The 2018 NFL Draft Prospect series breaks down draft-eligible players, highlighting their college production as well as their NFL potential. Daily fantasy players should know about NFL rookies before they’ve played a down of professional football because they are among the most misvalued assets in all of DFS. People who know NFL rookies have a significant DFS edge. The draft will be held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, TX, from April 26-28.
This piece is on Ohio State quarterback J.T. Barrett.
For more on all the other passers in the class, see our 2018 NFL draft quarterback rankings.
Updated as of Mar. 5.
Redshirt Senior | 6’1″ and 224 Pounds | Born January 23, 1995 (Age: 23) | Projection: Round 6-Free Agent
Combine numbers: 40-yard: 4.7 sec | bench reps: DNP | 3-cone: 7.38 sec | 20-yard shuttle: 4.44 sec | vertical: 30 in | broad: 108 in
Barrett is theoretically a tough player to evaluate. His numbers are objectively good, or at least good enough: He was 26-4 as a starter. He completed 63.5 percent of his passes for 8.4 adjusted yards per attempt. For his career he rushed for 3,274 yards and 43 touchdowns, but Barrett wasn’t even invited to the Senior Bowl, and he reportedly performed poorly at East-West Shrine Game practices. He was intensely bad at the combine. Despite finishing fifth in Heisman voting and scoring a Big Ten record 45 touchdowns for a national championship team as a freshman, Barrett is now being ignored by the draftnik community.
With his lack of athleticism, it’s unlikely that Barrett will be drafted as even a project player: The two previous Ohio State quarterbacks to start for multiple seasons — Braxton Miller and Terrelle Pryor — both entered the NFL as raw players, and they were selected with top-100 picks. They are now both wide receivers. Barrett, though, is unlikely to be drafted before Day 3, and although he seems unsuited to play quarterback professionally he also has almost no chance to transition successfully to receiver, as he lacks Miller and Pryor’s athletic attributes.
Barrett was a multi-sport athlete in high school and flashed throughout his career as an all-around playmaker, but it’s likely that his athleticism has been sapped by injuries: He tore an ACL as a high school senior, broke an ankle as a freshman, and struggled with a lingering meniscus issue in 2017. An unathletic player with no solid position, Barrett is in danger of becoming Ohio State’s first starting quarterback in a decade not to be drafted.
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Matthew Freedman is the Editor-in-Chief of FantasyLabs. He has a dog and sometimes a British accent. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he’s known only as The Labyrinthian.
Photo Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports
