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Welcome to NFL Daily, where we're always trying not to reach for quarterbacks.

I'm Greg Rosenthal.

I'm in the Chris Wesleyan podcast studio, and I am joined by one of the best minds in the podcasting writing game. It's John

Ledyard. He's got the audibles and analytics substack. He's got a great podcast with Ali Connolly.

John, what is happening? Man, not too much. Thank you for the kind words. First of all, always fun to be on here with you and talking some ball. I believe last time we talked, we ranked and tiered tight ends. It was a lot of backlash for that. So I'm excited to, I'm sure, get no backlash for today's podcast. No, and I don't even know if we're going to rank it. We're going to talk quarterback. So I've

been not pimping, but getting ready for this week now for a while, saying like, you know,

we're getting into the draft. It's been a slow process. I've got the weekly show with Daniel

Jeremiah Audibles. And analytics is another one that people should check out with you and Ollie. DJ and I are on Thursdays.

But like, now it's go time. We are two and a half weeks out from the draft. Every day now is

draft. And we're going to talk quarterbacks today and kind of keep it specifically to

quarterbacks. And I'm not going to put you and make you do a ranking, but we'll talk about

good fits and we'll kind of order him in some sort of way. And I guess we might as well just start

at the top. Now, because we've talked draft, it's not like Cam Ward has not come up on this show,

but I don't, I don't think we've dive deep until what makes him special. Kind of what was your journey with

Cam Ward as a prospect? And where did you land in terms of like how special do you think he is?

Yeah, the profile's weird right away, right? 23 year old rookie, he'll be three different schools.

So you're already like, okay, there's maybe some red flags. Right. And one of the schools was incarnate Word, which yeah, yeah, which is it necessarily what you traditionally think of as the trajectory. But, you know, the multiple schools saying, you know, we're starting to move away. That's more normal. Three is still, you know, being an older rookie. And I, to with you, Greg, like people just didn't talk about Cam Ward, like a special should be the top overall pick, even the beginning of the season. So to say it's come out of nowhere isn't fair because he's been on the radar for everybody for a long time. We've known the skill set and the traits are interesting. I think this year he got better in some really key ways, though, which makes him,

you know, he's my top quarterback.

I think he's most people's top quarterback, the NFL. Generally, everything we hear is, yeah, this guy's going first, and almost every team has him first, and it's not that close to a tier by himself type of guy in this class, I think. Now, I think one of the things that it's really interesting is one of the things he did really poorly in the past was manage the pocket. And this is still an area of growth for him, an area where he needs to continue to grow in a lot. But, I mean, his pressure to sacrate went down this year, 15.9% was a big step in the right direction for him. So just the ability to manage the game a little bit better now. his footwork, he still needs some work in terms of being able to set up the right way this guy is so lax and the detail sometimes like and he can get away within the college ball and he might be able to do it some in the NFL some of these guys do in the NFL and he's a pretty great arm I don't think he's quite that special so from a talent perspective so I do think he needs to continue to develop in those ways, but watching some of the processing stuff get faster.

And the other key thing, I think he just throws to every spot on the field.

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