Weighted On-Target Percentage: What happens to the 2025 NFL Draft class when removing FCS/G5 competition?

How did each 2025 quarterback look against the best competition this year?

The 2025 NFL Draft class is just around the corner, and I want to zoom in a bit further with my microscope on this quarterback class.

As any subscriber to this Substack knows, charting quarterbacks is kind of the thing that I do around here. I look at how accurate each quarterback is beyond completion percentage. I take a look at the ball placement and accuracy of each individual throw to chart it either on-target or off-target, regardless of whether or not the pass was completed.

More of the methodology behind the metric can be found here.

But I want to take it a step further today.

What if I took a deeper look at every quarterback’s profile and removed all charts against FCS and Group of Five competition? What if we just take a look at how each of these quarterbacks performs against Power Five competition, in conference play when it matters most, and beyond?

This works because every quarterback in this class is coming from a Power Five school, and there aren’t lower-level charts needed to complete any of their profiles. So let’s toss them.

Why am I even doing this now?

I’m considering just scrapping FCS games and Group of Five competition charts altogether moving forward. So I wanted to play around and see what kind of impact it actually had on some of our 2025 NFL Draft quarterbacks.

When looking at quarterbacks heading to the next level, I want to be most concerned with how they look when it matters the most, and against their conference foes and top-tier competition. This is why I’ll only look at Power Five and top-tier games for players who I am only grabbing an eight-game sample size on.

There will be exceptions to this, however. A perfect case of this would be with Penn State’s quarterback Drew Allar. Penn State played a Group of Five team in a playoff game last year. I am going to chart that game and add it to Allar’s profile, given the magnitude and pressure of playing with a national championship on the line.

So here are the results:

Looking at the difference in Weighted On-Target Percentage

So, when peeling away these lower-level competition games from the resumes of these quarterbacks, here is what the difference looks like:

Shedeur Sanders: 73.26 to 72.66

Cam Ward: 61.21 to 60.6

Jalen Milroe: 59.46 to 60.15

Jaxson Dart: 66.58 to 61.71

Kurtis Rourke: 60.53 to 56.08

Quinn Ewers: 55.33 to 54.89

*Will Howard and Tyler Shough are not included because I only did an eight-game sample size with them, and all of those games were against Power Five competition.

Quick observations

I’ll probably save myself some time next year and into the future and just skip out on charting these lower-level of competition games., I’ll have to add these games for quarterbacks coming from a Group of Five or FCS level, but what good does it do to chart a game against Furman, Mercer, North Dakota State, and more?

And the data shows it doesn’t make that big of an impact in those small sample sizes of games. On average, most of the quarterbacks in the class dropped only about .6 of a percent on average from removing these games.

Jalen Milroe is a curious case where his Weighted On-Target Percentage got better. This was because he had a very sporadic outing against the University of South Florida early in the season. Removing that game from his profile caused his deep ball accuracy to take a jump upward.

But still, Milroe’s Weighted On-Target Percentage went up by just .69.

There are a couple of cases in the opposite direction, however, that saw massive dips in their profiles after removing lower-level games. One of those cases was Indiana’s Kurtis Rourke, whose Weighted On-Target Percentage dropped by 4.45 percent.

I’d like to spend a little time talking about the other quarterback, though, as he continues to get unnecessary first round buzz.

Jaxson Dart are you okay?

The Ole Miss quarterback played through a very easy schedule early in the season. And by easy, I mean Furman, Middle Tennessee State, and Georgia Southern were all on the menu for Jaxson Dart. And he rightfully ripped them to shreds.

Taking that out, however, we may get a clearer picture of what his true ball placement and accuracy is in games that matter.

In fact, in Ole Miss’s first conference game after a blazing 4-0 start with the nation’s most explosive and efficient offense, they lost to a Kentucky team that turned out to be extremely middling this season. After starting the season 13-of-15 on deep balls in the non-conference part of play, Dart was just 1-of-6 against Kentucky.

This was not a one-off either. Overall, Dart’s deep ball placement and accuracy finished just 19-of-47 in conference play, including the bowl game against Duke.

The results in this exercise of removing FCS and Group of Five games from his profile resulted in nearly a 5% dip to his total Weighted On-Target Percentage.

If ever there was a case to remove lower-level games from a player’s profile, it would be Dart. The Ole Miss quarterback finished first in QB rating, third in passing yards, top-10 in completion percentage and passing touchdowns, and top-five in EPA on passing attempts. He even finished with the second-highest Weighted On-Target Percentage in the class.

If you just filter in conference play, though?

Dart was 40th in passing touchdowns, 15th in passing yards, 52nd in completion percentage, 15th in completion percentage, and his Weighted On-Target Percentage drops below 60 percent (the only reason it remains above 60 percent in this exercise is because Wake Forest was on Dart’s non-conference schedule and I guess they’re technically still a Power Five school).

Final Thoughts

It seems pretty worth it to kick lower-level competition games from my Weighted On-Target Percentage profiles moving forward. At worst, they provide an extremely negligible difference, and at best, they expose some LOC merchants who did most of their damage out of conference.

A player’s profile rarely gets better (Milroe), and it did not impact the majority of the class to make this move. Even if I do not remove the games from the full profile of these NFL Draft hopefuls this year and moving forward, this is at least a useful exercise to identify any outliers within the metric.

In this case, both Rourke and Dart get caught up in the storm. The difference between the two quarterbacks, however, is that one is a sixth-year senior seen as a late-round flyer while the other one continues to get first round buzz.

It matters what you do against your best competition, and that’s my best argument for scrapping these meaningless games against Group of Five and FCS competition.