Culture
2025 NFL Draft matchmaker: Best fits for Cam Ward, Jaxson Dart, other top QBs
Read Dane Brugler’s 2025 ‘The Beast’ NFL Draft guide.
At least beyond Cam Ward, there is no consensus on where each of this year’s crop of quarterbacks may get drafted. After Ward presumably becomes a Tennessee Titan, the rest of the group is a complete mystery. It’s just as likely Ward is the only quarterback we see on Thursday night as it is that four quarterbacks go in the first round.
Lucky for us, we’re going to cut through all that uncertainty and play quarterback matchmaker, placing all of this year’s top quarterback prospects on the teams that make the most sense. In some cases, that has more to do with what type of quarterback the team needs; in others, it’s about finding the right environment for getting the most out of a particular skill set.
Let’s get to the lovely new couples.
Cam Ward: Tennessee Titans
All signs point to Ward being the Titans’ starting quarterback next year. It’s not even worth entertaining different possibilities for either QB or team at this point. Ward is both a good fit for the core of Brian Callahan’s offense and would bring elements that Titans’ quarterbacks last season did not.
The Titans’ 2024 offense was all about maximizing play-action opportunities and attacking down the field. Ward has the arm talent and fearlessness as a thrower to excel in that environment. However, Ward also massively improved his quick-game operation in college, and he’s much more comfortable playing from spread and empty formations than Will Levis has ever been. Ward is leaps and bounds ahead of Levis (or Mason Rudolph) as a creator outside of the pocket, too.
There are going to be growing pains with Ward’s overzealous play style early on, but they will be worth it in the long run. Ward has both a floor and ceiling worthy of being the No. 1 pick in this class.
Shedeur Sanders: New Orleans Saints
Finding Sanders’ best fit was trickier than I anticipated. Kevin Stefanski’s downfield play-action offense in Cleveland is not ideal; Brian Daboll’s quicker passing attack in New York might make sense, but that offensive line is a sieve and Sanders is not athletic enough to tap into some of the best parts of Daboll’s playbook.
The idea of Sanders being Kellen Moore’s first crack at a quarterback is intriguing, though. Sanders is at his best operating spread passing concepts, especially in the underneath area. He’s a reliable short-area passer who uses the intermediate and deeper areas of the field to keep defenses honest, rather than making those his preferred areas of attack. That’s perfectly fine for a West Coast-inspired offense.
Of course, falling to ninth overall is no guarantee. The Browns or the Giants may feel the itch of desperation and draft Sanders in the top three. If Sanders does slide a little bit, however, it wouldn’t be a shock to see the Saints stop that fall.
Jaxson Dart: Seattle Seahawks
It would be stunning if the Seahawks left the first two days of the draft without a quarterback. The deal Sam Darnold signed in March is effectively a one-year contract with team options from then on out — if that doesn’t scream “a developmental quarterback is coming,” I don’t know what does.
Seattle could go in a few directions, but Dart makes sense for their new offense under Klint Kubiak, and vice versa.
Dart reminds me a lot of Jimmy Garoppolo as a passer. The two are quite similar in build, arm talent and ability on throws over the middle of the field. A majority of Dart’s best throws on film are slants, short posts and crossers. The same was true of Garoppolo at his best in San Francisco. Neither Dart nor Garoppolo is a quarterback you want reading out a full progression very often.
In theory, Kubiak’s offense plays into all of that. It’s built off the run game, which is then parlayed into a strong play-action attack. Not only does that simplify reads for the quarterback, it also demands the QB often makes tight throws over the middle of the field, which is where Dart shines.
With a year on the bench to learn the pace of the league, maybe Dart can make it work with the Seahawks.
Tyler Shough: Cleveland Browns
The Browns’ best path to a quarterback is to take the Day 2 player most ready to start immediately. For my money, that is Shough.
Outside of Ward, Shough is the most talented thrower in the class. He has a flexible yet explosive release that works well from all platforms, in and out of the pocket. Though he’s more of a straight-line thrower than someone with fantastic touch, he still gets the job done from an accuracy perspective.
Shough is a quality processor, as well. Similar to Ryan Tannehill, he can be a hair slow coming off of reads early in the down but generally doesn’t make bizarre mistakes, and he protects the ball well.
In terms of pro readiness and arm talent, Shough just makes the most sense for Kevin Stefanski’s offense right now.
Jalen Milroe: Los Angeles Rams
If Sean McVay wants to keep the offense roughly the same in an eventual post-Matthew Stafford world, Milroe is not the answer — he’s actually the furthest thing from Stafford in this draft class (aside from the two or three bizarre misfires each QB has every game).
McVay has long flirted with the idea of a mobile quarterback, though. He was eager to give John Wolford a chance at the end of the Jared Goff saga, then held onto him as the team’s backup through the 2022 season. McVay also gave Bryce Perkins a start in 2022, a game in which Perkins carried the ball 19 times for 90 yards.
Milroe will walk into the league as one of the best athletes at the position. As a passer, he’ll need at least a year to fix his footwork and adapt to the speed of coverage at the NFL level, but that’s okay. There would be no pressure on Milroe to compete with Stafford for the job.
This would be a long play. Regardless of it being a good or realistic idea, I just so badly want to see the world in which McVay gets to re-unlock the boot-action game and dabble in a quarterback-centric rushing attack.
Riley Leonard: New York Giants
Brian Daboll’s best work over the years — outside of his time with Josh Allen — was at Alabama in 2017, with Jalen Hurts, and in 2022, with Daniel Jones.
Though different quality players, Hurts and Jones can both generally be described as sturdy, athletic quarterbacks with the arm talent to push the ball down the field a little bit. Both players added something to the offense via their mobility, and Daboll took advantage.
Aside from maybe Milroe, Leonard is Daboll’s best swing at that kind of athlete. Leonard is 6-foot-4, 218 pounds with serious wheels. He’s fairly explosive in short areas and excels when he really gets to stride out, similar to Jones. He’s clearly a weapon in the designed-run game and the red zone.
Leonard still has a lot to prove as a passer, but his athletic ability and toughness gives him a floor to work with while he figures it out.
Kyle McCord: Dallas Cowboys
It’s hard to find and hold onto good backup quarterbacks — the Cowboys were lucky to draft and retain Cooper Rush for as long as that they did. Boring as he is to watch, Rush was a perfectly competent quarterback when it came to running the offense and not playing outside of his means.
With Rush now in Baltimore, the Cowboys are in search of the next guy to fill that role. McCord is their best bet.
McCord is not an overwhelming talent. His arm is just okay, and he’s not going to scare anyone on the move. Like any good NFL backup, however, McCord can run an offense efficiently and consistently. He really learned to play within himself at Syracuse, displaying good rhythm and decision-making as a thrower.
It’s unlikely he ever ascends to anything above a very good backup, but that’s quite alright for a Cowboys team shopping for that exact kind of player.
Will Howard: Pittsburgh Steelers
They have to draft somebody, right? Even under the assumption Aaron Rodgers finally drops the charade and signs, the Steelers need to make some sort of effort to secure a young quarterback.
Howard, if nothing else, fits Arthur Smith’s offense. He is not someone who should be a high-volume passer, which already leans into Smith’s run-first approach. Additionally, Howard’s best traits are his size and arm talent, which allows him to comfortably throw down the field, as well as ample athletic ability for a player his size. Smith’s entire play-action and boot menu would be open with Howard at quarterback.
It’s hard to imagine Howard developing the down-to-down accuracy and play speed to really thrive as an NFL starter, but Smith’s offense in Pittsburgh at least would give Howard a chance to hide his weaknesses and lean into his strengths.
Dillon Gabriel: Miami Dolphins
Putting the short lefty quarterback prospect as a backup to the short lefty NFL quarterback feels like a bit, but it’s not. It makes sense when you consider each player’s strengths and the dynamics of being a left-handed vs. right-handed thrower.
Firstly, pass-catchers often talk about the flight and spin of the ball being different from lefty quarterbacks — the ball rotates in the opposite direction of 99 percent of quarterbacks, so it looks different coming into a receiver’s vision.
Gabriel, like Tua Tagovailoa, also thrives with RPOs and throws over the middle. He has a flexible and explosive release, making him perfectly equipped to manage those RPOs at a high level. And he thrives on in-breaking throws, even offering more velocity than Tagovailoa does.
The Dolphins desperately need to invest in a backup quarterback somehow. Gabriel fits.
Quinn Ewers: Buffalo Bills
Not every player or team gets their ideal match in an exercise like this. Sometimes, teams have to settle for whoever is left on the dance floor.
From the Bills’ perspective, a young backup quarterback should be on the table, because Mitchell Trubisky has just one year left on his deal. It makes some sense for the Bills to get ahead of things early and get a developmental player in the pipeline.
Ewers would bring functional athleticism and arm talent for Joe Brady. He still struggles with pocket presence and touch accuracy, especially down the field, but there’s enough talent there to mold a functional backup.
(Top photo of Jaxson Dart: Justin Ford / Getty Images)
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg
“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”
The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.
It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.
Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.
When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)
In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.
The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.
Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.
On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.
On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”
In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.
As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.
In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.
Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.
Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.
Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.
“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99
CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks, by Benjamin Hale
Benjamin Hale’s “Cave Mountain” begins as many true-crime stories do: with a missing girl. In April 2001, 6-year-old Haley Zega got separated from her family in the Buffalo National River Wilderness in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.
Haley’s disappearance led to “the largest search-and-rescue mission in Arkansas history,” as authorities began to fear that she’d been abducted. But Haley was not kidnapped, or killed, or even harmed. She was found two days later, two miles away from where she’d gone missing, having simply gotten lost.
Though not itself a crime story, the incident clearly holds great significance for the author, a fiction writer who teaches at Bard and Columbia, and who is Haley’s cousin. Though he was in high school in Colorado at the time and not involved in the search, for him the memory recalls “the way things were in that brief period of time book-ended by the end of the Cold War … and the constitutional crisis of the 2000 presidential election.” Much of the book is steeped in nostalgia for this “never-such-innocence-again era.”
Haley’s disappearance serves as Hale’s personal way into the account of a horrific crime committed very near the spot where his cousin went missing. In 1978, two members of a small religious cult known as the Church of God in Christ Through the Holy Spirit, Inc. murdered one of their own, a 3-year-old girl whom Hale calls Bethany, because their teenage prophet claimed God had told him that “Bethany was ‘anathema’ and had to die.”
“Anathema” was the cult’s term for anyone who didn’t follow their highly specific interpretation of Christianity. They shot the girl eight times and buried her in a garbage bag stuffed into a bucket.
The author’s connections to this tragedy go beyond the geographical. Bethany’s mother, Lucy, who was a member of the cult and may or may not have been complicit in her killing, would later become friends with Haley’s grandmother Joyce, who’d taken Haley hiking that day in 2001 and was the last person to see her before she disappeared. Despite that case’s positive outcome, Joyce remained racked by guilt — a pain Lucy understood all too well. And Hale himself developed a friendship with Mark Harris, the teen prophet who ended up spending 40 years in prison.
Hale dives into the region’s history, including the Nixon administration’s forced displacement of residents via eminent domain in order to build a reservoir, to establish the “longstanding tensions between local residents of the area and the government, which they see as meddlesome, untrustworthy and incompetent.”
More relevantly, he provides some context about the rise of cults and religious and political extremism in America in the past century; but his version of political insight consists of bad-faith contrasts between the “extremely delicate constant censorious moral paranoia” of his classroom at Bard and the people he meets in Arkansas. “After that suffocating environment,” he writes of his mask-wearing, scarf-knitting, emotional-support-poodle-needing students, “my God was it a relief sometimes to be among the roughs, sounding their barbaric yawp.”
Repetition is inevitable, even necessary, in a work of nonfiction involving multiple story lines, but Hale reiterates some details too often, or too identically. He block-quotes his sources liberally in lengthy excerpts from personal interviews, email and text correspondences, court records, self-published memoirs and news articles, some of whose language he repeats either verbatim or with uncomfortable similarity in his own wording. For example, he reports three different times, once in a quote from a news article and twice in his own paraphrasing, that the police confiscated from Mark Harris’s cult “22 firearms” and around “2,000 rounds of ammunition.”
These repetitions, as well as Hale’s incorporation of so many threads that are irrelevant to the main one, start to feel like the author’s attempts to mask the fact that the cult crime story didn’t quite provide him enough material for a full book. The result is a mess of narratives and ideas, and as the pages turn it becomes clear they won’t gel into a satisfying whole.
CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks | By Benjamin Hale | Harper | 287 pp. | $30
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