Jayden Daniels' Rookie Year Was Probably His Career Year
But that doesn’t mean Washington’s ceiling has been set.
There is an odd paradox at the heart of sports greatness: The rarer the accomplishment, the less likely it is to be repeated. Outlier performances require not just talent, but timing, luck and circumstance — a mix that almost never comes together the same way twice.
That means an athlete’s peak is both a celebration and a ceiling. By definition, it’s the high point that we’ll probably never see again. And yet, we keep chasing greatness anyway, because the possibility of seeing it one more time is what makes sports worth watching.
I was thinking about all of this when pondering the future of the Washington Commanders with Jayden Daniels. Last playoffs, I wrote that he might have had the greatest rookie season in NFL history, and he certainly recorded the most Approximate Value of any rookie QB ever in 2024:
But where does a player — even one as talented as Daniels — go from here? When the bar is set at the ceiling immediately, it doesn’t leave much room to be raised down the line. Here’s what the rest of the best rookie QBs did in their second NFL seasons, along with a line to help place exactly where Daniels will eventually sit on the chart (depending on what he does this season):
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