Sunday Column: Sean Clifford, NFL Quarterback? It’s No (Slam) Dunk, But Stranger Things Have Happened

If life is like a box of chocolates (you never know what you’re gonna get), then pro days are like a box of donuts (you pretty much know exactly what you’re going to get, but certain varieties are more popular than others).

The range of players working out in Holuba Hall for pro scouts each year extends from guys who will be on the stage at the NFL Draft to those who haven’t played in a few seasons but are there to take one last swing at a professional future. It is the players in the middle who are often the most compelling, the chocolate glazed who won’t get picked until the cream-filled and jelly donuts are gone but just might be a good fit for the right squad.

Players like … Sean Clifford.

Now, I said I would write my last Sean Clifford column prior to the Rose Bowl game, and his excellent performance in a strong Penn State win seemed to be the perfect cap to his long and heavily debated career. But, like a solitary donut sitting among crumbs in an otherwise empty box, pontificating on his potential future as a pro is too tempting to simply walk past.

By most accounts, Clifford’s Friday was a mixed bag. He turned in impressive times in the 40-yard dash (4.57 seconds) and 3-cone drill (6.87 seconds), but the inconsistency as a passer that Nittany Lion fans saw for the last seventeen five years was there as well. He expressed being motivated by the fact that he had not received an invite to the NFL Combine, then reported he had contact with at least a couple of NFL teams—the Dallas Cowboys, whom he is set to throw for this week, and the Denver Broncos, with whom he met with via Zoom prior to Pro Day.

That second team is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. The Broncos are now led by Sean Payton, who not only built his career on the arm of a quarterback who was smaller (albeit much more accurate) than Clifford but has also repeatedly displayed that he isn’t afraid to take creative approaches to the game’s most important position, deploying tight end/tank Taysom Hill at quarterback in certain packages and drafting Clifford’s former teammate Tommy Stevens, another hybrid QB, in the seventh round in 2020.

Now, Clifford is neither the thrower Drew Brees was nor in the same class as Hill or Stevens as a runner, but he has shown enough skills at both to at least give a pro team a reason to ponder him. The other reason to consider Clifford performed at his pro day 500 miles away in Lexington, Kentucky on Friday.

Will Levis, who could not beat Clifford out for the starting job for two seasons in State College, is widely projected to be a top-10 pick in next month’s draft. While the two players are quite different stylistically—Levis’s velocity dwarfs Clifford’s as well as many of the other quarterbacks’ in a deep QB draft class—the overall numbers aren’t that much different. Levis completed 65.4% of his throws this past season, with 19 touchdown passes and 10 picks and a rating of 151.9. Clifford’s respective 2022 stats were 64.4%, 24-7, and 150.5.

It’s worth pointing out that players, particularly quarterbacks, develop at different rates and to different ceilings; Tom Brady threw only 15 passes in his first two seasons at Michigan. Patrick Mahomes’ college stats (63.5%, 152.0 rating) weren’t much different than Levis’s or Clifford’s. Matt Leinart, on the other hand, was a two-time All-American at USC and a top-10 draft choice who wound up starting 18 games in six seasons and finished his career with 15 touchdowns and 21 interceptions. One-time Broncos first-round pick Paxton Lynch has now been cut by teams in four different leagues.

Common sense says that Clifford would do well to merely land on a 53-man roster, much less compile any sort of NFL statistics. And yet … there was this sense for most of his career, even as he was winning more games than any previous Penn State quarterback and throwing nearly three times as many touchdown passes as picks, that Clifford was the anchor and not the sail of the Penn State offensive ship, that he alone was the culprit and not the spotty offensive line play and receivers (not named Jahan Dotson) who struggled to separate and play calling that at times had the same flow as chewing gum. There is merit to this line of thinking, but the NFL is a results-driven league, and no matter how it looked at times, Clifford got results despite not having much to work with.

As I wrote in my (not exactly) final Clifford column, we will know the answer to the question “How will the Nittany Lions fare without Clifford?” this fall on Saturdays, when Drew Allar gets his chance to make the throws and lead the key scoring drives that Clifford couldn’t. The question of “How will Clifford fare without the Nittany Lions?” is one that could very well have an easy and short answer.

But sometimes, with the right cup of coffee and to the right person (or head coach or general manager), chocolate glazed can be pretty damned good.