Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images
What makes Ward the top quarterback in the country?
There was a debate through the end of the 2024 College Football season and through the first part of the draft process as to who would be the first quarterback selected.
As the process has progressed, Miami’s Cam Ward has separated himself from the pack and established himself as the top quarterback on pretty much every publicly available draft board – and if rumors are to be believed, the NFL’s boards as well.
That’s impressive considering Ward has largely abstained from the draft process. Ward didn’t attend the East West Shrine Game or the Reese’s
Senior Bowl, nor did he work out at the 2025 NFL Scouting Combine. Miami’s Pro Day on March 24th was the first time he threw a ball for an audience since the first half of the Pop-Tarts Bowl against
Iowa State.
Ward has largely kept his head down over the course of the Draft Process, which is in keeping with his reputation as a fiery, but quiet, competitor.
But while he hasn’t done anything over the course of the draft process to raise his profile, Ward has gained separation nonetheless. That’s largely due to scouts and evaluators going back over his work in 2024 and realizing just how well Ward played last year, as well as how much upside has yet to be tapped.
Now, Cam Ward will likely be the first pick in the draft. Let’s dive into his profile to see what has made him so good.
Background
Cam Ward is from West Columbia, Texas, and was born on May 25th, 2002. Cam’s mother is a special education teacher and the coach of the girl’s basketball team, while his father is a fuel buyer for a nuclear power plant in the area.
We normally like to go back and look at quarterback prospects’ recruiting profiles. Development and growth is an important part of quarterback evaluation, and this is the area with which we can establish a baseline.
Cam Ward, however, was un-recruited out of high school. He’s a good athlete who had promising size as a high school player, but he wasn’t recruited – at all. That’s because his high school team ran a Wing-T offense and Ward attempted just 276 passes over the course of his entire high school career.
The Wing-T is a
very run-heavy scheme that uses two-back sets and formations that are very different from the offenses run at the collegiate and NFL levels. As such, the quarterback rarely throws and there’s almost no drop-back passing game.
With that in mind, and the fact that most offenses are based in pass-heavy concepts like the Air Raid or Spread offense, it isn’t much of a surprise that Ward was a no-star recruit who only received a scholarship offer from Incarnate Word.
He had to learn how to be a passer, and fast. Ward attempted more passes as a freshman at IWU (303) than he did in three years at high school. But in doing so, he won the Jerry Rice award for the Most Outstanding Freshman at the FCS level.
Ward took a significant step forward as a sophomore and the offense fully flowed through him. He attempted 590 passes, raising his completion rate from 60.4 percent to 65.1 percent, and averaging 357.5 yards per game. After that, Ward finally got attention from major programs and transferred to
Washington State.
He continued to develop with the Cougars and began to make a name for himself on the national stage. There was some speculation that Ward would declare for the 2024
NFL Draft, with some noting similarities between his game and that of Caleb Williams. Instead, Ward once again entered the transfer portal and landed in Miami.
There, he was named a consensus All-American, first team All-ACC, the ACC Player of The Year. Ward finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting, and won the Davey O’Brien award and the Manning Award as the nation’s top quarterback.
Measurables
Kent Lee Platte |
RAS.football
Ward has adequate size for the quarterback position – though not exceptional by any means. He’s just under average height for an NFL quarterback at 6-foot-2, while also just over average weight at 223 pounds (average being 6-foot-3, 221 pounds).
As with most of the other top quarterback prospects, Ward hasn’t done any athletic testing. So we don’t have any numbers to quantify his athleticism, but it certainly isn’t a limitation on tape. Quite the contrary, Ward has very good agility and short-area quickness on tape. He uses those traits to elude defenders in the backfield, execute bootleg rollouts, and pick up yards off of scrambles.
As noted above, Ward was a Wing-T quarterback in high school, and he was asked to be a ball carrier some in college. Both Washington State and Miami included read-option plays and designed quarterback runs in their offense. But while Ward executed them well enough, he doesn’t quite have the speed to be a dynamic threat out of the backfield and likely wouldn’t have put down a head-turning 40-yard dash.
Intangibles
So much of what we focus on with quarterbacks is tangible — things like their height, weight, 40 time, or their ball velocity. However much of what makes a quarterback successful is intangible.
We can’t really measure things like mental processing, football IQ, leadership, or competitiveness, but we can see their effects.
Football IQ and Mental processing
Cam Ward’s Football IQ is an interesting topic.
Neither Washington State nor Miami put a tremendous amount on Ward’s mental plate and ran fairly standard spread offenses. He wasn’t asked to navigate extended progression reads his first year at Washington state, largely sticking to one or two-man reads. The offense evolved a bit in Ward’s second year at Washington State and his helmet began cycling between options down the field – though still largely limited half-field reads.
That largely continued in Miami, though some more sophisticated concepts with longer reads were employed on occasion.
Ward largely executed his offenses well in 2023 and 2024, moving through his reads with few miscommunications or signs of confusion. He was crisp and seems to understand what the offense is trying to accomplish and how the various concepts employed attack the structure of the defense.
If an offense isn’t particularly complex or taxing, the next step beyond looking at the scheme is to see how a quarterback’s intelligence and processing are expressed within the structure of that offense.
And
that is where things get interesting with Ward.
The two areas of Ward’s mental game that stand out are his field vision and eye discipline, and he puts them to use with great effect.
It doesn’t take a lot of tape study to understand that Ward is willing to operate out of structure and off-script. He’s a classic gunslinger who hates to give up on a play and is always willing to give his teammates a chance. His athleticism and arm talent (more on that in a bit) enable the physical aspect of that play style, but his field vision is every bit as important.
Ward excels at finding his options down the field, diagnosing the defense, and leading his receivers to open windows. It’s impossible to do that without the ability to locate both the receivers and the relevant defenders as well as anticipate how players will react once the play breaks down.
While Miami’s offense might not have asked Ward to make extended full-field reads on a regular basis, it’s clear from how he operated while scrambling that he is always acutely aware of where all his options are on the field. There were instances in which Ward executed a no-look pass across his body and against the flow of the play to a receiver that the defense lost. Likewise, he’s able to throw with anticipation, leading a receiver in a scramble drill to a patch of open field.
The second aspect of this is that Ward is truly excellent at manipulating defenders with his eyes and body language. Even as far back as his first season at Washington State, Ward understood that the offense was a one-read affair and that defenders in coverage would be using his eyes to lead them to the ball. In response, he would look defenders off, freezing them in indecision and expanding the windows for his receivers.
As Ward’s comfort and confidence as a passer has grown, he’s married his eye discipline with his scrambling ability. He now routinely looks off defenders, adds fakes, or even orients his entire body away from his intended target to move defenders.
The combination of freezing defenders with his eyes and stressing the structure of a defense with his scrambling can make even well-coached defenses shatter.
Leadership and Toughness
As mentioned in his background, Ward’s path to the NFL hasn’t been an easy one. Largely unrecruited and unprepared for a modern passing game by his high school offense, Ward had to work his way onto the national radar before he could transfer from Incarnate Word to Washington State.
The perseverance to go from, essentially, a high school running back who was occasionally asked to throw to the starter for a major program speaks to his competitive toughness. And spinning forward onto the field in 2023 and 2024, we see evidence of that toughness in his play and how he moves on from mistakes.
It doesn’t take much tape study at all to discover that Cam Ward is a gunslinger. Every scouting report on him will highlight the looseness of his game, improvisational skills, and his willingness to take chances. But while that style of play can produce spectacular highs and highlights, the reward always comes with risk.
Ward wasn’t overly prone to turning the ball over – his interception rate of 1.54 percent is solid and about even with Jaxson Dart and Tyler Shough. However, bad plays and missed opportunities are the price of doing business in that way. Ward was also prone to make one truly head-scratching decision in each game, whether that was attacking a coverage window that wasn’t there or throwing into double (or triple) coverage. However, he also bounces back well from his bad plays.
Where some quarterbacks will let their mistakes fester in their mind and snowball over the course of a game, Ward seems to have a terrible short-term memory and is able to set those mistakes aside and overcome the setbacks.
The ultimate evidence of Ward’s mental toughness seems to come when his team is in a hole. Even if Ward himself was the one who put them there, Cam Ward is a bad man when his back is against the wall.
Those are the moments in which he’s at his most vocal with his teammates, lining them up in the pre-snap phase and directing traffic when the play breaks down.
His improvisations don’t always work, and Ward has the toughness and leadership traits to own up to his own shortcomings.
Ward was a primary reason why Washington State lost to UCLA in 2023. He went 19 of 39 for 197 yards, with 1 touchdown and 2 interceptions. After the game, he said,
“At the end of the day, I just didn’t get the ball out. Personally, that’s why I feel like I had to scramble. … So we’re just gonna get back to that next week, get the ball out to the playmakers.”
He added, “Just bad decisions, I would say. Not necessarily on the first [interception]. Just left it inside. Can’t throw an out-ball inside. I threw it with touch, so that’s always gonna be a pick. The second one was just a bad ball by me, bad decision. So I take that on the chest. Those were two reasons, for sure, why we didn’t win this game.”
“You’ll see a different offense from this point forward. We’re going back Monday, watching the film. We’ll go watch film tomorrow. We’re just gonna take this one on the chin, just go play football the rest of the year.”
It wasn’t immediate, but that game did seem to be a turning point for Ward. While Washington State would lose seven of their next eight games, Ward himself was significantly more efficient. He carried that attitude forward into 2024. Ward has long been respected for his “Alpha Dog” mentality. He admits to still carrying a grudge for the lack of attention he received out of high school.
“I carry all of that with me every day,” Ward said. “You’ve got to have something to keep you going. The time you get complacent, that’s the time you can let people pass you by.”
While he doesn’t seem to let mistakes fester during games, he does take the lessons to heart. That might be part of the reason why he was heralded as a leader immediately upon transferring from Washington State to Miami.
Miami coach Mario Cristobal said, “I think he earned trust quickly. And he earned trust in the fact that he’s up there in the office every waking free moment that he has, and he gets there early, and he leaves late. He pulls aside the receivers and the tight ends and he watches film with them. He takes the lineman out to eat, and he spends time with the running backs …
“Trust and confidence is earned,” Cristobal added. “It’s not just given away. What he has done, he has earned — earned — the trust of the people around him because of his time invested and the fact that he’s an alpha. And your quarterback needs to be an alpha.”
Arm Talent
Cam Ward’s arm talent absolutely leaps off the screen when studying his tape.
He doesn’t have the strongest arm in this draft class, but he has plenty of arm strength to access all areas of the field. He has a remarkably quick release and can generate velocity with ease, allowing him to challenge very tight windows in the short-to-intermediate area of the field. Likewise, he’s able to drive the ball deep down the field, and hit receivers outside in-stride deep down the sideline.
That, however, isn’t what makes Ward’s arm special. There are a lot of players who have strong arms and quick releases. Cam Ward’s arm elasticity, however, is incredibly rare.
He has the ability to attempt passes from seemingly any arm slot sets him apart from the vast majority of quarterbacks. Ward has almost every conceivable arm angle available to him, from over the top to below parallel to the ground. That allows him to attempt passes that other quarterbacks wouldn’t even consider. It also allows significant freedom in Miami’s blocking schemes and creativity in play design.
It isn’t uncommon for blocking schemes to account for free rushers as “the quarterback’s responsibility” on quick passes – essentially, it’s understood that there’s a rusher who will be unblocked so extra manpower can be allocated elsewhere. Ward’s arm elasticity, however, allows him to not just beat the rusher with a quick release, but to throw around him in ways that are utterly unexpected.
Ward is also able to generate significant velocity and throw with good accuracy from almost every arm slot, as well as do so while on the move or otherwise off-platform.
So while other quarterbacks may produce “WOW!” throws, Ward has the ability to produce “WHAT!?” throws that simply boggle the mind.
Ward’s arm strength and elasticity allow him to decouple his throwing motion from his feet to a large extent. However, that’s also a double-edged sword.
While it does allow for some truly incredible throws, Ward’s footwork is still a work in progress. It isn’t bad, per se, however he does have a tendency to get lazy with his footwork in ways that can cause problems for the offense.
Offenses commonly use a quarterback’s footwork in their drop as a timing mechanism, with the steps following a certain tempo and working almost like a metronome for the offense.
Ward, however, relies on his own internal sense of rhythm and timing. At his best, and when he’s in sync with the rest of the offense, Ward’s timing and rhythm can be like a great jazz musician improvising over Giant Steps. When he isn’t in sync, it can be like making Ringo Starr play drums for Funkadelic or Rush – the whole operation fall apart without the metronomic precision.
That dichotomy is likely the reason behind Ward’s highly streaky play.
And with that in mind, his future team will need to accept Ward’s tendency toward improv, while also working with him to build better discretion for when to stay within the structure of the offense.
Athleticism
Ward is a good athlete at the quarterback position, but not an elite or even great one.
We know from Ward’s background as a Wing-T quarterback in high school that he’s comfortable running and capable of helping the offense with his legs. However, Ward doesn’t have the kind of wheels we might expect from a quarterback who used to be a running back first. He has merely “okay” speed in the open field and can pick up yardage off of scrambles, but doesn’t often outrun defenders at the second and third levels. Instead, he gets what he can, then either angles out of bounds or slides.
He can obviously execute the Read-Option or designed quarterback runs, but probably won’t be a regular part of a team’s rushing attack. Overall, any rushing yardage that Ward accumulates should probably be looked at as a bonus.
That said, Ward is an agile and slippery player in the backfield. He isn’t tall, and therefore doesn’t have a high center of gravity, which allows him to change directions easily. He’s remarkably elusive when scrambling and his tape is littered with examples of him making multiple defenders miss in the backfield. He excels at extending the play and using his athleticism to evade rushers while buying time for his receivers to work open.
That, combined with his ability to freeze defenders with his eyes and body language can allow him to outright shatter the structure of a defense if they lose contain.
Projectable Stats
The use of stats and analytics is changing how we view and analyze the game of football. However, just because we have masses of data points, doesn’t mean we automatically make better decisions. Data that’s misunderstood or poorly interpreted is the same as no data at all, and distracting noise at worst.
However, there are some stats and advanced analytics that do have predictive value. Some stats, such as sack rate, are “sticky” and can follow quarterbacks from
college to the NFL, as
well as from team to team.
For our purposes, we’ll be looking at completion percentage, yards per game, sack rate and pressure to sack rate, EPA, and ESPN’s QBR. Each of those stats has a moderately strong to strong correlation coefficient between college and the NFL. None of them are definitive, but they’re another tool that can help provide a backstop to check bias as well as confirm what we did (or didn’t) see on tape. For reference, I’ll be listing their rank among top quarterback prospects in the 2025 quarterback class.
Completion percentage: 67.2 (3rd)
Yards per game: 331.8 (1st)
Sack rate: 4.6 percent (2nd)
Pressure to sack rate: 15.9 percent (2nd)
EPA: 103.2 (1st)
QBR: 88 (1st)
The predictive stats back up the tape study of Ward: He is the top quarterback in this year’s class and had a really excellent season for Miami.
While Ward’s game isn’t terribly efficient, it was undeniably effective. Him dropping back to pass almost always resulted in good things happening for Miami – or at least improved the likelihood of good things happening. He might not have been as accurate as some other members of this year’s draft class, his tendency to produce big plays without taking many sacks or putting the ball in danger (just a 1.54 percent interception rate) was a big reason behind Miami’s success this year.
Taking a step back, we can see Ward’s development arc from a Wing-T running quarterback to a passer reflected in the stats. Over the last three years – at Washington State and Miami – Ward’s accuracy, his yards per attempt and per game have all improved. His EPA and QBR have climbed each year while his sack rate has plummeted.
All in all, the stats suggest that he’ll be successful in the NFL, and the development arc suggests that he still has untapped upside to get even better with continued work.
Interestingly, Ward (as he was in 2024) would have compared well to the heralded 2024 quarterback class as well. It wasn’t much of a surprise that Jayden Daniels [
Deep Dive] and Bo Nix [
Deep Dive] played as well as they did last year considering how good their “sticky” stats were. As mentioned above, the stats we pay attention to here are largely stable from college to the NFL, and from team to team once in the Pros.
For had this year’s version of Cam Ward been in last year’s class he would have ranked:
Completion percentage: 6th
Yards per game: 1st
Sack rate: 3rd
Pressure to sack rate: 3rd
EPA: 2nd
QBR: 4th
Accuracy aside (and he’s only about two points away from 4th), he is very close to Daniels in Nix, which suggests that Ward could have similar success as a rookie.
Game Tape
Final Word
Cam Ward is the top quarterback in the 2025 NFL Draft class, but even saying that doesn’t adequately capture his full profile.
Both the amount that Ward has transformed as a quarterback, and the rate at which he’s done so, over the last five years is truly impressive. To go from a completely un-recruited no-star prospect to the best quarterback in the country has to be unprecedented.
The player that Ward has become is enticing to say the least. He’s most of the traits that NFL teams look for, with good size, a live arm, athleticism, and the ability to throw with accuracy and anticipation. He has the potential to make game-changing throws at any time, and he’s a player with whom your team always has a chance to win.
And yet, there’s still upside and room for improvement. Ward can stand to get more disciplined with his footwork, which will improve his accuracy, and he can continue to cultivate his decision making. His future team shouldn’t seek to dull his edge or dampen the competitive fire – however he’s still learning that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Ward did show an increased willingness to check the ball down as the season wore on, but that’s still a work in progress.
Likewise, learning when to stay within the structure of an offense and when to go off-script will only make him that much more dangerous.
Ward might not have
the strongest arm in the class, the best accuracy, or be the most dynamic athlete. But he rates as at least “very good” in every category and the sum of his parts is impressive. Likewise, his predictive stats suggest that he could have an immediate impact as a rookie.
He’ll likely be the first overall pick once the draft opens, and we’ll just have to see if Ward has a similar rookie season as C.J. Stroud, Jayden Daniels, or Bo Nix.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25954428/Screenshot_2025_04_15_at_7.45.52_AM.png)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25954502/usa_today_23115010.jpg "NFL: NFL Draft")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25954488/usa_today_24723067.jpg "NCAA Football: Michigan at Indiana")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25954500/usa_today_25244073.jpg "NCAA Football: CFP National Championship-Ohio State at Notre Dame")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25954452/Screenshot_2025_04_15_at_8.23.46_AM.png)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25955889/Tuimoloau_RAS.png)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25955873/Cam_ward_RAS.png)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25958822/0326_PreDraft_ShedeurSanders.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25958834/Screenshot_2025_04_18_at_11.26.45_AM.png)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25960093/Screenshot_2025_04_19_at_8.50.37_AM.png)