Rich Storry-USA TODAY Sports
This ‘Hendon Hooker in the Top 10’ talk is dumb.
Hendon Hooker was an incredible story during the 2022 NCAA season, but now this storyline has jumped the shark. Mike Tannenbaum of ESPN turned heads on Tuesday when he shattered every morsel of conventional wisdom when it comes to the 2023 NFL Draft, mocking Hooker to the Seattle Seahawks at No. 5.
A lot of things when it comes to the draft and prospect evaluation come down to personal opinion and gut feelings, but this is just dumb. We don’t need to humor this thinking, or pretend it’s somehow genius. Hooker in the Top 10 is stupid. It won’t happen, it will never happen, it was never going to happen.
Let’s discuss why.
Hendon Hooker is the anti Will Levis
Projecting NFL quarterbacks is extremely difficult, so teams look for predictors of success at the next level. The easiest way is to examine the offense they ran in college, and map that onto the way the sport is played in the NFL.
This is much, much more important than raw college stats. Obviously it’s nice to see someone win and put up big numbers, but we’ve seen mammoth college stats before, and if they’re in the wrong offense they will never, ever translate.
Do you remember Brandon Doughty? Probably not. In 2015 the Western Kentucky quarterback had one of the greatest passing seasons in the history of college football. Doughty threw for 5,055 yards, completed 71.9 percent of his passes, threw 48 touchdowns and only 9 interceptions. He was drafted in the 7th round and was out of the NFL in two years.
There was nothing about the Western Kentucky offense that translated to the NFL. They ran a variation of the Air Raid, which is amazing at putting up huge numbers and making life miserable for college defenses, but very few of the traits needed to run an Air Raid work in the pros.
Similarly, Tennessee’s 2022 offense was fun as hell, and also a total gimmick. Head coach Josh Heupel ran his own variation of Art Briles’ system, that spreads receivers wide, and uses stack alignments to cause defensive confusion. The quarterback has one read, and the nature of receiver placement results in busted coverage on almost every passing down. So long as the quarterback can get the ball to that one guy quickly, it’s simple.
“So, when this concept is signaled from the sideline, there is one target and only one target. It’s not a full-field progression read from the quarterback that is common in most West Coast systems. This is why when you look to the opposite end of the field, receivers aren’t even getting off the ball. They are simply conserving their energy for when they get tagged.”
This results in mammoth yardage gains, low risk of interceptions, and a system designed to destroy teams who don’t have the time to do immense homework on offense.
None of this works in the NFL. Pass rushers are too good to allow for running five-wide on every passing down. Defensive coordinators might get fooled a few times by gimmicks, but given them some time and they’ll grind a gadget offense down — remember when the Dolphins went 11-5 because of the Wildcat in 2008 before it got figured out?
The inverse of this is Will Levis. There’s no doubt that drafting Levis takes a tremendous amount of faith because his numbers and college performance don’t pass the smell test. However, the offense he runs does. Mark Stoops and offensive coordinator Liam Coen run a carbon copy of an NFL offense, with Coen coming directly from the Los Angeles Rams to Kentucky. There’s no guess work. Whatever positive traits Levis showed running Coen’s offense will translate to the NFL, so the work needs to happen in rounding out what he did poorly.
Levis had to work through a full read progression. He needed to throw into tighter windows. He had to have an understanding on NFL route trees and timing. Make no mistake: Levis didn’t do a lot of these things well, but at least you know what you’re getting. Hooker, on the other hand, is a wild mess of guess work that he can even adapt to the NFL from the system he’s been flourishing it.
Hooker is also 25 years old
There’s just a simple reality that teams want quarterbacks who can perform on their rookie deal, and if they succeed you want to lock them into two major contracts after that. Patrick Mahomes is only two years older than Hooker, and he’s already learned an NFL offense, become one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, and won two Super Bowl trophies.
Justin Herbert is entering his fourth NFL season and he’s the same age as Hooker.
If you think it will take 2-3 years (conservatively) to get Hooker up to speed, then he’s already approaching 30. When it’s time to sign the second contract you’re looking at the possibility of him being in his late 30s when the deal is complete. There just isn’t enough time to make it worth it.
Hooker is also coming off an ACL tear
Yeah, remember that his college season was shortened BECAUSE HE TORE HIS ACL! Yeah, there’s that too — and in justifying the pick Tannenbaum hilariously talked about the injury like it was a good thing, saying:
“The ACL, oddly to me, is a little bit of a positive from this standpoint. They just extended Geno Smith. Geno Smith will be their starter this year. Let the ACL come along.”
An ACL tear is never a positive from any standpoint. It means that Hooker will sit all of 2023 while he rehabs, taking his first NFL snaps (maybe) when he’s almost 27 years old.
The assertion for Hooker is “well, he looks so good it’s worth the wait.” The issue is that all the ways he looks good don’t translate. This isn’t some Tua Tagovailoa minor leap of faith, it’s a chasm — and even if Hooker was young and completely healthy he wouldn’t be taken in the Top 10 of the NFL Draft because of scheme translation alone.
Hooker could end up being a solid quarterback despite all this
For all the logic of projecting players into the NFL the league is littered with examples of the opposite. Nothing about Josh Allen made sense in the pre-draft process, and now he’s one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. Meanwhile everything about Sam Bradford screamed that he was going to be elite, and he ended up being mediocre at best. The list goes on if we get into deeper rounds and find gems who fell too far.
The point is: When it comes to selecting NFL quarterbacks with high picks the game is all about projection and risk mitigation. Ceilings and floors. When it comes to Hendon Hooker there’s an average ceiling, and a tremendously low floor. Why any team would take that over someone like Anthony Richardson, who shares similar floor risks — but with legitimate “could take over the entire NFL” potential is beyond me.
Hooker will only go in the first round if a team is willing to overlook every bit of logic about how the draft works. That could absolutely happen and if he pans out they’re geniuses, but everything we know about draft logic tells us that Hooker will be a Day 2 pick at best, and most likely last into the mid rounds. He will not go in the Top 10.
