When their NFL careers are over, Trevor Lawrence and Daniel Jones should get together 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 victories of the 2020s and played their way to 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 from a 27-0 deficit to beat the Chargers in front of a rabid crowd in Duval. The next afternoon, Jones threw for 301 yards and two touchdowns in his playoff debut, upsetting the favored Vikings and turning his entire narrative around … for a while, anyway.
Two vilified quarterbacks, two redeeming games. That’s not all these two have in common…but we’ll get to that.
Jones parlayed that one playoff victory — the Giants were blown out 38-7 by the Eagles six days later — into a $160 million deal, with $81 million guaranteed, that he signed in March 2023. Earlier this summer, Lawrence signed a five-year, $275 million contract extension — with $142 million guaranteed. At $55 million per year, Lawrence was briefly the highest-paid player in NFL history, tied with Joe Burrow in terms of per-season average. (Jordan Love later matched that mark, and Dak Prescott has since surpassed it.)
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 award-less 2023 season — no Pro Bowl nomination or MVP votes, unlike the year before — and the Jaguars finished 8-8 in the games he did play. This year, their teams have combined for one win in six games, and those miraculous playoff feats seem a long way off.
Jones and Lawrence fall into that murky middle ground for teams — not bad enough to let go, not good enough to feel particularly good about signing them to a long-term deal. In most cases, the team holds its breath, crosses its fingers, says a little prayer, and hands over that fat contract. (Baker Mayfield is a notable exception, and given how that story played out, Cleveland would probably want a mulligan on that decision.)
Sometimes that big contract is just what a quarterback and a team need to bond and cement a productive, long-term relationship. And sometimes it’s like having a kid to save a marriage — a bad idea with ramifications that will reverberate for a long time.
There are two ways to analyze talent in today’s NFL, and each side has its adherents and fanatics. There’s the old-fashioned eye test — in 2024, you’d call it a vibes judgment — where 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 no Dawg Presence metric yet, you go with your gut.
The other way is to dig deep into the numbers, a Next Gen analysis that goes beyond the basics like passing yardage, touchdowns and interceptions. Here you start to see that these two play a very similar game. Put another way, Lawrence is Jones with better hair; Jones is Lawrence with more of a Carolina blue blood:
As Charles Robinson noted earlier this week, the 17-game average comparison between Lawrence and Jones is strikingly similar:
Laurens: 63.2% completions, 3,955 yards, 19 TDs, 13 INTs, 45.8% passing percentage, 6.38 air yards per attempt, 5.66 adjusted net yards per attempt, 84.5 rating
Janssen: 64% completions, 3,538 yards, 18 TDs, 11 INTs, 42.8% passing percentage, 6.26 air yards per attempt, 5.45 adjusted net yards per pass attempt, 84.9 passer rating
That’s the quarterback equivalent of a five-dollar frozen pizza — it’ll get the job done, but no one will ever confuse it with quality. And in this case, that five-dollar pizza costs tens of millions.
The NFL is littered with quarterbacks who were dismissed by their previous teams and are now finding success in new environments — Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Derek Carr, Geno Smith. So it’s too early to write off Lawrence and Jones as failures. But Jacksonville and New York need to find a way internally to make these two play better; a lot of teams regret letting these rejuvenated quarterbacks go.
Jacksonville and New York need a transcendent talent to pull them out of their constant orbit of futility. They offered those huge deals hoping they already had that talent. But Lawrence and Jones will have to do a lot more than they have to help their teams reach breakaway velocity.
