2022 NFL Draft: Malik Willis, a tale of two quarterbacks

2022 NFL Draft: Malik Willis Background

Willis first jumped onto the high school football scene in 2014, earning a roster spot on the Westlake High School varsity team. Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Willis played just 27 minutes west of the city at the same high school that Cam Newton and AJ Terrell got their starts. Willis saw mixed success there, playing for two seasons at a limited capacity before transferring to Roswell High School to play his senior season.

About an hour’s drive north of Atlanta, it would be at Roswell where Willis first got recognition as the full-time starter. According to Maxpreps, Willis carried Roswell to a 14-1 record and a spot in the Class 7A state championship game. A school that had only seen two winning seasons since 2010, Willis lifted the team’s fortunes with his dual-threat quarterback skills. Passing for 2,562 yards and rushing for 1,073 yards during his senior season, Willis racked up a combined 37 touchdowns during their nearly undefeated season.

Despite such a productive senior season, Willis had trouble getting attention on the recruiting front. He’d accept an offer from Auburn but would have trouble differentiating himself during his first two seasons there, playing mostly clean-up duty in 2017 and 2018. Those two seasons saw Willis throw for a combined 69 passing yards and 309 rushing yards on 28 attempts. Decent numbers for the limited snaps on the field, but a gimmick player to be sure.

Malik Willis would end transferring after his second season at Auburn, picking Virginia school Liberty University. Unfortunately, he would be required to sit out the 2019 season due to NCAA regulations.

It is easy to see why Willis is so exciting to the fans of Liberty University, a school that didn’t join the FBS until 2018. The football program started in 1973 and has seen a modest level of success since then. Before hiring head coach Hugh Freeze in 2018, the team had a .504 record: Never so bad as to welcome universal contempt from contemporaries but not good enough to gain national attention.

When Freeze took over the football program, there was understandable skepticism about the school and its new coach’s intentions. After all, Freeze had left his last head coaching job in an inauspicious manner. There was speculation that Freeze had come to Liberty to rehab his career before leaving for a bigger FBS program. But in 2020 Freeze led the school to a 10-1 record, with quarterback Willis as the offensive playmaker Liberty had been missing.

In 2020, the Liberty football program took a substantial leap forward. With Willis leading the charge on the field and head coach Freeze calling the plays, the team would finish the season with a 10-1 record, putting Willis on the map as a possible NFL quarterback in the making.

The team even won a Bowl game against Coastal Carolina, a school that had won 11 games in a row prior to and had even beaten a Zach Wilson-led BYU team earlier in the season. Coastal Carolina had held the future second-overall pick in the 2021 NFL Draft to just 17-points. For context, Willis hung 37-points on Coastal Carolina, putting a metaphorical cherry on top of an already impressive season.

After the conclusion of the 2021 NFL Draft, Willis received national media attention as a quarterback to watch out for in the upcoming season. Pundits began putting their names to articles stating that he could be the breakout quarterback of the 2022 NFL Draft. They even had Willis in the top-10 of their 2022 Mock Draft, suggesting that he showed a lot of the same traits that former first-round quarterbacks showed prior to their breakout seasons.

But is this hype warranted? It would seem so but nothing is so cut and dry in the world of college football. The factors that create an amazing college quarterback are multitudinous and require more than just reading a box score to explain. In the next section, we’ll break down three traits Willis showed last season that have NFL scouts penciling in Willis as a future first-rounder, maybe in the 2022 NFL Draft.

At the same time, we’ll shine a light on some of the problems Willis showed last year and why pre-season hype is placing unrealistic expectations on the young quarterbacks’ shoulders.