Combine Preview: Free Agency Rulez, Draft Droolz.

Studying Ty Simpson’s 2025 game tape made me really excited about Malik Willis.

Simpson is the second best quarterback in the 2026 draft class. If Fernando Mendoza didn’t exist, Simpson would somehow still be the second-best quarterback in the class. That’s how much second-best energy Simpson exudes. He’s the boringly-handsome jobber in a romcom written by ChatGPT for the Hallmark Loneliness Network.

Simpson reminds me of a Ford Taurus. Back in the late 20th century, before the Ford Motor Company stopped pretending it could build anything but a line of useful trucks (contractors rely on them as work vehicles; single women rely on them as red flags in Tinder profiles), it unveiled the Taurus as its signature vehicle. The Taurus looked like it was kitbashed out of the most boring components of the Thunderbird and Fiesta, then reassembled into the vague shape of a Toyota Celica. The Taurus handled that way, too. I nearly bought one. Fortunately, I got a better job just in the nick of time.

Simpson, similarly, looks like he was glued together from leftover bits of Mac Jones, Kenny Pickett and J.J. McCarthy, then given a racing stripe to resemble Jaxson Dart. He was then rushed into production to fill a market demand for an affordable sedan that doesn’t have anything overtly wrong with it.

Simpson is not that big, nor very fast, nor is he rifle-armed. His tape isn’t very good, and it comes in such small portions: just 15 career starts. The more you watch – particularly if you watch last season in chronological order – the less impressed you become. Simpson looked like a rookie quarterback getting figured out after a hot start, but in the SEC instead of the NFL.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s NFL Network draft expert Daniel Jeremiah discussing Simpson on his pre-combine media conference call on February 19th:

He has the most at stake between where we are today and when we get to the draft. It’s not so much a question of ‘Is he number two?’ It’s how high of a pick is he worthy of? Is he worthy of a first round pick?

He’s in the 30s-40s range for me, as a pure grade. But I wouldn’t be stunned if he ends up going in the first round because there’s enough teams with need at the position, and I think he’ll be impressive from this point forward.

At the end of the year, he wasn’t healthy. I think he played a little bit small when he got in crowds in some of those games late in the year. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to the injury, versus he got exposed a little bit.

The injury in question was a lower-back injury on October 25th. Naturally, the possible severity of this injury was only discussed after Alabama lost 38-3 to Indiana in the Rose Bowl. College quarterbacks now get face-saving he was playing hurt storylines after playoff pratfalls, just like their NFL counterparts.

Excuse everything that happened from October 25th onward and Simpson’s window of excellence shrinks to just seven starts, a few of which weren’t all that impressive anyway. As Jeremiah stops just short of explicitly stating: teams will spend the next two months talking themselves into Simpson based on the firmness of his handshake.

Meanwhile, in the free agent pool, there’s Malik of the 100 Plays.

To be precise, Willis dropped back to pass 116 times for the Packers in the last two seasons: 89 passes, 11 sacks, 16 scrambles. Add the passes and sacks and you get 100 official passing plays! Willis completed 78.7% of his pass attempts for the Packers, averaging 10.9 yards per attempt, with six touchdowns and zero interceptions. He also averaged 6.2 yards per rush.

Willis’ 11.0% sack rate with the Packers is high, and also very easy to calculate thanks to those 100 passing plays. But let’s not let inconvenient facts get in the way of fun facts. Willis indeed played well in a sampler platter of spot starts and relief appearances.

I’m normally the Grinch when it comes to tiny sample sizes. But the choice between Willis and Simpson is a no-brainer. Willis left Liberty University as a raw heap of cookie dough in 2022. He was completely unready for the NFL, particularly Mike Vrabel’s corner of it. Two years in Vrabel’s rock tumbler led to two years of polishing with the Packers.

Willis speed-ran the first decade of Geno Smith’s career in four years. He’s toolsier than any of the non-Mendozas in this draft class. His services will probably run in the $20 million range per year, with few guarantees beyond the first year: a little pricey, but so is drafting the 30th best player with the third overall pick.

Willis is a better option than Simpson. So is Kyler Murray if the trade compensation makes sense. So is Mac Jones. Simpson is a better option than Tua Tagovailoa, though the equation might be different if Tua were a free agent available for Daniel Jones money.

If I were running an NFL team without a quarterback and had a grace period year to work with – if I were a newly-hired coach with enough credibility to ensure a three-year tenure — I might consider a stopgap year with Kirk Cousins or A a aaaa aaa aaa [computer glitches] rrrRrr00ooOOnn [blue screen of death, penny in the fuse box melts, house burns down] Rodgers before hitching my fortunes to Simpson or the quarterbacks below him in the draft rankings. There’s always 2027, after all.

(Dear lord, I just wrote a logical justification for the Steelers re-signing Rodgers. It’s been a weird week around here.)