When Colin Kaepernick was a relatively unknown prospect coming out of Nevada, he raised some eyebrows at the Combine by throwing a football at 59 mph during on-field drills. That was the fastest of any quarterback that year and believed to be the fastest since the Combine started using a radar gun to track quarterbacks.
But now someone has thrown faster: Logan Thomas, the former Virginia Tech quarterback, reached 60 mph according to Ourlads.com.
Thomas is the first player to reach 60 mph at the Combine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much: Other than Kaepernick, the list of quarterbacks with the fastest fastballs at the Combine is mostly a list of players who have never amounted to anything in the NFL. Tyler Bray, Zac Dysert, Brandon Weeden and Kirk Cousins are the four other quarterbacks to hit 59 mph since 2008, and the quarterbacks to hit 58 mph are John Parker Wilson, Mike Reilly, Drew Willy, Ryan Mallett and Austin Davis. How many of those guys would you want quarterbacking your team?
So while Thomas’s 60 mph throw is another data point for a guy who had a phenomenal Combine by any measure, what will determine if he can succeed as an NFL quarterback is whether he can throw with accuracy, not velocity.