Now that Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett has won two straight national championships, he’s ready to see what the NFL has for him — and what he can offer the NFL.
It is a more complicated question for Bennett than it is for most of the quarterbacks in the 2023 draft class. Each class is tiered pretty obviously at each position, and the general impression of Bennett is that if you take him on tape alone, he’s going to be a third-day pick, or a priority free agent. This despite a two-year stretch as the Bulldogs’ full-time starter in which he completed 495 of 742 passes (66.7%) for 6,989 yards (9.4 YPA), 56 touchdowns, and 14 interceptions. In 2022, Bennett also had 10 rushing touchdowns and 205 yards on 56 attempts.
Kirby Smart, Bennett’s head coach, said after Georgia’s 65-7 thrashing of TCU in the College Football Championship that Bennett deserves a real shot in the NFL.
“When you have a quarterback that can do the protections and check things and know what the defense is doing, yet still beat you with your feet, you’ve got a high-level quarterback,” Smart said. “And people have slept on Stetson Bennett for too long. He needs an opportunity to play for a long time at the next level.”
You’d expect Smart to say nothing less. However, there are issues to deal with here. Bennett’s pre-combine measurements (5-foot-11, 190 pounds) puts him in unfortunately rare air when it comes to NFL quarterbacks. Even if we bump the measurables up to 6-foot-0 and 200 pounds, there have been just five quarterbacks in the new millennium — Kellen Moore, Thaddeus Lewis, Armanti Edwards, Henry Burris, and Tim Rattay — who have played at all in the league with those heights and weights. The Carolina Panthers selected Edwards in the third round of the 2010 draft and made him a return man, and the San Francisco 49ers selected Rattay in the seventh round of the 2000 draft — he became a decent backup for a few seasons.
None of the other quarterbacks on this list were drafted, and none of the others did much in the pros.
Now, Alabama quarterback Bryce Young’s pre-combine measurements are 6-foot-0 and 194 pounds, and there are undoubtedly NFL teams that will be put off by that particular outlier, no matter how great Young has been. Young is also seen as the consensus first-overall pick in the 2023 draft. This might actually help Bennett; you just never know.
Then, there’s the age issue. Bennett will turn 26 on October 28, and while NFL quarterbacks are playing at All-Pro levels much longer than they ever have before, this will be another debit in the minds of NFL decision-makers. The thought of a drafted quarterback getting his second contract in his late twenties or early thirties does give one pause, though as we said, trends in the NFL tend to make this less of an issue than it ever has been before.
In Bennett’s case, you have a situation in which all the tangibles will scare teams away, and all the intangibles (leadership, toughness, and an icy calm in the game’s most provocative moments) are off the charts. All you can do that that point is to review the tape and the metrics to get the best possible sense of Stetson Bennett’s NFL potential.
Let’s do just that.