean heavily on exploiting the college hash marks and the space they create to force defenses into impossible situations. Michigan, on the other hand, wasn’t that different than any number of the Shanahan-based systems in the NFL, and there’s a good chance that McCarthy will land somewhere reasonably familiar. He’s been mocked to the Vikings countless times, and it’s hard to imagine a more perfect landing space for him. Put him into a situation with Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison, T.J. Hockenson, and play action, and he’ll probably exceed expectations.

Finally, let’s deal with the most wrong-headed criticism, and one of the big reasons many casuals are down on him: McCarthy doesn’t have the volume stats typical of a major prospect. In fact, of the 503 qualifying quarterbacks since 2019 (excluding the COVID-tainted 2020 season), McCarthy has two of the ten lowest “attempts per game” totals of any quarterback. While that’s unusual, it’s hardly fatal to an NFL prospect.

I think it’s important to understand that there are a lot of bad quarterbacks who lack volume due to selection bias. Coaches know that they are bad and try to hide them, or they have guys who were recruited primarily for their running. That’s simply not the case at Michigan. Jim Harbaugh would use a run-heavy offense even if Dan Marino were his quarterback. It’s simply his preferred style of offense; Blake Corum, a solid offensive line, and a truly outstanding defense did nothing to dissuade him from this tendency. McCarthy averaged about 23 attempts per game, but so did predecessor Cade McNamara. Shea Patterson was also in the same general area. It’s just how Michigan did things.

And of course there are plenty of successful NFL quarterbacks on the bottom of this list, as well as Jayden Daniels in his Arizona State days. Tua Tagovailoa had a season in which he averaged 24 attempts per game, 490^th on this list. So did Jalen Hurts. Trevor Lawrence was often a low-volume passer in his first two seasons at Clemson. Even Kyler Murray only averaged 27 attempts per game in his final season.

The other big reason McCarthy’s attempts are so low is the Big Ten itself. For as much as the Big Ten has improved in football sophistication over the past several years, it still has a tendency towards old-timey football. The “lowest attempts per game” chart is littered with names like Sean Clifford, Justin Fields, Jack Coan, Peyton Ramsey, Adrian Martinez, Trace McSorley, and whatever dreck Iowa is trying to pass off as a quarterback in a given year. Combine Jim Harbaugh with the slower conference and things like this can happen. Especially when, over a two-year stretch, your elite team posts a +723 net point differential over their opponents. That’s going to lead to a lot of running out the clock.

So yes, it’s weird to throw as infrequently as McCarthy did, but McCarthy isn’t the reason for it, and so we should basically ignore traditional volume stats here. By rate stats, JJ McCarthy had one of the best seasons in college football last year, second only to Daniels. He was also excellent the year before. He was, also tellingly, quite a bit better than his predecessors Cade McNamara, who posted a pedestrian QWOBA+ of 105 in 2021, and Shea Patterson, who posted a 106 in 2019.

So, while McCarthy has some flaws to his game, his considerable (and underrated) physical tools and youth should allow improvement there. He was among the most accurate passers in college football against extremely difficult competition. He’s good enough under pressure and having played in something akin to a traditional NFL offense with some Shannyness to it, there should not be the kind of huge learning curve you might see coming from gimmick offenses. The low volume was primarily a policy choice by Harbaugh and shouldn’t ding McCarthy as a prospect. He may go slightly higher than he should, but quarterback being the premium position that it is, he really should be considered a top 10 prospect. I don’t like putting comps on guys, but “athletic Brock Purdy” isn’t terrible, although I think he has more ceiling than that.

If he does land with Minnesota, as has been rumored many times, some will laugh, and accuse them of having wasted a pick. I will not be one of the latter.