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With all due respect to Jalen Milroe, he doesn’t belong in these Mock Drafts
I consider myself a Jalen Milroe fan.
In 2024, I lost track of the amount of times I said entering the season that “people forget that Milroe finished higher in the 2023 Heisman Trophy voting than any returning player.” Hence, why I predicted Milroe would win the 2024 Heisman and that the transition with Kalen DeBoer would eventually be a home run for Alabama.
I had Milroe on The Saturday Down South Podcast and became an even bigger fan. His charisma and joy are infectious. I told him he regularly delivered the best “Roll Tide” I’d ever heard, and to his credit, we heard it no shortage of times after an Alabama victory during the 2023 SEC Championship season. When he was right, there might not have been a more enticing quarterback to watch during his 2 years as Alabama’s starter.
If we look up 3 to 4 years from now and Milroe is starting in a Super Bowl, I’ll be rooting for him to hoist the Lombardi Trophy (as long as it’s not against my Chicago Bears … for some crazy reason).
Good. That’s out of the way. Now you can’t claim that I have some sort of anti-Milroe agenda as he competes at the Senior Bowl.
I am, however, anti-Milroe in Mock Drafts.
To be clear, Mock Drafts are limited to the 1st round unless clarified. Anything beyond that is a different discussion. Of course, Milroe is going to be drafted. I won’t push back on him coming off the board on Day 2 or even early on Day 3.
But if we have 3 more months of NFL people telling us — I say “us” referring to the people who watched every snap he took the past 2 years — that Milroe is worthy of being 1 of the first 32 players selected, I might lose my mind.
(Mel Kiper Jr. ranked Milroe as his No. 4 quarterback in the 2025 class while CBS Sports had him coming off the board at No. 3 overall.)
Yes, I understand the upside of having a successful quarterback on a rookie contract, especially one who can be a dual-threat in the modern NFL. I also understand the downside of having a 1st-round quarterback who doesn’t get a second contract with the team that drafted him. Again, that’s coming from a Bears fan.
The downside of Milroe is tremendous. With an elite offensive mind like DeBoer during his pre-Draft season, Milroe never developed into someone who could be trusted to avoid mistakes and move the chains. Milroe accounted for 3 turnovers in each of his final 3 college games. And sure, his rushing ability vs. Auburn prevented Alabama from losing to a 5-win team, but when teams contained his legs, he was completely ineffective. In Alabama’s 4 losses, he didn’t hit 12 rushing yards once, and he averaged 8.8 rushing yards per losing contest.
Milroe’s ball-security issues are alarming. He fumbled 24 times in his 2 seasons as a starter, and while his 67 missed tackles forced in that stretch will have some NFL folks salivating because of the increased emphasis on the quarterback run game, it’s also worth remembering that he was sacked … 67 times. His 200 scramble yards in 2024 only ranked No. 50 among FBS quarterbacks, and it was barely good enough to crack the top 10 in the SEC. Sure, it wasn’t a vintage Alabama offensive line, and the struggles at offensive tackle played a part in Milroe’s issues, especially in those last 3 games (PFF had Alabama’s offensive line responsible for 82.3% of the allowed pressures in 2024).
But if you’re drafting a quarterback in Round 1, there should never be a debate about whether the game looks too fast for him. The college game still looked too fast for Milroe. That’s a strange thing to say about a dynamic playmaker who was 21-5 as a full-time starter the last 2 seasons. Both the eye test and the numbers confirmed that, though.
When Milroe was under pressure, he completed just 43.5% of his passes (No. 77 in FBS w/ min. 30 drop-backs under pressure) and he had 5 turnover-worthy plays compared to 4 touchdown passes. The problem is that even when Milroe was kept clean, he threw 9 interceptions, which was tied for the most in FBS.
All of those numbers confirm how maddeningly inconsistent he was. Whether that was the byproduct of him having his 3rd different offensive coordinator in as many seasons or not, it’s hard to imagine Milroe suddenly cutting down on his mistakes and handling the ebbs and flows of being a QB1 in the NFL. Stretches like what he endured to end the 2024 season can lose a quarterback a starting job in the NFL, and perhaps it could make it a multi-year uphill climb to get that type of opportunity again.
That’s what I’d worry about with a team investing a 1st-round pick in Milroe. He can continue to develop, but if you’re a 1st-round pick, the modern NFL suggests that barring injury, you’ll be starting at some point in Year 1. In the 2020s decade, Jordan Love is the only 1st-round quarterback who didn’t start multiple games as a rookie (that’s excluding JJ McCarthy because he suffered a season-ending injury in the preseason). That’s because he went to a team led by future Hall of Famer Aaron Rodgers. As for the other 17 quarterbacks who came off the board in Round 1 and avoided a season-ending injury in the preseason, they were all thrown into the fire.
Milroe’s play suggests he’s not ready to be thrown into the NFL fire. He looked like someone who could put on his cape one week and torpedo his team the next.
Perhaps a team with an aging quarterback and an elite offensive-minded head coach like the Rams will make a play for Milroe late in Round 1. It’s certainly possible that there are surroundings that he can thrive in.
But as exhausting as it can be to watch top quarterback prospects get picked apart in the pre-Draft process, Milroe’s flaws deserve closer examination by anyone who puts him in a Mock Draft.
That’s reality, Milroe fan or not.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.