If you widen a bit further, you bring in Josh Allen, Blake Bortles, Rex Grossman, Brian Leftwich, JP Losman, and Mark Sanchez. This group showed above average levels of change, in particular Carr and Luck.

Lock is most similar to Brock Osweiler and Jason Campbell, and a bit more broadly: Derek Carr, Andrew Luck, Christian Ponder, Matt Schaub, and Jameis Winston.

If those ranks surprise you, the NFL is super passer friendly right now and what used to be great is now above average.

If he shows 10th percentile improvement (Brees level), he'll be a 67% passer (12th) with 7.5 yards/attempt (13th), a 2.8 TD/INT ratio (roughly Watson/Prescott level), and a 96.4 rating (13th).If he shows 25th percentile improvement, Lock will be a 63% (30th) passer with 7 yards/attempt (23rd), a 2.0 TD/INT ratio (Tannehill, Rivers, Roethlisberger career mark), and a 89.6 rating (25th).If Drew Lock merely shows average improvement he will become a roughly 61% passer (would have been 32nd among QBs this year) with 6.7 yards per attempt (25th), a 1.7 TD/INT ratio (don't know for 2020 but it's the same as Dalton, Trubisky, and Mariota for their careers), and a rating of 83.3 (27th).If you did not know this already, he is an extreme outlier Allen improved the most of any of the 70 QBs in every single category. Josh Allen and Drew Brees are the only two examples of someone who started out below average in their first 18 and turned into mega-stars.That does not always mean Josh Allen stories (more on him in a bit), it can also mean Kyle Orton, Ryan Fitzpatrick, David Carr (David not Derek), and Joey Harrington About 25% of QBs show real improvement and 10% show drastic improvement.Specifically the average QB adds roughly 2% to their completion percentage, barely changes their yards/attempt at all, goes from 1.6 to 1.9 for TD/INT ratio, and from an 82.6 rating to a 86.3 rating. The biggest improvement generally comes in TD/INT ratio. The average QB does not show what I would call 'noticeable' improvement in any category after their first 18 starts.He's in the 38th percentile for completion percentage, 31% for yards per attempt, 49% for TDs, 42% for INTs, 46% for TD-INT ratio, 42% for fumbles, 38% for INTs+fumbles (not turnovers as I am just measuring fumbles, not fumbles lost, which depends more on the randomness of recovery), 45% for QB rating, 54% for rushing yards, and 62% for rushing TDs Drew Lock is a below average QB over his first 18 starts compared to the other 70.Be warned: anyone who reads the whole thing will likely be able to tell you didn't if you only go off this summary.

Since this will be an extraordinarily long post, I'm going to summarize the conclusions up here at the top and then give you all of the data and a bit more detail. The key question we'll examine is what did these QBs do after their first 18 starts? What sort of improvement can be expected and what sort of improvement would be extraordinary? For those QBs with extraordinary improvements, is there anything we can say about them which might provide an explanation? Finally, which of these QBs is Lock most similar to, and what does that mean for our expectations for Lock. That's 70 quarterbacks with at least 18 NFL starts. We now have 18 games worth of evidence on Drew Lock, NFL quarterback, so I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to look at the first 18 games of every NFL QB since 2002 (which allows to bring in Drew Brees and covers everyone currently playing in the NFL except Tom Brady).

Josh allen stats