Whenever their NFL careers are over, Trevor Lawrence and Daniel Jones ought to gather every year to celebrate the anniversary of the 2022 season’s wild card weekend. Over the course of about 24 hours in early 2023, Lawrence and Jones pulled off two of the more improbable postseason wins of the 2020s, and played their way right into massive contracts … contracts that now have fans of their teams sighing and hoping for miracles.
In case you don’t recall that weekend, Lawrence led the Jaguars back from a 27-0 deficit to defeat the Chargers before a delirious Duval crowd. The next afternoon, Jones threw for 301 yards and two touchdowns in his playoff debut, upsetting the favored Vikings and flipping his entire narrative … for a moment, anyway.
Two maligned quarterbacks, two redemption games. That’s not all those two have in common … but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Jones parlayed that one playoff victory — the Giants got blown out by the Eagles, 38-7, six days later — into a a $160 million deal, with $81 million guaranteed, that he signed in March 2023. Earlier this past summer, Lawrence signed a five-year, $275 million contract extension — with $142 million guaranteed. At $55 million a year, Lawrence was, for a moment, the highest-paid player in NFL history, along with Joe Burrow in terms of per-season average. (Jordan Love later matched that figure, and Dak Prescott has since eclipsed it.)
After signing the contract, Jones played only six games — winning just one — before injuries forced him to the sideline for the rest of the year. Lawrence had an accolade-free 2023 season — no Pro Bowl nod or MVP votes, unlike the previous year — and the Jaguars finished 8-8 in games he played. This year, their teams have a combined one win over six games, and those miraculous playoff performances feel a long way away.
Jones and Lawrence fall into that murky middle ground for teams — not bad enough to cut loose, not good enough to feel really good about signing them to a long-term deal. In most cases, the team generally holds its breath, crosses its fingers, says a little prayer and serves up that fat contract. (Baker Mayfield is a notable exception, and given how that story has played out, Cleveland would surely like a mulligan on that decision.)
Sometimes that big contract is exactly what a quarterback and a team need to bind themselves to one another and cement a productive long-term relationship. And sometimes it’s like having a kid to save the marriage — a bad idea whose repercussions will reverberate for a long time.
There are two ways to analyze talent in today’s NFL, and each side has its devotees and zealots. There’s the old-school eye test — in 2024, you’d call it a vibes judgment — in which you go with your gut (and some vanilla stats like Quarterback Wins). The goal here is to determine whether your quarterback, as they say, has that dawg in him — and since there’s not yet a Dawg Presence metric, you go on feel.
The other way is to dive deep into the numbers, a Next Gen analysis that goes beyond basics like passing yardage, touchdowns and interceptions. Here, you start to see that these two are playing a very similar game. Put another way, Lawrence is Jones with better hair; Jones is Lawrence with a more blue-blood Carolina pedigree:
As our Charles Robinson noted earlier this week, the 17-game average comparison between Lawrence and Jones is stunningly similar:
Lawrence: 63.2% completions, 3,955 yards, 19 TDs, 13 INTs, 45.8% success rate, 6.38 air yards per attempt, 5.66 adjusted net yards per attempt, 84.5 rating
Jones: 64% completions, 3,538 yards, 18 TDs, 11 INTs, 42.8% success rate, 6.26 air yards per attempt, 5.45 adjusted net yards per pass attempt, 84.9 passer rating
That’s the quarterback equivalent of five-dollar frozen pizza — it’ll get the job done, but no one will ever mistake it for quality. And in this case, the five-dollar pizza costs tens of millions.
The NFL right this moment is full of quarterbacks cast off by their previous teams who are finding success in new environments — Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Derek Carr, Geno Smith. So it’s too early to write off both Lawrence and Jones as washouts. But Jacksonville and New York have to figure an in-house way to get these two playing better; a whole lot of teams are regretting that they let those rejuvenated quarterbacks go.
Jacksonville and New York need a transcendent talent to pull them out of their constant orbit of futility. They offered those massive deals hoping that they had that talent already in the building. But Lawrence and Jones are going to need to do a hell of a lot more than they’ve done so far to help their teams achieve escape velocity.