While it’s impossible to ever know how Joe Burrow and Tua Tagovailoa would have graded out by NFL evaluators had the former Alabama quarterback never suffered his season-ending hip injury last season, NFL Media’s Daniel Jeremiah recently shared his thoughts on how that scenario would have played out.

Jeremiah was recently a guest on “The Dan Patrick Show,” which airs daily at 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET on AT&T AUDIENCE Network and can be found on DIRECTV Ch. 239, and was asked just that hypothetical question by Patrick.

If Tua never injured his hip, how would Jeremiah grade out the two quarterbacks? The NFL Network draft analyst believes Burrow would still grade out higher due to the fact the former LSU signal-caller performed better under pressure when going up against elite competition during his college career.

“If Tua was totally healthy, I would still take Joe Burrow. That’s my opinion, there are people on both sides of that argument,” Jeremiah said on the show. “I really like Tua, but to me, when you have two players that played for, you know, incredibly talented teams, there is so much of the production you have to take and set aside.

“You have to dig in and you have to study the quality of opponents they played against and you’ve got to really study the pressure snaps that they played – because there aren’t a lot of them. With Burrow this past year, he had maybe 180 of them, I think Tua had 68 or right around 70 snaps where we was under pressure. When you study the better opponents and you study them when they are under pressure, it’s a decided edge for Joe Burrow in the way they performed. That to me is why I ended up with Burrow over Tua.”

While there’s no clear-cut, defined way to evaluate college quarterbacks when it comes to projecting how they will perform in the NFL, Jeremiah’s rationale makes sense. There won’t be many easy throws for each of these players once they get to the NFL and they will be tested regularly under pressure by defenses until they prove they can perform under fire.

Based on Burrow’s success doing just that last season, it’s no surprise to see him entrenched as the draft’s No. 1 overall prospect — something Jeremiah seems to believe would be the case even if Tagovailoa was 100 percent healthy.