The mystery of Jaxson Dart's draft stock: What I am hearing

Draft Twitter is all over the map on Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart, so I asked around.

There is not a 2025 NFL Draft prospect whose stock is as all over the map as Ole Miss quarterback Jaxson Dart.

Some view Dart firmly as a Day 3 player (myself included), while others see him as high as QB2 and perhaps a top-10 pick. But what Draft Twitter and analysts think of a player matters nothing compared to what the actual NFL thinks of a player.

Those lines of gotten completely blurred on Dart, however.

After his Senior Bowl performance brought in mixed reviews, the discourse is all over the map. Some say he was easily the best quarterback in Mobile and his stock should shoot through the roof as a result, and others say he did not do nearly enough to stand out among the crowd of lackluster quarterbacks.

So what is true and what is false?

Here we talk a bit about what he did in Mobile, Alabama last week and try to sift through a ton of the extremely loud noise about Jaxson Dart.

Jaxson Dart Senior Bowl hype and analysis

I watched all of the practice tape and digested all of the 11-on-11 and 7-on-7 reps, and it’s hard to justify Dart's strong week. Dart had his moments throwing on air and in 1-on-1 settings, but just as in his tape at Ole Miss shows, he struggled to anticipate windows and was often late.

He was named the best quarterback on the American squad by his teammates, beating out Alabama’s Jalen Milroe, Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard, and Memphis’ Seth Henigan. However, in my analysis of practices, both my first-team and second-team quarterbacks from the Senior Bowl came from the National squad in Louisville’s Tyler Shough and Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel.

Then you have to consider that Dart never played under-center at Ole Miss and that showed. There were multiple under-center exchanges fumbled throughout the week, and Dart’s feet are a mess because, well, he was never asked to purely drop back under Lane Kiffin. This stuff, however, is extremely coachable and fixable over time.

It’s the NFL playbook stuff that at the very least forces a multi-year projection onto Dart at the next level.

Kiffin’s offensive philosophy is that less is more to think less and keep the tempo fast. Everything is spread out and vertically oriented, and jet motion is a staple to give his quarterback as many pre-snap indicators as possible. The goal is to make the job as easy on the quarterback as possible for the sake of volume, both in the amount of offensive snaps played and yards vertically attainable.

A perfect example of this is a redzone 11-on-11 rep where Dart is operating a boot concept. He has both the running back in the flat and the wide receiver on a corner open in the endzone. Dart, however, hesistated and did not anticipate. Instead, he ran out of bounds for a loss on the play.

Is it impossible for Dart to pick up a much denser playbook? No, but given the looks in Mobile, a shell of an NFL playbook, the learning curve is going to be a steep one for the Ole Miss quarterback.

So where does Dart’s 2025 NFL Draft stock sit around the league?

Even after what I would consider a rough week in Mobile, the beauty is often in the eye of the beholder. This tweet from fantasykash very much indicates the same:

So I did some digging around. I have some scouts from around the league that I have networked with over the years. I have intel from four different scouts from four different buildings what their grades on Dart were inside their facility, and I largely got the same answer from them.

One AFC scout told me that his grade is, “nowhere near the first two rounds for us.” Another AFC scout in response to the Dart hype gave a NSFW answer to his opinion on the Ole Miss quarterback. An NFC scout expressed an early Day 3 grade on him, while another NFC scout indicated their building had an even lower grade than that on Dart.

In discussions with another prominent and well-plugged-in member of the NFL Draft media, this individual also expressed quite a bit of concern about Dart’s projection to the NFL level. They told me, “The main concerns with him are more ‘not that he can't do it’ but ‘we haven't seen him do it consistently.’ So he's a complete projection and will need time, which is why I'm probably not making that bet.”

There was a caveat to Dart from this media member however: Dart is well-liked by both his teammates and coaches and is a notoriously hard worker. They concluded, “Likable kid with talent, but needs so much work doing actual QBing things.”

Even ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler was asking around at the Senior Bowl in Mobile and got similar feedback. In his article released on Sunday, Fowler talked to scouts and executives who agreed that the first round talk is “misguided.” Per Fowler, another scout added that they “could see him getting pushed up in the draft, maybe not in the first round but close.”

Scouts and NFL officials align across the board that Dart doesn’t belong in the first round conversation. However, where he comes off the board gets a bit murky.

For the TL;DR crowd

So there is not a consensus on where Dart will come off the board, but the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. No team that I have spoken to has a Day 1 or Day 2 grade on Dart, but it sounds like just about everyone expects him to get pushed into the Day 2 conversation with the amount of quarterback-needy teams in a bad draft class.

That is exactly where the consensus of mock drafts continue to pin him down. According to Benjamin Robinson at Grinding the Mocks, Dart’s Expected Draft Positioning currently sits at the 70th overall pick and as the sixth quarterback off the board.

You’ll continue to hear a ton of buzz because it sure seems like his agent is putting in the legwork with media members, but it doesn't seem like the actual grades in NFL buildings match that hype. Players don’t magically skyrocket this late in the season when a whole season of tape has been out there.

Based on my analysis and intel, Dart is likely the fourth quarterback off the board but I wouldn't be shocked if one or two others went before him. Even with his Senior Bowl performance, there is not enough on tape or tools-wise to leap Dart over even Alabama’s Jalen Milroe.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a noisy three months.