The scouting combine is massively important for most draft prospects. It’s where they’re able to meet with NFL teams, get their official medicals done, and go on the field at Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium to participate in drills that (to a greater or lesser degree) give evaluators that much more of a sense of what attributes and liabilities they bring to the next level of football.
The combine process will be especially important for Kentucky quarterback Will Levis. After two seasons at Penn State and two more with the Wildcats, Levis leaves behind an iffy legacy, and one that NFL shot-callers will have to consider carefully. For all the amazing raw athleticism, there be dragons. I have little doubt that Levis will ace whatever combine drills in which he chooses to participate; at 6-foot-3 and 232 pounds (unofficial), he presents a skeleton of attributes that some tie to Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen.
Like Allen when he came out of Wyoming in 2018, Levis is also a quarterback with all kinds of development that needs to happen before he has the real opportunity to be a top-tier quarterback. Allen was lucky in that he was aligned with a play-caller and play-designer in former offensive coordinator and current New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll who set him up for success, gave him the concepts he needed to move past the parts of his game that needed work, and dialed things back when it all got too overwhelming.
Levis will need that same kind of assistance, and when it comes to raw tools quarterbacks, if they don’t get that, things can get weird in a hurry. Levis also might be the kind of quarterback who can’t get out of his own way, and his athleticism and rocket arm might tap out pretty quickly in the NFL. He might be a Tim Tebow type who has a fixed ceiling, and it’s generally pretty easy for professional defenses to reinforce those types of ceilings to those types of players.
So, which is Will Levis — the guy who can be developed into a top-tier quarterback over time, or the guy who burns his NFL team for their too-shiny take on his future? The tape never lies, so that’s where we’ll go.
Arm strength vs. arm talent.
Levis now and Allen in his final collegiate season of 2017 both have (had) the ability to turn deep passes into game-altering plays, while still leaving a lot of meat on the bone. In 2017, Allen completed 15 of 46 passes of 20 or more air yards for 441 yards, eight touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 90.7.
In Levis’ final collegiate season, he completed 16 of 39 deep passes for 541 yards, one touchdown, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 75.5. Both quarterbacks had three deep passes dropped by their receivers in those seasons.
So, if we’re going to affix the “Next Josh Allen” title to Levis’ draft profile, we’d better be able to discern the source of those seven missing deep touchdowns.
You’re going to hear a lot about Levis’ relatively mediocre supporting cast when excusing his inefficiencies, and that does show up on tape. If you’re going to throw deep to the boundary, you need at least one receiver who can beat tight boundary coverage.
There were times when Levis’ targets could do that, as seen by receiver Barion Brown on this 31-yard completion against Georgia cornerback Kelee Ringo. Browning did a really nice job of separating at the right moment to get the ball Ringo couldn’t.
And here’s Levis throwing Brown open against Ringo from the slot in that same game — this time, for a 42-yard gain.
The difference between arm strength and arm talent is in part a quarterback’s ability to use timing, accuracy, and velocity to win in contested situations. As this interception against Youngtown State showed, Levis struggles with the combination of these three aspects too often.
Levis can throw to any area of the field in which his receivers are decidedly open, and he will make the occasional big-time throw with outstanding velocity. But the finishing touches that make great NFL deep-ball throwers are not on display nearly enough.
Progressing past the first read.
One thing Levis will absolutely have to fix if he’s ever to become a top-tier NFL quarterback is a first-read fixation that got him in trouble too often at the NCAA level. His throwing windows are about to be reduced exponentially, so the processes that lead to plays like this just can’t happen. On this end zone incompletion against Vanderbilt, Levis followed tight end Jordan Dingle through his route, and when that was closed, he didn’t avail himself of any other options. Had he seen Brown’s backside crosser in time, it was open for a touchdown. Alas.
This end zone interception against Georgia had Kelee Ringo retorting for other sins in that game. Here, Levis started off reading Dingle on a similar route — taking the linebacker up the seam — and before that progressed, Levis threw to his outside read, the aforementioned Mr. Brown. Problem was, Ringo and safety David Daniel-Sisavanh were all over that, and it was obvious as the routes developed.
This interception against Tennessee had Levis giving perfunctory looks to his front-side reads (Brown and Tayvion Robinson), then traveling to the back side and making this inexplicable throw to Dane Key — which was picked off by cornerback Brandon Turnage. This was a third-and-seven situation, so maybe Levis thought he had to nuke one in there, but he also had a metric ton of room to run to that side, so… I dunno.
Levis isn’t doing himself any favors with these random plays predicated on a developmental ability to see — and react to — the entire route palette. His NFL coaches will have to put in work to get him where he needs to be in that regard.
Clearing the picture in the red zone.
If we want to label Levis a “winner” or a “finisher” as opposed to a
“gritty, tough guy,” it might behoove us to look at his red zone performance in the 2022 season. And that, my friends, is a problem. Levis threw 14 touchdown passes from the opposing 19-yard line and in, but he also led the nation with four interceptions in such instances, and he tied with North Carolina’s Drake Maye and San Jose State’s Chevan Cordeiro for the nation’s most red zone sacks, with 10.
We’ve already shown a couple examples, but here’s another red zone interception against Miami of Ohio in which Levis has tight end Keaton Upshaw open to the boundary on a well-executed pick play, and Levis can’t time it up. If he feathers the pass to Upshaw earlier, or zings it to Upshaw to make up for the elapse of time, maybe defensive back Eli Blakey doesn’t have an easy turnover. Upshaw’s WTF reaction is one that I suspect a lot of people would have at the end of this play.
This sack at the Georgia 16-yard line with 4:51 left in the fourth quarter of that game was notable because cornerback Javon Bullard got the takedown with a blitz from the slot. Rule No. 1 when you have a blitzer from an area of the field is to check for easy openings to the area of the field vacated by said blitzer. Dane Key had sone free real estate in the left slot, and if Levis had simply capitalized, maybe that’s a touchdown.
At this point in his progression, Levis’s slow reading ability, and his inability to capitalize on easy stuff in compressed areas, could be fatal at the NFL level. Again.., yes, he has tools, but his NFL coaches have their work cut out for them.
Traits are great, but what about the art of quarterbacking?
One of the worst things you can do to yourself as an evaluator of talent in any industry is to come in with a preconceived notion, and to array your work based on those priors.
There are times when Will Levis does look like an NFL quarterback, and when you add all the physical gifts and base skill to those particular throws, you could convince yourself that he’s nearly at the level of a Bryce Young or a C.J. Stroud in this draft class. Maybe not a “sure thing” NFL guy, but close enough to bet on the traits.
But if you look at the body of work, and you work through how close Levis is when it comes to the finer NFL traits, it’s a tough study. Which is to say, it’s nearly impossible. Levis doesn’t have Young’s mechanical ability to see the field and react. He doesn’t have Stroud’s functional accuracy combined with late-blooming mobility. He doesn’t even have the passing development Florida’s Anthony Richardson showed in the second half of his first season as a full-time NCAA starter.
Right now, Will Levis is a traits-based quarterback who needs a great deal of work in nearly category which separates good from great at the NCAA level, much less what does it in the NFL. If that’s enough to get you betting on the upside and ignoring all the trap doors, more power to you, but there are serious reservations in this room.
