"[The] biggest error we made when evaluating Kyle Boller out of Cal was justifying his low completion percentage by criticizing the talent he had around him."

Brian Billick, the ex-Ravens head coach who drafted Boller 19th overall in 2003, sent that tweet last January. Fast forward 15 months, and we're seeing this same logic being used for selecting Wyoming quarterback Josh Allen in this month's draft.

If you've avoided draft analysis this offseason, the dilemma here is pretty straightforward. You've got a quarterback in Allen who brings the right physical traits to the table to become a franchise signal-caller -- he's big, he can throw the ball farther than anyone else in the draft, and so on -- but his college numbers just don't compare to other passers' numbers in this year's draft. He threw for only 1,812 yards in 11 games last season with a 56.3% completion percentage. And, no, that's not a typo.

Is College Completion Percentage Important?

A quarterback who succeeded in the box score during his college years won't automatically be a good pro, and the opposite is true, too. Jamarcus Russell had two seasons with 200 or more drop backs. The aforementioned Kyle Boller had three. And they were both first-round picks, getting more opportunity than they probably deserved to get.

But when we associate performance to the name, the correlation still isn't strong. When adjusting our Passing Net Expected Points metric (you can read more about Net Expected Points, or NEP, in our

What this is showing us is that players with ultra-bad college completion rates really haven't been effective in the NFL. The sample isn't large -- and, to reiterate, we're only looking at quarterbacks who've had multiple 200-plus drop back NFL seasons -- but the sample is scary.

If you want to look at things a little differently, here's the 74-quarterback sample broken up into groups based on where they ranked in college completion percentage. Feel free to compare each group's average adjusted Passing NEP per drop back rate to one another.

The entire sample may not be showing a strong correlation, but that has a lot to do with players who have a maximum completion percentage at or north of 60%, which is where passers in the 46 to 60 group lie. The reality is, quarterbacks with poor completion rates have been four times as inefficient per drop back in the NFL as passers with slightly below average to elite ones.

This doesn't bode well for Josh Allen, who falls directly into the "hey, I wasn't very good in the completion percentage department in college" bucket. Because in order for him to pan out as a pro, he'll have to do something that we really haven't seen in recent history.

Or, I guess, he'll need to make an impact on the ground like Michael Vick did. But I don't think that's happening.