By all accounts, it seems like Tennessee Titans rookie quarterback Will Levis had a strong couple of days at rookie minicamp. To be perfectly honest, it’s the first time in a while that he’s been on the field with a handful of actual NFL-caliber teammates practicing alongside him.
It’s no secret that Levis significantly regressed from 2021 to 2022 in basically every possible metric.
Per Pro Football Focus, the Kentucky product finished the 2021 season with the 21st-highest quarterback grade in the country (90.6) out of the 294 who qualified that year.
The former Wildcat completed approximately 66 percent of his passes (232-of-352), totaling 2,827 passing yards, 516 rushing yards, 33 total touchdowns, and 13 interceptions.
Sadly, just one season later, his overall grade dropped 22 points (68.6), he finished with 411 fewer passing yards, five fewer passing touchdowns, 397 fewer rushing yards, and seven fewer rushing touchdowns.
As I discussed in a previous article, there are a handful of reasons behind this type of dropoff, with one of those being the lack of talent that surrounded him.
When watching film, it was glaringly obvious how bad Levis’ supporting cast was in comparison to the other three top quarterback prospects in this year’s draft.
Why did Will Levis regress so much from 2021 to 2022?
He definitely owns his fair share of the blame, but to say he was surrounded by an inconsistent supporting cast would be putting it mildly #Titans pic.twitter.com/ST83E3umAI
— Shaun Calderon (@ShaunMichaels31) May 1, 2023
However, I finally took the time to put objective research into that opinion now that the hectic draft process is in the rearview mirror.
During the pre-draft process I evaluated a handful of quarterbacks in the class and came away with the consensus conclusion that Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud, Anthony Richardson, and Levis were the top four quarterbacks in the draft, and in that order.
But this time around I wanted to do something a little different since I didn’t personally evaluate each player on each team since the majority of them aren’t even draft-eligible yet.
Therefore, using PFF’s grading system, I went ahead and got the overall grades (2022) for the starting supporting cast of the top-four rookie quarterbacks.
I then went ahead and averaged those 10 individual grades into one whole grade. In total, there are three major categories worth noting:
- Average overall grade of each team’s supporting cast (11-personnel).
- Average overall grade of the starting wide receivers.
- Average overall grade of the starting offensive line.
Also, the starters were chosen based off end-of-season depth charts, snap counts, production, etc.
This article is going to compare the four starting units of this year’s top QB prospects (sans quarterback), along with their overall grades. I’ll follow that up with a brief breakdown discussing what stood out.
Some of these results were eye-popping, so let’s not wait any longer and dive right in.