In the 2024 offseason, NFL teams selected six quarterbacks in the first 12 picks of the draft, by far the most ever. As rookies, these passers had their ups and downs. One carried his team to the NFC championship game. One nearly set the record for sacks taken in a season. One never got a chance to play due to an injury.
Where do these players stand going into year two? Is this group still set to change the league—or were NFL teams overzealous when they drafted these guys back in April of last year? Welcome to Sophomore QB Week at The Ringer. This week, we’re breaking down the play and futures of Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye, Michael Penix Jr., J.J. McCarthy, and Bo Nix. Today, we’re looking at Penix, who was the surprise of the 2024 draft and is now locked in as the Falcons starter.
Whenever I think about quarterback Michael Penix Jr. going eighth in the 2024 NFL draft, I still hear the words of NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah in my head. “Are they really gonna do this?” Jeremiah said, his tone a mix of bewildered and fearful, as Roger Goodell made his way to the podium to announce the pick.
Even though Atlanta had signed veteran Kirk Cousins to a four-year deal worth $180 million less than two months earlier, the Falcons did indeed pick Penix on that April evening, choosing a player that they believed would be their quarterback of the future instead of addressing pressing needs on the defense and the offensive line. They made the pick in spite of Penix’s troubling injury history while in college, and without immediate plans for him to play. But a chance to draft a franchise quarterback doesn’t come along often—especially if a team is good. “If you believe in a quarterback, you have to take him,” Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot said that night.
What was unusual about Atlanta’s process, though, wasn’t just that it signed a free agent quarterback and used a first-round pick on a QB in the same offseason. It was that the Falcons would take this unconventional path with a quarterback as old as Penix. After six seasons in college, Penix entered the league at age 24 and was initially going to be asked to hang out on the sidelines for a season or two while Cousins tried to get the Falcons back into championship contention. There was a world in which he wouldn’t have taken his first meaningful snaps until his late 20s! That’s both an outdated quarterback development model and one that’s much more fitting for a younger, less polished passer who needs some fine-tuning before he can be trusted to execute at the highest level.
For much of this quarter century, drafting older quarterback prospects has been rare. Of the 67 quarterbacks drafted in the first round since 2004, just 22 were 23 or older at the start of their rookie year. Six of those 22 have been selected since 2020, and four of them—Penix, Denver’s Bo Nix, Washington’s Jayden Daniels, and Tennessee’s Cam Ward—were selected in the two most recent drafts. How these older players, particularly one like Penix, who has an extensive injury history, perform early on in their NFL careers could affect the league’s approach to drafting and developing quarterbacks going forward, especially as “project” QBs who’ve entered the league with little college experience—like Anthony Richardson and Trey Lance—have flamed out.
Sophomore QB Week
Penix got his chance to play earlier than the Falcons expected: Cousins was benched after a brutal 1-4 stretch in the second half of last season, in which he threw nine interceptions and just one touchdown and the Falcons were outscored 126-72. Penix went just 1-2 in his three starts but led game-tying touchdown drives in the fourth quarter of both losses. The passing game was rejuvenated, and it was clear that he belonged. After what he showed in those three games, it wasn’t hard for Fontenot and head coach Raheem Morris to commit to him over Cousins as the starter in 2025.
Penix flashed the kind of natural arm talent and decisiveness that escaped Cousins during his disastrous stretch last season. Penix didn’t post the gaudiest numbers in his starting debut against the Giants—just 202 passing yards on 27 attempts—but he consistently made the right throws at the right times to keep the offense on schedule. And he didn’t succumb to pressure or panic in the pocket when the Giants threw unconventional looks at him.
But now it’s fair to wonder how much growth we can reasonably expect from an older quarterback like Penix, who spent many years in college. Penix’s small sample of film from his rookie year gives us a chance to evaluate whether he’s a different passer now than he was at the University of Washington in 2023—and whether he or other older quarterbacks will or should be expected to take another big step forward.
Even before he led Washington on a run in the College Football Playoff in 2023, Penix was known for his arm talent and ambitious passing. His first breakout game came in 2020 while he was still at Indiana, when he put up nearly 500 yards passing against Ohio State. If you go back and watch that game, you’ll see the outlines of the passer we got to know better later on in his college years. There was no area of the field he was afraid to attack, and his explosive play potential was evident in every dropback.
Once Penix transferred to Washington after the 2021 season after recovering from a second torn ACL, his developing maturity and polish were reflected in major improvements in his completion rate (65 percent in each of his two seasons at Washington, compared with in the mid-50s in his two seasons at Indiana), but his aggression hadn’t been muted. When I was evaluating his tape in February 2024, this was some of what I noted:
Left-handedness aside, the nuances in Penix’s game remind me a lot of Tua Tagovailoa, and a play-action-heavy offense like Tagovailoa resides in would suit Penix’s strengths, too. I don’t know if Penix’s processing speed is fast enough to operate in a pure dropback world, but he has the accuracy and confidence to deliver the ball where it needs to be, if he’s coached to do so.
It’s easy to say a QB in a Shanahan system would be set up to perform well, but Penix needs the help that kind of offense provides to open up the middle of the field for him. Outside of that ecosystem, you can draw comparisons of Penix as a passer to someone like Jalen Hurts, who’s been pretty accurate on vertical throws in his career.
So far, the impressions I had then have held true. When the pocket is clean and the offensive design is on point, Penix can be the best version of himself. He’s the kind of quarterback who thrives in a complex and aggressive scheme, and you see that in the clip below, in which he works through the progression exactly as it's designed, looking for the easy throw first and then attacking holes in coverage when they’re presented:
In a lot of ways, Penix could be the platonic ideal of a quarterback in Atlanta’s offense under coordinator Zac Robinson. He’ll likely never be bored or dissatisfied by playing within structure because he’ll always find opportunities to take the big shots when his coaches call for it. Robinson comes from Sean McVay’s coaching tree; he’d worked with the Rams quarterbacks since 2019, until taking the Falcons job last season. In L.A., he first coached Jared Goff; then, after the Rams acquired Matthew Stafford, he got an up-close look at how an offense that’s heavy on pre-snap motions, empty formations, and play-action passes can evolve with the addition of a talented downfield thrower. Penix shares some of Goff’s pocket rigidity, but he has a big arm and likes to take big shots like Stafford. “With Mike now, it opens up a different avenue within the offense,” Robinson told reporters this offseason.
When a play caller knows that his quarterback is willing to take chances downfield, they have more comfort in dialing those plays up. That’s something we saw in Penix’s limited time in the lineup last season. The play below is a three-level passing concept designed to flood zone coverages. Many quarterbacks would wait for the intermediate route to open up or take the quick checkdown, but the moment Penix sensed that the nearest defensive back was late to pick up the deepest route, he uncorked a deep pass without hesitation:
But for all the upside that comes with Penix’s aggressiveness as a pocket passer, there can be a cost to his rigid adherence to the structure of a play design. Even though he clocked an impressive 40-yard-dash time (4.46 seconds at his pro day in 2024), Penix is not a runner, and he won’t improvise when the play breaks down. This was what I noted in my predraft evaluation of him last year, and it stands true today: He’s a statue-like pocket passer, often fixed at one point as he surveys the field. When a quarterback plays like this, his best answer against pressure is getting the ball out quickly. Penix wants to push the ball downfield but can’t always buy the time for those plays to develop, which means that there’s a chance his accuracy will be affected when he rushes throws from within the pocket, as on this play against the Commanders:
And when his passes are rushed, there’s also a risk that he’ll throw his receivers into dangerous situations, as we saw here:
Receiver Drake London led the NFL in receiving yards with Penix as his quarterback over the last three weeks of the season. Both London and Darnell Mooney averaged more than 12 air yards per target in that stretch of games, while the Falcons ranked in the top 10 in passing yards from Weeks 16 to 18. But Penix threw three interceptions (to go along with his three touchdowns) in those three starts. Unlucky bounces and miscommunications can explain those turnovers, but I don’t think that the risks will be mitigated over a larger sample size in 2025.
In fact, when you watch his 2024 Falcons film, Penix isn’t all that different from the player he was coming out of Washington—but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. He landed in exactly the right kind of offensive system on a team that can benefit from having an aggressive downfield passer. Realistic comps for the range of potential outcomes for Penix’s career are Geno Smith and the 2024 version of Sam Darnold. At his best, Penix can stand in clean pockets and rip throws through the middle of the field, and he will take every opportunity to attack zone defenses. At his worst, he could become a turnover-prone quarterback who becomes afraid to take chances or a player who takes sacks while waiting for the perfect downfield opportunities to open up.
When you compare his low passer rating (78.6, which ranked 39th out of 46 quarterbacks with at least 100 pass attempts) from last season with his actual tape, you see a better quarterback than conventional passing stats can capture. That probably informs a lot of Atlanta’s optimism about Penix as he heads into year two. So let’s say that Penix makes even a moderate leap and does play like a mid-tier quarterback in 2025; that might be enough of a proof of concept that other teams will continue to take older and more experienced quarterbacks in the first round, in a league that’s altering its preconceptions about age and the development curves of incoming quarterbacks seemingly in real time. It seems like patience with raw prospects, even those drafted early in the first round, is at an all-time low.
My theory: There has been an influx of new, younger head coaches in recent years, many of them in their 30s and 40s, who have known quarterback play only at its most efficient levels. They weren’t raised in an NFL that drafted quarterbacks and stashed them on the bench. We’re in a pass-first era, and teams are designing their offenses for and around prolific passers. As the level of quarterback efficiency keeps rising, every franchise is desperate to keep up. That leads to big swings on quarterbacks and short leashes once they hit the field.
Bryce Young, the 2023 no. 1 pick, lost his job just two weeks into his second season and had an opportunity to earn it back in late October 2024 only because his replacement, veteran Andy Dalton, was in a car accident. In Tennessee, even if quarterback Will Levis, a second-rounder in 2023, hadn’t needed shoulder surgery this summer, he was never going to be in real competition with 2025’s first overall pick, Cam Ward. Lance, whom Kyle Shanahan traded up to draft high in the first round in 2021, got hurt in his second game as a starter in 2022 and never sniffed the starting job again once Brock Purdy took the helm. Colts quarterback Richardson, the no. 4 pick in 2023, was erratic in his first two seasons and quickly lost the faith of his head coach, Shane Steichen, and now Indianapolis has opted instead for the supposedly safer veteran Daniel Jones.
To me, this signals that the league may be leaving the job of quarterback development to the collegiate level. Today, there’s an ever-shortening on-ramp for young passers to figure it out in the pros, and the quarterbacks who don’t possess elite physical traits will need to come armed with enough experience that they can pick up NFL offenses quickly. With that knowledge comes the confidence about what throws they can and can’t make at the NFL level. Hesitant throwers, players who panic in the pocket, and unrefined passers could be on a two-strike policy, and that may mean that raw 21- or 22-year-old prospects get pushed down draft boards in favor of players who have proved more in college.
But what matters most for the Falcons is whether Penix will play well enough in 2025 to justify their controversial decision to draft him in the first place. If Penix is merely good enough to hold down the starting job for the duration of his rookie contract, that’s probably enough to prove Atlanta right. If he’s better than good and gets the Falcons back into the playoffs, the fan base should be elated.
Either way, Penix’s entrance into the league alone is proof that any conventional approaches to acquiring and developing quarterbacks are on the way out. From the moment he was picked, it was clear that the ripple effects would be felt far outside Atlanta—and if he succeeds, teams will only be more emboldened to take wild swings at finding the future of their franchises.
