Rosen and Hackenberg are probably good comparators (hyped guys with tools who "looked the part") but whose college careers were uninspiring and whose NFL careers seemed to reflect their lack of college production.
I think a guys like Tanner Lee and Garrett Gilbert, who were drafted in the sixth round don't really tell us much; an analysis (
link) by Football Outsiders found that the majority (30/48, 63%) of QBs drafted in the sixth round don't ever start in the NFL. So their lack of college production doesn't tell us all that much more than their draft status.
On the other hand, a guy like Rosen was picked in the first round with the 10th pick. His lack of college production should have been a red flag, and was borne out by an NFL career that would have been predicted by his draft status alone (100% of first round picks, 57/57 started at least one game, and they started an average of 73 games (that means they were multi-year starters). Rosen started 16 games in his career.
As a second round pick, Hackenberg was a total bust who never played a snap across two NFL seasons, compared to the average second round pick who started an average of 41 games in the FO analysis.
Conversely, Russell Wilson might be a guy who by collegiate production should have been a first round pick. He was drafted in the third round, but his 173 starts were much higher than the average 20 starts by 3rd round QBs (and since the analysis was from 1994-2016 and he was probably the most productive 3rd round QB drafted in that time, he singlehandedly increased the average, as he accounted for 96 starts (as of 2017, when the analysis was conducted) out of the 567 total starts by third round QBs in that period.
Of course, those are cherry picked anecdotes. I'd be curious to run a regression to see whether, as a whole, collegiate production, above and beyond draft pick. After all, they are guys like Johny Manziel, 10th in your list in collegiate career best QBR, 1st round draft pick, and career 8 game starter in the NFL.
BC
