Football Bytes: Is Jayden Daniels Putting Together the Best Modern Rookie QB Season?

Plus, Sam Darnold's career turnaround is looking unprecedented.

Welcome to Football Bytes — a new spin-off of my baseball column that I’m experimenting with, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various football spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Football Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!

🏈 Daniels’ Debut Delivers

Jayden Daniels has had plenty to celebrate early in his career. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Around this time last year, I wrote about how Houston Texans rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud was off to one of the hottest career starts of any QB in NFL history — a huge exception to the general rule (and structural factors) that say young QBs have to struggle in the pros right out of the gates.

But now, Washington’s Jayden Daniels has arrived on the scene and is threatening to make Stroud’s hot start look like a warm-up act.

In his first four career NFL starts, Daniels’ Commanders are 3-1 (including three consecutive wins and counting), and the 23-year-old LSU product is completing a stunning 82.1 percent of his passes with 1,115 yards of total offense (897 passing, 218 rushing) and 7 total touchdowns against just 1 turnover. As a rookie, Daniels ranks third in the entire NFL in passer rating, fourth in QBR, second in QBR points above average, sixth in adjusted net YPA and second only to Lamar Jackson in EPA value over replacement.

How does that compare with Stroud? Through the first four team games of their respective careers — all starts — Stroud was ahead of Daniels in most passing stats (aside from that extremely high completion rate), while Daniels has a pretty sizable edge in rushing performance:

EPA-wise, Daniels has the edge because he has been so efficient when he does pass the ball, and he adds all of those high-efficiency QB runs as well. (His success rate, while not quite at absurd Lamar-style levels yet, is still well above the league average for rush attempts.)

But ultimately, the Jayden-versus-C.J. rookie battle comes down to whether you think the QB’s value is primarily as a passer or as a hybrid passer-runner. And that philosophical split might actually determine who was the best first-year QB since the AFL merger through four games.

If we take adjusted net YPA and convert it to a yardage value over league average, Stroud remains the best pure rookie passer through four games since 1970. If we including rushing value via total EPA,¹ then Daniels leapfrogs his way near the top of the list… ranking second behind another brilliant young Washington QB in Robert Griffin III.

We’ve seen RGIII on lists like these before, which is a useful reminder of just how good he was as a rookie before the knee injury that ended his debut season (and, ultimately, ruined the original potential of his career). But 12 years later, Daniels is giving Redskins Football Team Commanders fans déjà vu with another incredible performance early in a young QB’s rookie season. Here’s hoping it lasts longer than Griffin’s run did — and that the Daniels-Stroud comparisons (it’s not really a “rivalry” yet, they haven’t played each other² and won’t this season) stay relevant for many years to come.

🏈 Hey Darnold!

Arguably the biggest story of this young NFL season — more so than Daniels’ stellar rookie performance, even — has been the abrupt ascendance of the Minnesota Vikings to the league’s elite. At 4-0, they currently stand alongside the two-time defending champion Kansas City Chiefs as the league’s lone undefeated squads, and they rank fourth in Elo’s Super Bowl odds at 7.7 percent.

This was a little difficult to see coming after the Vikings: a) Actually lost a home playoff game to the Daniel Jones Giants; b) Dropped to 7-10 last season; c) Lost longtime starter Kirk Cousins in free agency; d) Lost rookie QB (and No. 10 overall draft pick) J.J. McCarthy to a season-ending knee injury in preseason; e) Were therefore down to washed-out former Jet, Panther and 49er Sam Darnold as their full-time starter.

That should have spelled disaster, as Darnold — an eternity removed from being drafted third overall in the 2018 draft out of USC — had been an almost uniformly sub-replacement level QB throughout his NFL career before joining the Vikings. But instead, Darnold has been the league’s third-best passer by both QBR and adjusted net YPA, and ranks ninth in EPA value over replacement. It’s all shaping up to be a QB career revival the likes of which we’ve never really seen before.

Already, Darnold’s QB EPA value over replacement this season (6.9 points) is the highest ever in a season by a player with a previous career value of -50 or worse. But on a per-17 games basis, he’s on pace to smash the previous mark — Vinny Testaverde’s 5.8 from 1992 (after a previous value of -53.2) — with a value of 29.5 EPA over replacement for Minnesota this year. Here’s a comparison between Darnold’s early pace and other notable QB career turnaround seasons:

Darnold is age 27 as well, so you might have thought the exceedingly mediocre version of him we saw at his previous career stops was simply who he would always be. However, his hot start in 2024 is providing hope that even journeyman veteran QBs can rediscover the spark that once made them coveted prospects.

Now, this is the part where I note that a seeming Darnold renaissance that ends badly in the playoffs would actually be perfectly in keeping with a franchise that my old editor Kyle Wagner (a Vikings fan himself) aptly called “Doom Dressed Up As Hope”. But for now, Darnold is one of the primary forces powering Minnesota’s surprisingly strong early performance, and he’s done it basically out of nowhere.

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Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes

1. Estimating for earlier seasons extending back to 1970.

2. Not even in college.