Jayden Daniels is already playing like one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks

Joseph Maiorana-Imagn Images

Jayden Daniels has arrived. Will the road through the NFC playoffs lead to the nation’s capital?

The theme for the Week 3 edition of QB of the Week, highlighting the quarterback who had the best week in the NFL, could be “You never know…”

Will Andy Dalton lead the Panthers to the playoffs? You never know. Does Malik Willis give the Packers a better chance to win than Jordan Love? You never know. Was Sam Darnold actually an upgrade over Kirk Cousins? You never know. Could Anthony Richardson complete over 50% of his passes this season? Anything is possible.

Certainly the last thing that I want to do at QB of the Week is overreact to one game. If we had overreacted to the first two weeks of the season, then we’d be dumbfounded that actually Derek Carr does not run the Greatest Show on Turf 2, Kyler Murray is stoppable, and C.J. Stroud is not infallible. It would be easy to reward a great story like Dalton’s for being the first QB this season to throw for 300 yards and three touchdowns in a game with the same offense that had barely over 300 yards passing in the first two games combined. But if next week’s game against his former team in Cincinnati is a letdown, how much longer until Bryce Young gets Round 2?

As I always say, if you’re going to overreact, then overreact to the moon. Dalton’s story is already fading. Jayden Daniels hasn’t even warmed up yet.

One could easily write a story highlighting Daniels setting the record for highest completion percentage in a game by a rookie quarterback, completing 21 of 23 pass attempts on Monday against the Bengals for 254 yards and two touchdowns, in addition to rushing for 39 yards and another score, and call that enough of a reason to make the No. 2 overall pick the player of the week. Daniels now leads the league in completion percentage through three games, going 61 of 76 (80.3%) with no interceptions and 8.7 yards per attempt. That is the second-highest completion percentage through a team’s first three games in the NFL history, almost a point higher than Tom Brady’s historic 2007 season.

In the history of the NFL, Drew Brees is the only other quarterback to complete over 80% of his passes on at least 60 attempts through his team’s first three games of the season, which he did with the Saints in 2018 on 129 attempts, so over 60 more attempts than Daniels. But that was Brees’ 18th season in the league. Jayden Daniels did it in the first three games of his career. When Brady led the Patriots to a 16-0 regular season record in 2007 and won his first MVP award en route to a 50-touchdown season, he completed 79.5% of his 88 attempts.

Not only is Jayden Daniels putting his name into historic conversations at the genesis of his career; he’s also going to be one of the most dangerous quarterbacks on the ground this season. By comparison to a featured back, his 171 rushing yards and three touchdowns is slightly better than Breece Hall’s 170 rushing yards and two touchdowns.

But Daniels’ historic accomplishments are not the only reason he’s the QB of the Week. It’s the fact that on top of how good the stats are—and numbers can always be manufactured to make a player look better on paper than he is on the field—Daniels also made the best play by any player in any game so far this season. You can’t manipulate plays like you can manipulate numbers:

Facing third-and-7 on Monday Night Football, the Commanders could have played for a field goal to take an eight-point lead with just over two minutes remaining in the game. Based on how Joe Burrow had been playing (he joined Dalton in the 300 yards/three TD club), an eight-point lead was only like playing to eventually have to defend a two-point conversion to win the game.

Instead of playing for a potential tie and overtime if they had kicked the field goal, Terry McLaurin ran a double-move on a go to give Daniels a game-winning option if he could take it. Facing immediate pressure (it’s perfect that Troy Aikman is saying that Washington “only has 10 guys on the field” as Daniels is launching the ball), Daniels pulls the trigger so fast that I’m sure most fans just assumed it would be underthrown, if not intercepted.

It was the perfect pass.

According to Next Gen Stats, the touchdown was “the most improbable touchdown” of the season (10.3%) and in at least the last eight years of the Washington Commanders franchise. For a team that has been rotating quarterbacks every one to three years ever since winning a Super Bowl with Mark Rypien in 1991, the premise of stability at the position is so enticing that you couldn’t blame Washington fans for any overreactions they might have to Daniels’ start.

And it’s a far more promising start to his career than even when Robert Griffin III won Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2012 with only a fraction of the arm talent and ability to beat teams as a passer, not just as a runner.

The NFL needs star quarterbacks, and this has been true for at least the last 100 years. You may not be able to name anybody who played for the Washington franchise in the 1930s, but if I told you that Sammy Baugh did, you’d probably say something like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of him.”

Quarterbacks rule the league and as far as those of us who are not over 100 years old, they’ve always ruled the league. They dominate our thoughts and our conversations and our predictions of what will happen in the NFL, and that will continue to be true whether we are overreacting to a single game or if what’s happening in front of us is actually real and sustainable, which it is every so often. It’s rare — it’s like Patrick Mahomes winning MVP in his second year in the NFL and first as a starter — but it does happen and that’s why we continue to obsess over “the next crop” of rookie quarterbacks.

“Will there be a new addition to the elite QBs this year???”

Well, I guess it could be Sam Darnold. Anything is possible. (Maybe not anything; it won’t be Andy Dalton, but he gets my respect.) Of the rookies, it could eventually be Caleb Williams, Drake Maye, Michael Penix, or someone else. Two years ago, Brock Purdy was just a seventh rounder sitting in San Francisco’s three-spot.

But with Jayden Daniels so far, calling him one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL is not a projection, a prognostication, a prediction, or a far-off fantasy. It’s real. This season, Jayden Daniels is unquestionably one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL through three games. It is only three games—in Marcus Mariota’s first three games with the Titans, he had eight touchdowns and over 800 passing yards—but it’s the type of three games that re-writes how I think about Washington quarterbacks: It can be done. You actually can be a good quarterback in Washington!

Whether or not Daniels continues on this path as defensive coordinators start writing counter-attacks to what’s working is something we won’t know until the rest of the season unfolds. Could a quarterback who wasn’t even considered that good of an NFL prospect at this time last year shoot right past the Rookie of the Year conversation and into talks as the Most Valuable Player in the entire league?

You never know.