The crop of quarterbacks in this year’s draft class has widely been criticized for its supposed lack of talent. There isn’t an Andrew Luck or Robert Griffin III in this year’s class and every quarterback in this draft has significant holes that can be poked in their games.
But is the talent truly as bad as everyone is suggesting? Buffalo Bills general manager Buddy Nix tried to claim the talent isn’t actually that poor and that a quarterback wouldn’t be a reach in the top 10. Now a member of the New York Jets front office is echoing those statements. According to Conor Orr of the Star-Ledger, Jets scouting director Jeff Bauer doesn’t believe the quarterback class is nearly as poor as advertised.
“There’s some good quarterbacks out there, you can see a lot of these guys coming in and playing and having very successful careers,” Bauer said.
The Jets have done their due diligence with several of the quarterbacks in this year’s draft class. They’ve hosted E.J. Manuel, Geno Smith and Zac Dysert and also met with Ryan Nassib, Matt Barkley and Mike Glennon.
“Obviously we’ve studied the quarterback class and still are studying the quarterback class,” said Bauer. “Obviously we can’t say where our quarterbacks are ranked, that wouldn’t be prudent of us, but there are some quarterbacks who will come out and play in this league, and they’re going to start. If that’s at the No. 9 pick, we can’t say.”
Of course with the draft set to get underway next Thursday, trusting anything NFL personnel guys say at this point in the process is a difficult proposition in itself. For a class that some say doesn’t deserve to have a quarterback selected in the first round, only time will be able to truly judge the validity of the passers that will land on NFL rosters by the end of next week.