The Las Vegas Raiders have a quarterback competition between Gardner Minshew and Aidan O'Connell ahead of the 2024 season, and the battle is expected to last through training camp, as neither signal-caller has established dominance this spring.
While we already know what Minshew is after five seasons in the NFL, O'Connell is a total wild card after an up-and-down rookie season that saw him finish strong. He has a chance to make a leap in Year 2, but things could certainly go the other way.
So, what might O'Connell's ceiling be?
That remains to be seen, but Pro Football Focus' Sam Monson believes the Tulane product's ceiling is Ryan Fitzpatrick. When it comes to O'Connell's floor, Monson thinks the worst O'Connell will be is a "short-career backup."
O’Connell was a fascinating prospect. He made 48 big-time throws over his final two seasons at Purdue, and his highlight reel matched any quarterback in the draft class.
The problem was that his lowlight reel was almost equally as spectacular and undermined all of his positives. He has the tools to be a starting-caliber NFL quarterback, but he may be an inherently streaky player.
Even last season, we saw a similar story with the Raiders. O’Connell earned an unremarkable 65.9 PFF overall grade, but within that season was an elite 85.5 PFF game grade (against the Super Bowl-winning Chiefs) and another two high-end games of 79.0 and 75.2. It also featured game grades of 39.8 and 51.7.
O’Connell could potentially become the next Ryan Fitzpatrick — a quarterback on the borderline of being an NFL starter yet one capable of catching fire and going on a run of high-level play. When that player catches the low end of his variance, he gets relegated back to backup status and often bumped from the roster entirely, forced to move on to a new team to begin the cycle anew.
As exciting as Fitzpatrick was at times during his career, he also had some serious lows and never amounted to a true franchise quarterback at any point.
O'Connell becoming a Fitzpatrick-like signal-caller isn't the long-term outlook you want for a young quarterback, but that could be enough to at least get the Raiders to the playoffs in the short term, assuming O'Connell wins the job.
Hopefully Monson is wrong and O'Connell is better than that, but we won't really know until he takes the field again.
