NFL rookie rankings at quarter mark of 2024 season: Jayden Daniels edges out Malik Nabers for No. 1 spot.
Draftniks, rookie obsessives, football fans, lend me your eyes …
I come to serve a purpose, and that purpose is to rank the top 25 NFL rookies … at an admittedly random point in their debut campaign. Yeah, we’re at the quarter(ish) mark of the regular season, but it’s still an arbitrary cutoff for Year 1 evaluation. And here’s the funny thing about randomly timed rankings: They can be published on the morning after a Thursday Night Football tilt that saw three of the rankees commit fourth-quarter whoopsies on an island-game stage.
Tampa Bay newbies Tykee Smith, Graham Barton and Bucky Irving all had costly moments late in the Buccaneers’ 36-30 overtime loss at Atlanta. And yet, THEY REMAIN RANKED! Why? Because one bad play doesn’t make a bad rookie. Did their respective rankings suffer last-minute damage, given that we’re operating with such a small sample size at this point? That’s confidential information.
Enough preamble. Let’s get to it.
Rank
1
Jayden Daniels
Jayden Daniels
Washington Commanders · QB
DRAFTED: Round 1, No. 2 overall
Malik Nabers held the No. 1 spot for most of September, but then his former LSU quarterback snatched it away with a pair of transcendent performances. Shoutout to the Washington Post’s Nicki Jhabvala for getting me to think in this manner, but over the past two games, Daniels has quarterbacked more than twice as many scoring drives (13) as he’s thrown incompletions (6). And 10 of those 13 marches hit paydirt. After some rough decades for this franchise, what a time to be a Commanders fan.
