NFL Draft: Brad Kaaya Needs to Prove Consistency to Earn Blue-Chip Label

The first round of the NFL draft should be used to acquire players with rare traits, skills that players who hit free agency almost never have, no matter how raw or young those athletes are.

At the quarterback position, that net is wide, as hardly any starting-caliber signal-callers ever sniff the open market in today's NFL era.

For example, this offseason, CBSSports.com's Pete Prisco ranked every starting quarterback in the league, and only one of the top 24, Drew Brees, has ever hit free agency. Even then, Brees had strong injury concerns as he was coming off of shoulder surgery.

With so many teams still looking for a quarterback, Prisco believing eight franchises have worse starters than the sophomore pairing of first-round picks in Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, organizations have to turn to the college draft for franchise passers. This year, the two quarterbacks who are the apple of the draft world's eye are Clemson's Deshaun Watson and Miami's Brad Kaaya.

Watson is a fairly known commodity, as he nearly willed the Clemson Tigers to a national championship win over Alabama in an effort we haven't seen from a quarterback on that stage since Vince Young. On the other hand, Kaaya is a projection. So why is Kaaya receiving so much hype this offseason?

To understand Kaaya's narrative heading into the 2016 regular season, you need to take into account his voyage. Coming out of high school, the California-born passer was a four-star quarterback according to 247Sports' composite rankings, which take into account of all of the major recruiting sites' scores on recruits.

Instead of staying home, with USC and UCLA offers in hand, he elected to move across the country to the University of Miami. That gave hope to a struggling fanbase that hadn't seen a BCS bid since the 2003 season.

When Memphis transfer Ryan Williams tore his ACL in the spring before Kaaya's freshman year, the track was laid out for the Golden State passer to win the starting job with little to no resistance. For reference, despite Williams only throwing for 53 passes in his career with the Hurricanes, after starting with the Memphis Tigers as a freshman, Williams still generated enough buzz to warrant an offseason spot with the Green Bay Packers.

By all accounts, Williams was walking into a situation to be a starter as a senior, and once he went down with his season-ending knee injury, the Canes were left with few options but to start the true freshman.

This year's first overall pick, Jared Goff, was a true freshman starter for the California Golden Bears, which began his rise to becoming the future of the Los Angeles Rams. What's lost in that transaction is he struggled early on his college career.

Juxtaposing Goff's freshman start against the Oregon Ducks, when he only threw six passes before being pulled in a 55-16 loss, and the quarterback's sophomore start against the same team, when he threw for 360 yards against a program that finished its season in the national championship, tells the story of Goff's tenure in Berkeley: progress.

At this point in Kaaya's career, he has seen little of that. In fact, when you compare Kaaya's freshman and sophomore seasons, he dropped in yards per attempt, yards per completion and touchdown percentage, down to 4.1 percent, in 2015.

From the past three draft classes, you could make the case there were four quarterbacks who were established prospects going into their final seasons who eventually landed as first-round picks, Winston, Mariota, Johnny Manziel and Teddy Bridgewater, and four quarterbacks who caught lightning in a bottle during their final seasons to rise to that stature, with Goff, Carson Wentz, Paxton Lynch and Blake Bortles in the latter grouping.

Winston and Manziel had both won the Heisman Trophy before their final years at Florida State and Texas A&M respectively, Mariota was a two-time All-Pac-12 passer heading into his junior season and Bridgewater was the Big East's offensive player of the year prior to his final campaign.

Kaaya is in a sort of purgatory between to the two groups. He's not Wentz, Lynch or Bortles, unheralded passers from mid-major programs who were never mentioned as first-round picks prior to their ultimate seasons. At the same time, the quarterback isn't exactly Winston, Mariota or Manziel, quarterbacks who were battle-tested weekly and proved their talents over and over on nationally televised games against the powers in college football.

One thing Goff, Wentz, Lynch and Bortles, the risers, all had in common was a solid touchdown percentage. They flashed their upsides to NFL franchises, as they finished with 8.1, 8.2, 6.3 and 6.5 touchdown percentage scores respectively to conclude their college careers. All of those numbers tower over Kaaya's mark in 2015—by almost double in Goff and Wentz's cases.

Kaaya's projection doesn't fit the paths of recent first-round picks. Instead, his projection seems to be riding on two waves of social currency: the fact he started as a true freshman, which again wasn't the plan until Williams' injury, and that Mark Richt, the former head coach of the University of Georgia, has taken over Miami's program in 2016.

Addressing the first leg of the hype train, one of Kaaya's former teammates, Jon Feliciano, had some interesting thoughts on the passer this offseason. In an interview with WQAM's Orlando Alzugaray (via the Miami Herald's Barry Jackson), Feliciano said Al Golden, the former head coach of the Hurricanes, started Kaaya because of job security:

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Feliciano said: 'The whole Ryan Williams situation was the most messed up situation. We know Brad Kaaya is the best quartertback we've had in a few years, but me and Brad talked about this before. I'm taking no shots at Brad Kaaya. He's going to be a first-round pick.

'When you have a guy, Ryan Williams, who breaks a bunch of records at Memphis, has to sit behind Stephen for two or three years, does everything right,... tears his ACL [in the spring of 2014], works his butt off to be ready by camp. They said he's not ready. He's ready. No one knows how good Ryan Williams is. Telling him this is still your team only to find out he's back, but sorry, we're going with Brad.'

He said players believed Golden played Kaaya because he was a freshman and wanted to play a freshman quarterback to have an excuse if he lost. 'That's how the upperclassmen felt and the people who could have been drafted felt.'

Williams was cut by the Packers recently. Feliciano said the 2014 team would have won four more games with Williams (10, instead of six with Kaaya) but also admitted he is friends with Williams.

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That same player, someone Feliciano believes cost the team four games, regressed statistically in big plays as a sophomore. To play devil's advocate for the Oakland Raider, Golden was on one of the hottest seats in America after a three-year 13-11 record in ACC play heading into the 2014 regular season. After less than two years with Kaaya, combining for a 4-7 conference record with the passer, Golden was fired.

Enter Richt. The publicity surrounding the Kaaya-Richt pairing isn't unjustified. In his career leading the Bulldogs, the former Miami quarterback has developed David Greene, a third-round pick, D.J. Shockley, a seventh-round pick, Matthew Stafford, a first overall pick, and Aaron Murray, a fifth-round pick. Outside of maybe Bob Stoops of Oklahoma, there is no coach in major college football who has had a baseline of quarterback talent as consistent as Richt did at Georgia.

The match of Richt and Kaaya means Miami should get the most out of the passer, but young players aren't fantasies of limitless upside. Kaaya still has a cap to his talent.

The most limiting trait the incoming junior possesses is his arm strength. Unfortunately for Kaaya, that's not an attribute that typically improves with time. At the NFL level, the quarterback to turn that negative into a positive in the past decade or so is the post-surgery Brees.

Kaaya is going to struggle to throw the deep ball in the league with his arm talent. Despite his shrinking yards-per-attempt and yards-per-completion numbers, he did have some big plays in 2015, though they came on passes he'll never be able to execute in the NFL.

For example, against Florida State, he lofted a touchdown into double coverage, with one of the defenders being 2016 fifth overall pick Jalen Ramsey. When he turns professional, after either the 2016 or 2017 regular seasons, he'll enter a league in which the hashes are more centralized and offenses are less spread out, allowing more talented NFL safeties to play a more even space on the field.

Even from just a talent perspective, if that ball were thrown against any NFL defense, a majority of the time it ball winds up in the hands of an opponent. He simply isn't treating college defenses like he will have to treat NFL defenses, but as a two-year starter in the ACC, he's able to get by.

When he's converting successful deep passes he's not forcing downfield, they're rarely passes of high difficulty. Typically, explosive plays are considered to be snaps that gain 20 or 25 yards in one clip. Kaaya has made those, but if it's a ball thrown to a receiver who doesn't have a defender within five yards of the catch point, can you come away with more than just the assumption he can throw into space?

The Kellen Moores of the NFL can make those types of passes. Again, the draft should be used on rare talents, and Kaaya has yet to prove himself as that.

The one saving grace to Kaaya's deep ball is his touch on throws that go over the heads of cornerbacks. There are passers in the league who can live with that attribute, but that isn't a desirable positive, as it means a franchise is going to have to spend money on finding Kaaya receivers who can consistently win with speed down the sideline against NFL-caliber cornerbacks.

With that in mind, the name who rings a bell is Kirk Cousins. Cousins, who was armed with DeSean Jackson, Pierre Garcon and Jordan Reed as pass-catchers last season, didn't have a touchdown pass of over seven yards until Week 10 against the New Orleans Saints. Even with that ammo, including semi-breakout rookie Jamison Crowder, the Washington Redskins drafted TCU wideout Josh Doctson with their first-round pick in 2016 to give Cousins even more to work with.

In an interview with Bleacher Report's Jason Cole, Washington's general manager, Scot McCloughan, revealed he told Cousins they're going to build the roster "to where [Cousins] can be average and still be good." That's the type of passer Kaaya could be at his developmental peak, and draftniks seem to be more confident in the Canes passer's success than Cousins' own general manager is in public.

All is not doom and gloom with Kaaya. In fact, he's one of the most mentally developed true sophomores on film in recent years. Despite being limited to mostly half-field reads, he's patient and can find almost any free man underneath, though he does have the tendency to look over deep options.

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Mentally Kaaya is pretty impressive. Knows when boundary blitzers are coming. Can be a huge issue for CFB QBs. pic.twitter.com/EvYKawmbRX

— Justis Mosqueda (@JuMosq) July 10, 2016"

Even some of the nuances to quarterbacking come easy to him. When someone jumps offsides, he has Aaron Rodgers' killer instinct to take a free play as deep as a defense will allow him. He's also rarely fazed by boundary blitzers, who have hung up quarterbacks branded with high football IQs in the past—the most recent example being 2016 second-round pick Christian Hackenberg, another former freshman phenom.

Heading into the 2016 regular season, the goal for Kaaya should be to refine his mechanics. What's separating him from players such as Cousins, who hasn't been given a long-term deal since his fourth-round rookie contract, is how consistent they are able to play on a given down.

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In my opinion, a QB's shoulder being aligned means a lot more than having your feet right. Kaaya's out of whack here pic.twitter.com/iybY037dDC

— Justis Mosqueda (@JuMosq) July 10, 2016"

Be it having a misaligned shoulder, leading to a sailing ball, or not standing tall enough in the pocket, causing an inaccurate pass, Kaaya still has a ceiling he can reach toward. Playing under Richt, even if only for a season, could lead to crucial development in those areas.

In Miami's spring game, we saw Kaaya working under center more often. In that system, he's going to be asked to make more of those high-difficulty passes in the short and intermediate ranges, where he's not limited by arm strength. When he completed those passes in the spring game, fans uniformly gasped, which is the same reaction evaluators should have had.

As of July of 2016, Kaaya is on pace to work toward the upside of Cousins, but without a long-term Cousins contract on hand, it's hard to tell how much the NFL values that player. Cousins is working on a one-year franchise tag worth close to $20 million.

Let's say you hold the first overall pick and Cousins hits the open market in the offseason. What's the right move? Do you offer up a contract in the $20 million-per-year range for the Redskins passer? Do you use the selection on a quarterback such as Kaaya, who on a rookie deal would likely make close to $28 million in total over four years but eat the opportunity cost? That contract number is similar to the one Goff signed this offseason as the league's top draft choice.

If you're making the case for Kaaya's top-five draft value, stating he has rare ability, it's not because he's a top-five talent in college football; it's because you could save in the ballpark of $52 million over four seasons, avoiding to dish out big money to an average quarterback. That's what could make him a top draft pick next spring should he refine his game.