When their NFL careers are over, Trevor Lawrence and Daniel Jones should reunite every year to celebrate the anniversary of the 2022 season’s Wild Card Weekend. Over the course of roughly 24 hours in early 2023, Lawrence and Jones pulled off two of the most improbable postseason wins of the 2020s and earned themselves massive contracts — contracts that now have fans of their teams sighing and hoping for miracles.
In case you don’t remember that weekend, Lawrence led the Jaguars back from a 27-0 deficit to defeat the Chargers before a delirious crowd in Duval. The next afternoon, Jones threw for 301 yards and two touchdowns in his playoff debut, stunning the favored Vikings and changing their entire narrative… for a moment, at least.
Two maligned quarterbacks, two redemption games. That’s not all they have in common… but more on that in a bit.
Jones parlayed that lone playoff win (the Giants were routed by the Eagles, 38-7, six days later) into a $160 million contract, with $81 million guaranteed, that he signed in March 2023. Early last summer, Lawrence signed a five-year, $275 million extension, with $142 million guaranteed. At $55 million a year, Lawrence was, for a moment, the highest-paid player in NFL history, tied with Joe Burrow in terms of average per season. (Jordan Love later matched that figure, and Dak Prescott did, too.) Since then it has eclipsed him.)
After signing the contract, Jones played in just six games, winning just one, before injuries forced him to sit out the rest of the year. Lawrence had an unremarkable 2023 season (he wasn’t nominated for the Pro Bowl or voted MVP, unlike the previous year) and the Jaguars finished with an 8-8 record in the games he played. This year, his teams have a combined one win in six games, and those miraculous playoff performances seem a long way off.
Jones and Lawrence fall in that murky middle ground for teams: Not bad enough to part with, not good enough to feel really good about signing them to a long-term deal. In most cases, the team usually holds its breath, crosses its fingers, says a little prayer, and hands them that juicy contract. (Baker Mayfield is a notable exception, and given how that story played out, Cleveland would surely want a second chance at that decision.)
Sometimes that big contract is exactly what a quarterback and a team need to bond and cement a productive, long-term relationship. And sometimes it’s like having a child to save a marriage: a bad idea whose repercussions will resonate for a long time.
There are two ways to analyze talent in today’s NFL, and each side has its devotees and fans. There’s the old-school eye test (in 2024, you’d call it a vibe judgment), where you go by your gut (and some conventional stats like a quarterback’s wins). The goal here is to determine whether your quarterback, as they say, has that kind of talent inside him, and since there’s no talent presence metric yet, you go by intuition.
The other way is to dig into the numbers, a Next Gen analysis that goes beyond the basics like passing yards, 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 noble Carolina pedigree:
As our Charles Robinson pointed out earlier this week, the 17-game average comparison between Lawrence and Jones is strikingly similar:
Lorenzo: 63.2% completion rate, 3,955 yards, 19 TD, 13 INT, 45.8% success rate, 6.38 passing yards per attempt, 5.66 adjusted net yards per attempt, 84.5 rating
Jones: 64% completion rate, 3,538 yards, 18 TD, 11 INT, 42.8% success rate, 6.26 passing yards per attempt, 5.45 adjusted net yards per pass attempt, 84.9 passer rating
It’s the equivalent of a five-dollar frozen pizza: it does the job, but no one will mistake it for a quality pizza. And in this case, the five-dollar pizza costs tens of millions.
Right now, the NFL is littered with quarterbacks who were cast aside by their former teams and 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 failures. But Jacksonville and New York have to find an internal way to get these two to play better; many teams regret letting go of those rejuvenated quarterbacks.
Jacksonville and New York need transcendent talent to break them out of their constant orbit of futility. They offered those huge contracts with the expectation that they already had that talent on the team. But Lawrence and Jones are going to have to do a hell of a lot more than they have done so far to help their teams achieve escape velocity.