Jalon Daniels, a quarterback nobody drafted, is getting an NFL start. The reporting this morning has the former Kansas quarterback taking the first snap for Tampa Bay on Sunday, which means a kid with zero draft capital is running a pro offense in front of a full stadium. If you watched the Big 12 in 2022, you are not surprised. You are relieved.
The long-form piece that went around today frames it as a Hollywood script, and the pieces are all there: no draft slot, no guarantees, a mother who carried the load so he could keep chasing it. I don't usually need the violins. This one earned them.
Who is Jalon Daniels, the undrafted QB starting for Tampa Bay?
He is the reason Kansas football stopped being a punchline. Daniels took over as a true freshman when the Jayhawks were one of the worst power-conference programs in America, the kind of place where the visiting band outnumbers the home crowd by halftime. Then 2022 happened. Kansas opened 5-0, got ranked in the AP poll for the first time since 2009, and went to a bowl game for the first time since the 2008 season. Daniels was the engine of all of it: a dual-threat who made the read-option look like a cheat code and turned a roster with no business being competitive into must-watch Saturday television.
That is the part the league's evaluators never disputed. The part they did dispute was the body. The injuries came, they came at the worst times, and they kept coming, and a quarterback who misses the wrong Septembers stops being a prospect and starts being a question. He answered it by simply refusing to leave. Grind through Lawrence, grind through rehab, grind through a draft weekend where the phone does not ring.
Why the undrafted thing matters more than it should
Checked the almanac on this one, because undrafted quarterbacks are the sport's best argument against its own certainty. Kurt Warner came out of Northern Iowa in 1994 with nobody's draft pick attached to his name, bagged groceries, played Arena ball, and was a league MVP by 1999. Tony Romo went undrafted out of Eastern Illinois in 2003 and started a decade of Sundays in Dallas. The evaluation business is very good and occasionally very wrong, and the gap between those two states is where guys like Daniels live.
None of that is a prediction about Sunday. First NFL starts are usually ugly, and they are especially ugly for quarterbacks who got the job because somebody ahead of them could not go. The honest read is that we learn very little about Daniels from one afternoon and a great deal about him from whether he still has the job in three weeks.
The Hawkeyes and Hawks mix-up, briefly
Separate item, same wire, too dumb to skip: a viral political spat this week ran on the premise that the Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes are the same outfit. They are not. One is an NBA team in Georgia. The other is a football program in Iowa City that would very much like you to know the difference. Somebody on the Senate floor had to say the words "you have your teams wrong" out loud, and college sports currently has enough real problems, a Senate bill included, without a new benchmark for sports IQ. Learn the mascots or leave the mascots alone.
What I'm watching next
Three things on Daniels, none of them box score. Whether the staff lets him keep designed quarterback runs in the plan or wraps him in bubble wrap and throws it all short. Whether the protection holds long enough for him to get to a second read. And whether Tampa Bay talks about this as a week or as a stretch. Kansas people have been telling everyone for four years that this kid was better than his draft grade. Sunday, somebody else finally has to grade him.