Top 10 quarterbacks in the 2021 NFL Draft

#2 2021 NFL Draft Prospect: Zach Wilson (BYU)

6' 3", 210 pounds; JR

Zach Wilson

Barely a top-1000 overall recruit in 2018, Zach Wilson kind of came out of nowhere this past season and took the college football world by storm.

His first two years at BYU, he played in nine games each and put up modest numbers – 63.7% completion percentage for 243.5 yards in his starts with 23 touchdowns compared to 12 interceptions – as part of a run-centric Cougars offense.

In 12 games last season, he completed 73.5 percent of his passes (second behind only Alabama’s Mac Jones) for 3692 yards and 33 touchdowns, for a ridiculous 11 yards per attempt, and only three interceptions, to go with another 254 yards and 10 touchdowns on the ground.

BYU traditionally have been a ground-and-pound rushing offense and they came out smashing Navy’s defense in a blowout win in the season-opener, but from that point on, Wilson has emerged as a Heisman candidate and now seems to be the consensus number two overall pick.

This young man has experience operating from under center, the pistol and shotgun. He ran a lot of play-action at BYU, with his back to the defense, staying in the pocket and on bootlegs, consistently carrying out play-fakes. He has such great command of the football and it’s so easy for him to spin it.

He uses a lot of torque, to create that velocity and the ball really expoldes out of his hands. Wilson is an incredibly natural thrower, has the arm strength to deliver absolute lasers across the field, but also the touch to loft the ball over a trailing defender and or the second level on dig routes.

Wilson can use different speeds on the ball, while having lightning-quick feet and release. The quick game should be called very quick with him, and he make those underneath placement throws, where the defense basically can’t do anything about it, on square-ins, hitches or slide routes off motion, because of leverage advantages.

One of the things that really make him special, is the fact he can throw off different platforms and with different arm angles like nobody else in this draft. Often times he just gets the ball out with a quick flick of the wrist, and he can throw with very little space or his feet cock-eyed. Another spect that really stands about Wilson is the way he can throw receivers open with ball-placement, away from the leverage of defenders.

That is meant in the most positive way – he is already a professional jump-ball thrower. He is in perfect position for his guys and rarely risks turnovers with them, as well placing balls to the back-shoulder, when his receiver can’t stack vertically. And on some of those on-the-move throws, he forces receivers to work back to the or even slide for it, to avoid the chance for defenders to make plays on it.

It led to a bunch of big plays through the air, as he completed an FBS-high 62.5 percent of his passes of 20+ yards and had a PFF grade of 99.9 on those. Yet, at the same time you see him actively pull the ball down, because he understands it isn’t a chance worth taking, which led to a turnover-worthy play rate of only 1.2 percent, despite the vertical prowess.

When you zero in on Wilson, you can clearly see his processing of information and the plan he has before the snap, in terms of manipulating single-high safeties to open windows and freezing defenders, or opening up seam shots by forcing safeties to widen in two-high coverages. While he did have great protection, in terms of reading defenses and making more advanced decisions, he was asked to do more than any of these guys that are in the first-round conversation. And his pocket presence and footwork are certainly the best among the top four.

Wilson plays with a certain confidence and own pace. He work his way through progressions and has that internal clock, to know when he has to move. Wilson may not be quite as fast in a straight line as these are other three big names, but I think he has the best quick-twitch athleticism, to avoid rushers and extend plays, as you see him start and stop, in order to make free rushers miss consistently. When he gets out, he can really scoot and is very fleet-footed as a runner, hesitating and going past defenders in the open field effectively.

He can shake guys and is not afraid to get hit. The BYU coaches used his mobility on plenty of QB draw plays, but he is even more dangerous at extending plays and launching bombs. You see him make more big-time throws rolling one way (mostly to the right) and attacking the opposite side of the field than any other passer.

Wilson has that innate vision for secondary plays and sees windows opening up off script, to where defenders are attached with receivers and an area is vacated. And the Cougars coaching staff seems to have a lot of trust in the guy they have under center, judging by how often they go for it on fourth down and the results usually say they are right, going 12 of 22 on the season.

He threw a 78-yard touchdown on the very first play of the Houston game and iced it with a dime on a fade route for a TD on third-and-10, he made some ridiculous throws in a blowout victory at Boise State, shredded UCF in the Boca Raton Bowl and even in what people call his worst game of 2020 – at Coastal Carolina – he made several big-time throws and his team came up a yard short on the final drive in Kevin Dyson-fashion.

However, Wilson did have the luxury of playing behind of the elite offensive lines in college football and wasn’t even hit once through the first three or four games of the season, plus there were some great chances for big plays off those run fakes, because of how much they pounded some teams on the ground. One of the few things I believe Wilson needs to improve upon is protecting his receivers from big hits by not leading them into zone defenders at times, and when he has a rusher in his face, his feet are locked into the ground usually.

He is a little rushed with his footwork as he reads the field and every once in a while, he will leave the back-foot outside of his frame rather than bringing it up, as he comes forward and that’s when the ball can come out low. Wilson barely won the starting job in 2019 and certainly benefitted from lower level of competition in his only high-level season, when you compare it to these other guys at the top.

There are some durability concerns with Wilson, because he isn’t the physical specimen some of these other guys at the top are. He underwent labrum surgery in the spring of 2019 and then missed four games with a broken thumb during the upcoming season.

Wilson put on an absolute show at the BYU pro day, highlight by that final moonball off a scramble, but also just how the ball exploded out of his hand and how automatic everything looked, to go with making all these throws from different platforms and arm-angles.

Obviously you should never get too enarmed with what guys do at these scripted workouts, but you see all of that on tape as well. We can talk about how little he was under pressure behind that phenomenal BYU offensive line, but he didn’t have the greatest weapons around him, especially missing his security blanket from the year prior, in tight-end Matt Bushman.

Wilson is often punished for a weak schedule by a lot of the mainstream analysts, even though the Cougars had nothing to do with those bigger games having to be canceled due to COVID protocols. Wilson to me is a phenomenal talent and should be a problem in basically any offense, where it’s a zone-run based approach, where they move the pocket and he throw bombs on the move, or using his quick release in more of a spread, RPO-based attack.