Takeaways: Michael Penix, J.J. McCarthy Both Helping NFL Draft Stock

The quarterbacks have been impressing teams with their athleticism and intangibles as we get closer to the draft. Plus, the reasoning behind the Stefon Diggs trade and Carolina’s Derrick Brown extension.

Michael Penix Jr. has had what I’d call a modest climb, as far as I can tell, over the past few weeks. I’m always hesitant to say anyone is “flying up draft boards” because it just doesn’t happen that way. More often than not, it’s the media catching up to what teams think of guys, and the conversation through the public shifting accordingly.

So take what I’m going to say here with that grain of salt.

Washington’s Heisman finalist’s stock is, indeed, on a bit of an upswing. He had a nice pro day, no doubt. The 40-yard dash in the 4.5s, especially given the injury questions, helped, and Penix also showed, in the words of one AFC college scouting director, “He has a super strong arm.” “The arm talent, it’s impressive,” says an NFC exec. “Combined with running faster than most thought, he just had a good day.” On top of that, he’s come off as humble, confident, and introspective in his meetings with teams, after a six-year, two-school college career.

But, as much as anything, what’s really helped is simpler than all that—the coaches are now involved. Because in my early rounds of phone calls, it’s pretty apparent to me that coaches are higher on Penix than scouts. And that’s significant, because among scouts, Penix has never been seen quite the way the general public thought the NFL was seeing him back in the fall when he was lighting up the Pac-12.

“Penix is my No. 2 guy,” says one offensive coach from an AFC team. “I love Penix. He's a stud, a born leader, calm and collected and in a genuine way. He’s a baller. He turns it loose, can throw it into tight windows. He stands in the pocket, lets plays develop, takes hits, throws it down the field. He’s just a winner.”

So after talking to a few coaches who raved about Penix—one said he thinks he throws it a little like Matthew Stafford—I checked in with a couple of people to see what would lead to the disconnect here between the teachers and evaluators.

The strongest answer I got was easy to understand. Simply put, Penix has things that you can’t coach. The deep-ball accuracy is off the charts. He throws with anticipation. And he’s tough as nails and very football smart. So where a scout looks at sometimes-scattershot accuracy underneath, and some issues with movement through the pocket, the coach looks at what he can coach, and what he can’t, and believes he can fill in the blanks thereafter.

Along those lines, I did have one NFC executive call Penix a “three-point shooter” before the Washington-Michigan title game. Two others I talked to after that agreed with the assessment. Then, I watched the championship games, and saw Wolverines DC Jesse Minter dare Penix to beat Michigan underneath, and go on 10- and 12- and 14-play drives, and Washington couldn’t pull it off.

The optimist (coaches) would say that can be fixed with some mechanical work. The pessimist (scouts, in this case) would say he’s been in school for six years, and had great coaching, so it’s not like folks haven’t been trying.

And so moreso than other quarterbacks, this is where I think private workouts will be important for Penix, giving those coaches the chance to go hands-on with him. The Vikings sent a large contingent, and put the quarterback through a rigorous workout of nearly 100 throws. The Falcons sent eight guys, including GM Terry Fontenot, coach Raheem Morris  and OC Zac Robinson, cross country for their own lengthy workout. 

Put it all together, and I think how Penix’s fate plays out should be one of the more intriguing storylines of draft weekend.

JJ McCarthy

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J.J. McCarthy’s the other one who really helped himself. The Michigan quarterback’s had a good few months. In a meeting room setting, his football IQ has reflected his experience running a pro-style offense, and teams have been really impressed with how open and reflective he’s been in telling his story, and detailing his bouts with depression during COVID and his move away from home to IMG Academy as a high school senior.

Then, there’s the physical part of it, which has been better than expected.

“J.J.’s got more arm than I thought from what I saw on tape,” says one AFC coach who went to the pro days of both McCarthy and Caleb Williams. “It was pretty impressive. Every ball wasn’t on the face mask, some were behind guys a little, and Caleb’s more naturally accurate. But, man, he showed off his arm. There was one where he was moving away from internal pressure, drifting left, and throwing [right] to the field—wow. The spiral is tight, the rotation is there, he drove the ball more than Caleb did.”

“His pro day was ridiculous,” says an AFC college scouting director. “He’s a super athlete, a really efficient thrower. I like his skill set.”

Now, the difference is that Williams is so twitchy and explosive that he barely needs to put his body into even difficult throws, and the ball jumps off his hand and goes where it needs to. McCarthy, conversely, has to use a lot more of his body, and thus needs more space to throw, to get it there.

That said, the workout helped put to bed the idea that McCarthy doesn’t have starting-quarterback tools. He’s not the physical outlier that a lot of guys who go that high in the draft usually are, but that’s not his game anyway.

And in that way, he’s probably done more to swing teams’ opinions on him than any of the other quarterbacks in his class. Which is why we’re discussing the possibility that he goes in the top five.

The Buffalo Bills’ trade of Stefon Diggs was, in the end, a value proposition. All told, Buffalo got 445 catches for 5,372 yards and 37 touchdowns over 66 regular-season games from Diggs, who was acquired with a seventh-round pick for first-, fifth- and sixth-rounders in 2020, and a fourth-rounder in '21. Add to that the development of Josh Allen over that time, and all the wins, and there’s no question they got a lot from the trade.

And, sure, to move Diggs for a whole less than that now—a 2025 second-rounder, with a sixth-rounder this year and a fifth-rounder next year going back to Houston with the 30-year-old star—was always going to elicit criticism, given what Diggs gave Buffalo.

But this deal, in the works for over a month, was made more to avoid a few things than it was an attempt to gain back what the Bills yielded to land Diggs.

First and foremost, there was the blunt reality that the deal that was on the table, that would land Buffalo a premium pick for Diggs, wasn’t a sure thing to re-materialize if the Bills had decided to wait. The Texans were the only team offering a second-rounder and if, say, they’d landed Brandon Aiyuk or Tee Higgins later in April, there was no guarantee another team would be willing to go as far as Houston did to take Diggs’s contract.

Second, on his old deal, he was owed $18 million or more in each of the next four years. There’s also always the chance that, upon being traded, a player is going to make noise about wanting his contract revised (raising concerns that we now know would’ve been well-founded in this situation).

Third, there’s the drama that’s followed Diggs with the cryptic tweets and holdout/nonholdout during last June’s minicamp and the rest of it. Diggs is a fierce competitor, and a well-liked teammate, but the up-and-down nature of his time in Minnesota and Buffalo, and the need to feed him the ball, can wear on a team, and the Bills had gotten to that point.

Fourth, there was the potential that, at 30, the wheels could fall off. No one’s predicting that. But Diggs’s production lagged at the end of his final season in Buffalo—he only exceeded 75 yards once in his final 10 games (playoffs included) as a Bill—and there’s no guaranteeing that it was going to bounce back.

Fifth, the Bills were already going through a cap reset this year, saying goodbye to Tre’Davious White, Micah Hyde, Jordan Poyer and Mitch Morse and other aging vets in an effort to make sure the roster makeover wouldn’t be weighed down by cap issues in 2025 or beyond. And so if you’re already going through that with a set of decorated veterans, you could see where it’d make sense to do it all at once, and lump Diggs in with the rest.

Now, with all this established, there’s a great chance that the Texans juice what’s left of Diggs’s NFL career. You could argue that, purely speaking of the guys as passers, Diggs won’t be taking a hit going from Josh Allen to C.J. Stroud; and that having Tank Dell, Nico Collins and Dalton Schultz around him, and taking the pressure off him, will give Diggs the best supporting cast he’s had in the passing game in any of his 10 NFL seasons.

He'll also have motivation, with the last three years of his contract chopped off and another set of “doubters” to prove wrong. Which, of course, wouldn’t be part of the equation had he returned to Buffalo for a fifth season, and is why, really, this deal made sense for everyone involved.

I really like the approach the Minnesota Vikings have taken to studying the quarterback class. You might have noticed, over the past couple of weeks, that Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah were absent from the big quarterback pro days, which seemed to fly in the face of the aggressive approach they took to position themselves for a trade up after the move with the Texans in mid-March.

The reality? The Vikings were just allocating resources in a different way.

Rather than go to the cattle calls that pro days often become, Minnesota dispatched quarterbacks coaches Josh McCown and Grant Udinski to those, and then rolled out a larger group for a three-day whirlwind tour to work out quarterbacks privately. The itinerary included stops in Chapel Hill to meet Drake Maye, Ann Arbor to get with J.J. McCarthy, Seattle to put Penix through the paces and Eugene to see Bo Nix.

In each case, the Minnesota contingent, with Adofo-Mensah, O’Connell and McCown heading up the traveling party, had extensive meeting time with the quarterbacks before taking them out on the field. The field work included the coaches and players applying what had been taught in the classroom, and then the ability to put what they could explain between the lines.

Kwesi Adofo-Mensah

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In the end, you figure it gave the Vikings a really good picture of what each guy might look like in Minnesota’s offense, and the team’s culture, with the officials on the ground knowing that they still had the ability to bring the players to Minneapolis for "30" visits in their back pockets if they needed to know more (those haven’t been scheduled yet, but could be).

It’s all well thought out, and was rolled out, really, the minute Kirk Cousins decided to leave. The groundwork for the Houston trade was laid at the combine, and pushed over the goal line after the ex-Vikings quarterback bolted for Atlanta—the smoking gun that getting a second first-round pick was done with the implicit goal to draft Cousins’s replacement. The addition of Sam Darnold on a one-year deal sets a safety net. And the rest is, well, really, really good.

Whoever the Vikings decide to take, assuming they do draft a quarterback, will have Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison and T.J. Hockenson to throw to, and a solid, cohesive offensive line to play behind, with 24-year-old left tackle Christian Darrisaw as its anchor, and clean financials after last year’s cap cleanse to continue building with.

It’s as good a situation as a first-round quarterback could hope for. Now, the Vikings have to find the right one—whether it’s a guy who could eventually carry a team (maybe as the target in a trade-up) or someone good enough now to be the bus driver (maybe at 11) with the potential to become more. And there’s no question that they’re turning over every rock they can, and piling up a lot of air miles, to get there.

My sense is the New England Patriots haven’t made up their minds yet on trading or sticking at 3. So, yes, personnel chief Eliot Wolf’s going to take phone calls on the pick. And one really interesting piece of information I’ve gathered over the past week is that New England, to this point at least, has only allotted three of its 30 visits to quarterbacks.

Maye was in Thursday night for dinner at Davio’s by Gillette Stadium for his visit on Friday. LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels will have dinner with Patriots brass tonight, and be at the stadium tomorrow for his 30 visit. McCarthy is scheduled to go through the same drill next week. And New England has held back some of its allotment of 30 visits, but those are the three the Patriots have been zeroed in on through the process.

While the Patriots did send a group headed by Wolf to L.A. for Williams’s pro day, coach Jerod Mayo wasn’t there for that one, instead joining the rest for McCarthy’s pro day a couple days later in Ann Arbor. New England then sent an eye-popping nine guys (Mayo, Wolf, OC Alex Van Pelt, QBs coach T.C. McCartney, senior assistant Ben McAdoo and execs Pat Stewart, Matt Groh, Alonzo Highsmith and Cam Williams) to Baton Route for Daniels’s pro day, and eight of those nine (with an area scout joining them) to Chapel Hill for Maye.

For context—Maye and Penix had their pro days on the same day, and Williams was the only one from the above group to break off and go to Seattle to see Penix throw. So that would tell you New England’s focused on quarterbacks who’ll go right in the range of their pick, which makes sense, and not those available in trade-down scenarios.

O.K., so that said, what if, for example, Minnesota offers both its firsts and a 2025 first-rounder (maybe with a pick getting kicked back to the Vikings) for the third pick? And in that scenario, if Minnesota takes, say, Maye, could the Patriots then try to trade back up into the top five to take McCarthy? And if that were to happen, could they hold on to the 23rd pick, and wind up with someone such as Oklahoma’s Tyler Guyton to fill their left tackle need?

I think all that’s on the table, as the Patriots work through their options.

The Chicago Bears’ approach to Caleb Williams’s 30 visit was pretty cool. We can start with this—it’s not like there’s much mystery left on what Chicago plans to do. Bears GM Ryan Poles and coach Matt Eberflus didn’t go to Maye’s pro day, nor do they have him coming in for a 30 visit as it stands right now. They did go to Daniels’s pro day, but there were a slew of other top prospects there, including two receivers who could be considerations at 9.

So with that as the backdrop, when I’m putting the pieces of how that visit went for Williams, I see the Bears getting ahead on the relationship-building piece of the process.

Williams was one of a half-dozen prospects to have their 30 visits last Wednesday at Halas Hall in Lake Forest. The crew arrived Tuesday night, and was divided into two dinner groups. The other draft guys went to Eddie Merlot’s in nearby Lincolnshire. Williams went with the team brass and a group of veterans to Sophia Steak in Lake Forest, and Williams sat with a group of his presumed future teammates.

The next day, a number of young veterans were in the building for Williams’s visit to the team headquarters, including Tyrique Stevenson and DJ Moore. Moore, for what it’s worth, hadn’t yet been back to the facility this offseason, and used the trip to meet some of his new offensive coaches for the first time. That it happened the day Williams was there didn’t seem to be coincidental.

And now, after meetings at the combine, two dinners ahead of his pro day in L.A., and last week’s events in the Chicago suburbs, it’s starting to feel like the end of Williams’s draft process is starting to meld together with the beginning of his career as a Bear.

If that was all intentional, and I assume it was, good on the team for handling things this way, so their (again, presumed) rookie quarterback can hit the ground running in May.

Baker Mayfield, Derrick Brown

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The Carolina Panthers’ signing of Derrick Brown didn’t get much attention, but it’s an important one. The 2020 first-round pick landed a four-year, $96 million extension last week. He’ll get $49 million over the first two years of the deal, and $72 million over the first three, and it’s a well-deserved deal for a guy who’s done the right things and lived up to his draft billing.

Moreso, finally, it’s a signal that Carolina’s willing to take care of its own.

As owner David Tepper’s influence has washed over that organization, increasingly, and noticeably, players have been handled like bargaining chips, more than they have valuable pieces of the organization. Over the last 18 months alone, Carolina has offloaded Christian McCaffrey, Moore and Brian Burns. McCaffrey and Burns brought home a bunch of Day 2 and 3 picks, while Moore was used as a piece in the trade up for Bryce Young last year.

Those are arguably the three best players of the six seasons of Tepper’s ownership. And as the team now moves to Tepper’s third head-coaching hire in four years, that’s made it just as easy for players to lose faith that they’d be rewarded for giving to the organization as it has been to lose faith in the organization’s ability to build a contender.

So for new GM Dan Morgan, VP Brandt Tilis, and most of all coach Dave Canales, paying Brown has intangible value in that it shows the players they’ll bring in over the next few years that there can be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and they’re not just assets in a hedge fund manager’s portfolio. Which is a good step forward for the new guys in charge as they try to turn things around.

The pressure on Tua Tagovailoa will be palpable this year. The Miami Dolphins have, for sure, been clearing room to pay their fifth-year quarterback. They let Christian Wilkins explore free agency, and he signed with the Las Vegas Raiders at $27.5 million per year. They cut Xavien Howard and Jerome Baker, and turned over the defensive coordinator spot, with Anthony Weaver replacing Vic Fangio.

And in doing so, they showed their model going forward.

Terron Armstead was restructured and retained. Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle are still around. As such, as the defense reshuffles, and tries to regain its health in some spots (Jaelen Phillips is coming off a ruptured Achilles suffered in December), it’ll be on Tagovailoa and the offense to carry the team early on. Whether or not he’s on a new contract by then remains to be seen. What’s clear is the dynamic is changing in Miami.

For the past four years, they’ve had the rookie-contract edge, and that’s about to go away. Some teams react by spreading their resources to other parts of the team (the Chiefs were one). Miami, instead, is concentrating resources around Tagovailoa and the passing game. Which means, at least for now, the quarterback gets more help and will need to do more to give the rest of the team a chance to evolve and grow.

The Dallas Cowboys’ restraint on giving Dak Prescott a new contract is one worth watching, and not just for Dallas. Forever now, the NFL has struggled with finding the right way to set a second-tier for quarterback pay. And the struggle only gets more real as the top of the market continues to escalate.

Last year, Jalen Hurts became the NFL’s highest paid player at $51 million per year Then, Lamar Jackson got $52 million, Justin Herbert got $52.5 million and Joe Burrow landed at $55 million. This, by the way, was just 11 years after Drew Brees became the first player to hit $20 million per season and Burrow’s now making more than double what Matthew Stafford got on a record-breaking five-year, $135 million deal six years before the Bengals QB did his deal.

That, by the way, is great for players, and for those teams. But it also means that it’s harder for this game to simply be the one of leapfrog it was when Stafford got his final deal in Detroit, and Derek Carr and Jimmy Garoppolo were the benchmarks before and after that.

So how do you crunch the numbers if you’re the Cowboys with Prescott? Do you just acquiesce and start flirting with $60 million per, knowing you can’t franchise him in 2025? Or do you wait it out? If you’re, for that matter, the Dolphins with Tagovailoa, the Packers with Jordan Love or, next, the 49ers with Brock Purdy, how do you reckon with all this?

I’m not sure what the answers are in those situations.

But I do know it won’t be easy to find them.

We’re back, finally, into the natural flow of things. And so we’re going to wrap up the takeaways this week, per usual, with some quick-hitting thoughts ….

• I think seven offensive tackles go in the first round. Maybe more. And it’s because of the scarcity of the position. If you, say, have a tackle need and a receiver need this year—or really any year in this era—it’s fair to say it’ll be a lot easier to address receiver later in the draft than it will be tackle. Which, I think, will have these guys flying off the board.

• That dynamic also has me thinking, good as this receiver class is, maybe just five (Ohio State’s Marvin Harrison Jr., LSU’s Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas, Washington’s Rome Odunze and Texas’s Adonai Mitchell) go in the first round, with teams knowing there’s more help outside of the first round at receiver than at any other position.

• To that end, I think we could get three tackles in the top 10—maybe to the Chargers, Titans and Jets. I do think Jets GM Joe Douglas would like to get a tackle of the future at 10, with Tyron Smith and Morgan Moses clear stopgaps. And I’d be very surprised if Notre Dame’s Joe Alt isn’t the first one to go.

• We have a few big pro day make-ups coming this week, with Iowa CB Cooper DeJean going today, and Georgia stars Brock Bowers and Amarius Mims set to work out on Wednesday. And the medical recheck for all these guys in Indy was just completed, too.

• While we’re on that, it’ll be fascinating to see where UCLA pass rusher Laiatu Latu lands. His tape is as sparkling as his neck condition is concerning—bad enough to have forced his transfer from Washington in 2022 after the Huskies medically retired him. As a player, he’s considered up in the same category as Alabama’s Dallas Turner and Florida State’s Jared Verse as an edge player. As a prospect, though, teams can’t divorce that from the medical risk that their doctors have sorted through.

• One thing the Diggs trade can illustrate on the situations Tee Higgins and Brandon Aiyuk find themselves in—it doesn’t take a team making outgoing calls for a trade to get done. Any team looking to land a veteran receiver over the next couple of weeks will inquire with the Bengals and Niners, so those two can simply wait for the market to come to them.

• I think Andy Reid’s extension in Kansas City gets finalized soon. Here’s hoping the Chiefs take care of some others, too, that have been so integral to the construction of the dynasty there, starting with GM Brett Veach.

• While we’re there, it’ll be interesting to see if Rashee Rice’s situation affects the Chiefs’ draft strategy in any way, especially with such a deep receiver pool.

• Loved the video of C.J. Stroud working out with Tank Dell, Nico Collins and his new teammate Diggs on UCLA’s campus. I think little stuff like that matters, and that Stroud was so aggressive in getting Diggs started is a pretty good sign that the Texans won’t be resting on their laurels after their breakthrough 2023 campaign.