Once their NFL careers are over, Trevor Lawrence and Daniel Jones should reunite every year to celebrate the anniversary of the 2022 wild-card weekend. In the span of 24 hours in early 2023, Lawrence and Jones pulled off two of the most improbable playoff victories of the 2020s and landed 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 delirious Duval crowdThe following afternoon, Jones threw for 301 yards and two touchdowns in his playoff debut, upsetting the favored Vikings and upending his entire narrative…for a moment, at least.
Two maligned quarterbacks, two redemption games. That’s not all these two have in common… but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Jones used that playoff win — the Giants were crushed by the Eagles, 38-7, six days later — to sign a $160 million contract with $81 million guaranteed, which 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, for a time, 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 has since eclipsed it.)
After signing his contract, Jones played in just six games — winning just one — before injuries forced him to the sidelines for the rest of the year. Lawrence had an undistinguished 2023 season — no Pro Bowl nominations or MVP votes, unlike the year before — and the Jaguars finished 8-8 in the games he did play. This year, their teams have a combined one win in six games, and those miraculous playoff performances seem a long way off.
Jones and Lawrence fall into that gray area for teams: not bad enough to let go, not good enough to feel 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 serves up that big contract. (Baker Mayfield is a notable exception, and given the way this story has played out, Cleveland would probably like a mulligan on that decision.)
Sometimes that big contract is exactly what a quarterback and a team need to bond and solidify a productive long-term relationship. And sometimes it’s like having a baby to save a marriage — a bad idea with repercussions that will be felt for a long time.
There are two ways to analyze talent in today’s NFL, and each team has its followers and fanatics. There’s the old-fashioned eye test—in 2024, it would be called a vibe judgment—in which you rely on your gut (and a few basic stats like quarterback wins). The goal here is to determine whether your quarterback, as they say, has that dog in him—and since there’s no measure of dog presence yet, you rely on your gut.
The other option is to dive 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 play a very similar game. In other words, Lawrence is Jones with a better haircut; Jones is Lawrence with a bluer Carolina pedigree:
As our Charles Robinson noted earlier this weekThe comparison of the 17-game averages between Lawrence and Jones is surprisingly similar:
Laurent: 63.2% completion, 3,955 yards, 19 TD, 13 INT, 45.8% success, 6.38 air yards per attempt, 5.66 adjusted net yards per attempt, 84.5 rating
Jones: 64% completion, 3,538 yards, 18 TD, 11 INT, 42.8% completion percentage, 6.26 air yards per attempt, 5.45 adjusted net yards per pass attempt, 84.9 passer rating
It’s the quarterback’s equivalent of a $5 frozen pizza: It’ll do, but no one will mistake it for quality. And in this case, the $5 pizza costs tens of millions.
The NFL is currently full of quarterbacks who have been passed over 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 Lawrence and Jones as failures. But Jacksonville and New York need to find a way internally to get those two to play better; many teams regret letting these rejuvenated quarterbacks go.
Jacksonville and New York need transcendent talent to pull them out of their constant orbit of futility. They offered these massive contracts hoping to have that talent already in the building. But Lawrence and Jones are going to have to do a lot more than they have so far to help their teams reach escape velocity.
