In honor of Mac's start tonight, here's how he compares to the rest of the QB's drafted in 2021. While it's still early, I think it's fair to say that Mac has been the best pick thus far (ranking 1st or 2nd in every category, save for INT%). Interestingly, Davis Mills looks like the best bargain. Trevor Lawrence has, thus far, been the most durable. And Trey Lance has perhaps been the most explosive.
Here's hoping Mac can eventually claim the top spots in YPA, ANY/A, TD% and INT%.
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Mostly what this tells us is Mac was the best rookie by a significant margin, which we already knew.
Lawrence for example took a big step forward going to year 2, basically the opposite of Mac.
If people are concerned about Mac it's because his TD% halved and his INT% more than doubled and his ANY/A dropped. People should expect rookie QBs to be bad, year 2 and 3 are the key years usually. Mac was surprisingly good as a rookie, but (in a small 3 game sample) the concern is that in year 2 he not only didn't improve, he appears to have regressed (now there could be valid reasons for that, and it's a small sample but...), where some of the others, notably Lawrence, are doing what you'd hope for out of a young QB... he significantly cut his INT%, he significantly raised his TD%, his ANY/A also went up.
Generally I don't think you grade second year QBs by career stats, it's mostly pointless, since you don't really care about totals you care about year over year growth. We've had a lot of Josh Allen comps on here (which I think we've finally agreed are dumb) and one of the things is... if you looked at Allen halfway through his 3rd year against his classmates using this method, he wouldn't look that good, he'd have been behind Lamar obviously, but also Baker, and maybe even Darnold, because all of those guys had much better rookie years, and some had better year 2 numbers.... but... anyone paying attention would have seen that Allen started all-time bad, jumped to just mediocre bad then took the leap year 3... trajectory matters far more the first 3 years than aggregated totals, and more recent games should be weighted signifcantly more than earlier games.
It's 3 games, so it's too early to be significantly concerned about Mac, but his rookie season becomes less and less important in deciding what he is as a future NFL QB as you move forward.