I'm, a big Auburn fan and watched almost all of Stidham's games since he transferred from Baylor. I think he tops out as a backup.
On the plus side, he is exceptional at the short-to-medium touch passes. He can drop a ball into a receiver's and lead him up upfield for YAC. He's a real rhythm guy, so in a no-huddle offense if he hits two passes in a row he gets into Zen mode and might reel off six or seven completions.
He's not a real running QB, but's he's mobile enough to make a defense pay for sitting back in coverage. He can roll out, tuck it, pick up 4-6 yards and get out of bounds. Useful skill on third and short.
The downside is that SEC defenses figured him out and took most of his strengths away by the end of the 2018 season. He locks on his primary receiver and can't make a sequence of quick reads. At Auburn if his target was covered he had a bad habit of forcing the ball or taking a sack. He also gets happy feet if the pocket isn't clean, which also leads him into some bad throws -- shot-putting the ball, throwing off the wrong foot, ugly ducks. Auburn's gut-punch loss to Tennessee was sealed when Stidham got rattled on a trick play and flung the ball right to the defensive back.
I don't think he can throw a bomb with accuracy. If you ask him to go deep you are in trouble.
Weird career. Looked like the best QB in the country for a few weeks in 2017. By late 2018 there was talk of benching.
Another Auburn fan here, just wanted to add my thoughts to Bernie's excellent post here. We agree that he tops out as a backup.
My first reaction upon seeing this thread was "oh no", and my second was "Fuck, another Wilhite to shame my school!" My third is articulated below.
Jarrett Stidham pushed me over the edge on Gus Malzahn, because he was the walking embodiment of a QB whose head coach seemed unable/unwilling to tailor his offense to the roster's strengths instead of trying to force every player, in this case Stidham, to make plays strictly according to his system.
Agree with Bernie on his strengths - short-to-medium throws, preferably between the numbers (he didn't show off what I'd call a rocket arm on outside throws that I can recall), to my mind preferably coming off of play action or quick routes. I might quibble over whether he was a rhythm guy, or if he was in a rhythm offense - Malzahn's fast-tempo offense only works well once it has had a couple of successful plays in a row to build momentum, and Stidham was caught up in that dynamic from a playcalling standpoint. Bernie's dead-on on his speed, although I think he'll get murdered if he tries that too often at the NFL level.
We diverge somewhat on his weaknesses, in that I can't tell where issues were due to Malzahn's playcalls/Auburn's roster or due to Stidham himself.
At the start of the 2017 season, Auburn's OL played under its talent level, leading to an epic sack total in the opening game against Clemson. As the season progressed, the OL got its act together, and Stidham consequently learned to trust the OL and his running game a bit more, reducing the "happy feet" problem. Combined with a running game that forced opponents to respect it, the now SEC-quality OL gave Stidham the time required to throw the predominantly deep-to-medium passing routes called for in Malzahn's offense, and gave enough breathing room to the outside screens behind/at the line of scrimmage that is the third leg of what I'd call Malzahn's core offense - runs up the middle (preferably including the QB as a legit threat), sweeps/screens to the outside at the line of scrimmage, and deep throws. This led to the "few weeks in 2017" where Stidham looked like a stud. Once injuries impacted the running game, one of the three legs of the Malzahn offense gradually collapsed, and the lack of versatility inherent in Malzahn's "screens and bombs only" passing attack hamstrung what might have otherwise been a still-interesting offense. Alternatively, one could argue that Stidham wilted under the pressure or just wasn't capable of having to carry the offense himself, without a solid rushing attack to give him helpful play-action passes to throw from. I'm in the other camp, but it's a legit argument to be made. Giving a tough Georgia team a second look in ~4 weeks at an offense that is pretty predictable at its core at a "neutral" field might have had something to do with it, too, of course.
Now, 2018. This time, there was no "Auburn's OL gets its act together", despite what otherwise looked like a hopeful opening to the season against a Top 10 opponent from the PAC-12. The recurring theme of the season was "play against an SEC team with a quality DL, and get smacked around." The OL consistently failed to even pretend to be SEC-quality at multiple points throughout the season, eliminating any credible inside rushing attack, and now we get into why I now want Gus Malzahn's head on a spike in my front yard. This is why, despite Tennessee being a complete laughing stock throughout the SEC, Auburn still lost AT HOME to them, because their DL was one of the relatively few capable units and was more than up to the challenge of pushing through Auburn's Plastic Curtain OL.
The lack of good inside running was pretty consistent throughout the season, so it was fairly obvious that the passing game was going to have to carry the load. Its failure to do so does not reflect well on Stidham, but I'm unconvinced that it's his fault. Malzahn's stubborn insistence on relying on "bombs and screens" in the passing game played to Stidham's weaknesses, and the OL was incapable of buying him time to throw those bombs (to frequently covered WRs in that rather predictable set of WR patterns, as I remember it), so the QB who had never been given an offense with multiple potential reads for him between 3 and 12 yards from the line of scrimmage developed happy feet. One man's happy feet is another man's "there's only two WRs in this pattern for 3rd-and-8, and I need to wait 15 seconds for the route to devel..." *IMPACT NOISES* There was one shining moment, in the 4th quarter against Texas A&M, when I assume Gus had a stroke or actually listened to one of his offensive coaches and let Stidham go wild, throwing short-to-intermediate routes like a QB in a pro-style offense, on 1st and 2nd down even! For whatever reason, they never went back to that with any frequency for the rest of the season, not that it would have mattered against the Georgia and Alabama defensive lines anyway.
In other words, I don't think he necessarily locks onto his primary receiver and fails to make reads, so much as he was given middling WRs, poor playcalls, and rosters that limited his opportunities to ever get to make those reads in the first place. His pocket was rarely clean, his happy feet were often justified, and he lacks the gun to put up something better than a duck in those circumstances. I'm agnostic on his long bomb accuracy, because the context leading up to those bombs makes me wonder how often he might have hit them in a full two years of either the late-2017 Auburn offense or under a better offensive system for his capabilities. It's entirely possible that the Patriots-style offense is exactly what he needs, and he could be a completely different caliber of QB under a coach who sees what he can do instead of asking him repeatedly to do what he can't.
That being said, I don't see him as having the arm strength to make the full range of NFL throws, the mobility to get away with breaking the pocket against NFL defenders, or the experience in a competently-run offense to provide a base from which the Patriots can build him into a possible heir to The One. What hope exists in this pick lies within the possibility that Gus Malzahn is a one-trick pony who doesn't know how to operate without an above-average blocking OL and a QB who is a persistent rushing threat, *and* that Stidham's latent talent remains untapped. I'm fully on board with the first premise, but I personally don't buy the second.
Apologies for the length of this.