The 2023 Draft Was Wrong: How Three Years of Film Reveals the Quarterbacks We Actually Got Right

You know what I love about football? It humbles you. Every single year, scouts and general managers and television analysts like me sit in rooms, look at film, make their lists, and declare with absolute certainty what's going to happen come draft day. And every single year, we're wrong about something. But the 2023 NFL Draft? Man, that one's looking more wrong with each passing season than a screen pass on third and long with a lead.

Let me tell you something I've learned after watching football for more decades than I care to count. The truth about any draft doesn't reveal itself on draft day. It reveals itself in the third preseason game of year two, in the fourth quarter comebacks of year three, in the way a player handles adversity when nobody's watching and the scoreboard matters. We were sitting there in 2023, all of us, watching Will Levis walk up to the stage in Kansas City, watching Bryce Young get his hat, watching Anthony Richardson put on that Jacksonville Jaguars cap, and we thought we knew something. Turns out, we had it backwards in about a hundred different ways.

Here's what's fascinating about looking back at that draft now, three years deep into the real test. If you could do it all over again, with what we actually know instead of what we thought we knew, that first round would look like somebody's fever dream. You'd have late-round picks and undrafted free agents stepping into spots that early selections occupied. You'd have guys who were supposed to be sure things sitting on sofas at home, and you'd have fliers and maybes and "we'll figure it out as we go" types leading franchises. That's not to say the 2023 draft class was a disaster. But it's to say that the blueprint we had for that class, the one we all agreed on, was drawn with a crayon and a lot of confidence that turned out to be misplaced.

The quarterback class of 2023 is absolutely exhibit A for this phenomenon. When you sit down and look at what these teams would do differently, knowing what they know now, you start seeing the seismic shifts that happen in football when reality collides with expectations. The guys who were supposed to be the foundation of franchises for the next decade are getting long looks from teams that suddenly need new quarterbacks. The guys who were supposed to be developmental projects or long shots are running offenses and winning ballgames. It's like somebody shuffled the deck and dealt out a completely different hand, except the deck was actual human beings trying to make their living in the National Football League.

What's really happening here is something fundamental about how we evaluate football players. We watch tape, we study measurables, we listen to coaches and trainers talk about what a guy can do in theory. And then that guy actually has to do it against five hundred pound monsters trying to rearrange his face, in front of eighty thousand screaming people, with millions of dollars and his entire career hanging in the balance. The gap between what you can do in a controlled setting and what you can do when it matters is the same gap between throwing darts in your basement and throwing them in the Super Bowl.

Think about the late-round steals and undrafted free agents who've crashed this hypothetical redraft. These are guys who weren't supposed to be in conversation with first-round picks. These are guys the draft process spit out because they weren't tall enough, or they played at a school the NFL wasn't sure about, or they had one bad game on film that overshadowed everything else they did. The draft process is a machine, and like any machine, it's efficient at some things and terrible at others. It's excellent at measuring certain physical traits and running times. It's absolutely lousy at measuring heart, football intelligence, the ability to stay composed under pressure, and the mysterious quality that separates good players from great ones.

I've been around football long enough to know that every single draft class, if you could rewind it, would look completely different. But 2023 seems to be one where that reality is hitting especially hard and especially fast. We're talking about first-round selections who would be significantly further down the board, possibly off it entirely, if we could start over today. We're talking about Day Three picks and undrafted guys who would start climbing that board like they were born to be there. That's not a slight indictment of scouting or the draft process. That's just football being football.

The thing about redrafting is that it tells you the truth about what actually matters. It tells you that tape study matters less than you think and production matters more. It tells you that being at a big school doesn't guarantee anything and being at a small school doesn't disqualify you from being great. It tells you that measurables are one thing and measurable results on the football field are something else entirely. A guy can have all the physical tools in the world and still not know how to use them in a real game. Another guy can be smaller or slower or less impressive looking and still find ways to make plays when it counts.

When you look at that 2023 class through the lens of what three years of actual games have taught us, you're looking at a lesson in humility. Every team that passed on a player who's now thriving wishes they hadn't. Every team that spent high capital on someone who's struggling would do it differently. That's not unique to 2023, but the magnitude of the shift seems significant. The guys who would move up in a redraft weren't just late picks. Some of them were considerations after the draft itself, undrafted free agent signings that were supposed to be organizational filler.

Here's what gets me about this whole situation. Football people spend their entire lives studying the game, preparing for draft day, building systems and databases and analytics to help them make the right call. And then the game itself, the thing that actually happens out there on Sundays under the lights, teaches them something completely different. The humility that requires is real. The acknowledgment that you got it wrong is something that not every organization is good at. But the best ones are. The best teams look back at their misses and understand why, and they use that knowledge going forward.

The quarterbacks swapping places is the headline here, but it's really just the most visible sign of something bigger. It's the recognition that we misunderstood something fundamental about this group of young players. Maybe we overweighted certain measurables. Maybe we didn't give enough credit to how guys performed under pressure. Maybe we relied too heavily on what happened at the combine and not enough on what happened in actual games against NFL-quality defenses. Whatever it is, three years of football has taught us something that draft day didn't.

For fans, this is why football never gets old. This is why you can't just look at a draft class in April and decide you know how it's going to turn out. The game is still being played. The tape is still being written. In five years, this conversation is going to shift again as more of these players develop or plateau or surprise us in different ways. That uncertainty, that inability to predict the future with perfect accuracy, is what keeps you coming back. That's what makes football great. It's not what you draft. It's what you do with what you have once the season starts and the scoreboard actually matters. The 2023 class is reminding us of that in a big way.