NFL Draft
11/19/24
8 min read
2025 NFL Draft: Jalen Milroe Is Prospect With Most To Prove
With just two weeks left in the college football regular season, the on-field portion of NFL Draft evaluations is mostly complete.
NFL Combine results and bowl performances can separate clusters within specific rounds. Still, a player’s tape is the bulk of his résumé, and most prospects have essentially the same draft grades now as they will in April. There are a handful of prospects, however, whose performances in the next few weeks will be influential, if not pivotal, for finalizing their evaluation.
Playoff games will carry more weight than the regular season, and with the expansion to four rounds, a successful postseason run could substantially boost a player’s stock.
The final games will also carry more weight for prospects like Tate Ratledge or Smael Mondon Jr., who are returning from mid-season injuries and have less 2024 tape to evaluate.
But occasionally, a player’s tape raises as many questions as it answers, leaving a crucial stretch of late-season games to fill in the blanks and determine his final grade. I think Jalen Milroe is among the few prospects who could significantly affect his draft stock with just a few weeks of good tape.
Milroe's Rocky Road
Milroe’s redshirt junior year has been full of peaks and valleys. After throwing eight touchdowns and zero interceptions in the first three games, he had the best performance of his career in Alabama’s primetime win against Georgia. The following week was arguably the worst for the Alabama program since 2007, but in an embarrassing loss to Vanderbilt, Milroe once again had a career game.
Everything seemed to be lining up for Milroe to be the first quarterback selected. Still, back-to-back dreadful outings against South Carolina and Tennessee ended the hype, at least publicly.
The stark contrast between the beginning of the year and Weeks 7-8 was puzzling, and many speculated if Milroe was playing through an injury. It wasn’t just a message board conspiracy; that was my best explanation for such a severe dropoff, where his greatest strengths became defined weaknesses.
Milroe has done an excellent job avoiding turnovers since becoming a starter, but he fumbled twice and threw four interceptions in that two-game stretch. He hasn’t yet developed into a fully polished pocket passer. Still, accuracy was never the issue, and his erratic ball placement was arguably the leading cause of Alabama’s loss to Tennessee:
— James Foster (@JamesFosterNFL) November 18, 2024
Considering how out-of-character these two performances were and his return to form in the three weeks since, it seems possible that Milroe’s mid-October regression was due to him playing through an unreported injury. With how desperate NFL teams are for quarterbacks and how underwhelming this year’s class is, I suspect NFL teams will have an easy time convincing themselves that Milroe’s worst film should be ignored.
If Milroe plays well in Alabama’s final two-plus games and proves that his Week 7-8 tape is an outlier, he has a legitimate chance to be the first quarterback off the board.
What Milroe Does Well
There is no complete package in the 2025 class, so I would expect a wide range of grades and opinions across the league. Some teams will prefer Sanders’ precision targeting the middle of the field or Ward’s out-of-structure playmaking, but Milroe’s upside in a class full of singles and doubles will be difficult to pass up.
He has a rocket arm and laser-quick release, along with pinpoint deep accuracy:
— James Foster (@JamesFosterNFL) November 18, 2024
Despite his 11.9 average depth of target in the last two seasons, his interception rate and interceptable pass rate rank near the bottom of FBS and would rank even lower if we ignored Weeks 7-8.
And his rushing ability is almost impossible to overstate. There are few declarations you can make about Milroe, the runner, that would qualify as hyperbole. At 6-foot-2, 223, he’s built like an early-down running back from 2005 and weighs more than the first nine running backs selected last year.
If he runs a 40-yard dash, his time will be in the 4.3s. I try to avoid the G-word at all costs, but if Milroe isn’t a generational running quarterback, we’ve never seen one. Jayden Daniel’s annihilation of Florida in Week 11, 2023, was the most impressive quarterback rushing performance I had ever watched, but Milroe outshined him a year later in the same stadium:
— James Foster (@JamesFosterNFL) November 18, 2024
This isn’t an endorsement of Milroe as a complete quarterback prospect. In most classes, he’d be a late-first or early-second-round developmental pick, but this is one of the thinnest first rounds in recent memory.
For perspective, this is how many first-round grades I’ve given for each of the last four classes:
2022 - 20
2023 - 21
2024 - 26
2025 - 9
He’s at least a year away from being a pro-ready passer, and for a general manager like Joe Schoen, I’m not sure Milroe’s play next year will help his job security. For a front office with the luxury of approaching this pick with a multiyear perspective, however, the development of Milroe’s game from last season is encouraging.
Where Milroe Needs to Improve
When evaluating Milroe last year, before he returned to school, I saw two glaring problems on tape:
- Holding onto the ball and taking sacks
- Slow to identify open windows in the middle of the field
Milroe’s poor anticipation of pressure, lack of pocket command, and ability to extend plays resulted in an absurdly high sack total in his first year as a starter. In 2023, he took 44 sacks on 138 pressured dropbacks and had the sixth-highest pressure-to-sack rate among 165 qualifying FBS quarterbacks.
At times, he was oblivious to the pass rush and got blindsided off the edge or absorbed by the collapsing pocket. Sometimes, his internal clock ran fast, and he would bail from clean pockets, abandoning the passing concept and running into pressure. His ability to escape pressure and create explosive plays on the run was too often his first instinct instead of a backup plan.
For Milroe to be taken seriously as an NFL prospect, he needed to drastically improve his pocket presence and take fewer negative plays, and he’s done exactly that in 2024.
After taking a sack on 31.9 percent of pressured dropbacks last year, which falls in the 1.7th percentile, Milroe cut his pressure-to-sack rate in half in 2024.
Through the first 12 weeks, Milroe’s 16.3 percent pressure to sack rate is actually above average historically and lower than Shedeur Sanders (21.2%), Cam Ward (17.5%), and Carson Beck (16.5%).
He still has a bad habit of dropping his eyes against interior pressure, and a relatively high pressure-to-sack rate might be an unavoidable byproduct of his play style. But his dramatic improvement from last season is encouraging and makes it easier to project future development.
Another telling statistical change is time to throw, where Milroe led FBS quarterbacks in 2023. Milroe had an average time to throw of 3.44 seconds last year, the highest since 2021, but has reduced it to 2.85 in 2024. Despite shaving off 0.59 seconds, he’s still in the ninth percentile, meaning he holds the ball for a long time, which is relative to most quarterbacks, but he’s no longer a historical outlier.
A high time to throw isn’t inherently bad, but in Milroe’s case, it confirms the indecisiveness from the pocket that was apparent on tape. If you watched Alabama’s offense through the lens of Jermaine Burton or Isaiah Bond, you saw a lot of plays where the receiver got open within the structure of the play but wasn’t targeted. Milroe was capable of working the sidelines last year, but when routes developed in the middle of the field, he was unable or too slow to identify open receivers.
His shorter time to throw this year is indiciative of increased processing efficiency and far more plays where he gets rid of the ball on time.
I don’t want to overstate his improvement, as anticipation between the hashes is still one of the primary aspects of Milroe’s game that needs development, but he’s made a substantial jump this season. It’s no longer a rarity to see Milroe progress to a backside dig or have the confidence in his coverage identification to challenge a tight window in the middle.
— James Foster (@JamesFosterNFL) November 18, 2024
Last year, he hesitated to target wide-open in-breakers on his first read, so at least now he has coaching points aside from “get rid of the ball.”
The remainder of Alabama’s schedule, however many games that end up being, is an opportunity for Milroe to put more evidence of his growth on tape and solidify his position at the top of the 2025 quarterback class.
With every quality performance, general managers will see his mid-season struggles further in the rearview mirror and view him as less of a gamble in the first round.
I don’t think he has the résumé to withstand a couple of bad-to-below-average performances to finish the year. If he can't build on his recent success and ends up falling out of the first round, there’s a good chance he’d return to Alabama for his final year of eligibility.
