Kyle McCord was doing his best to maintain his excitement, though his quarterback coach — the same one who didn’t bring any footballs to their first workout together — was testing that mission.
The coach? Jordan Palmer, who is more like a physics/physical education/psychology professor crossed with the best gym teacher who’s ever lived.
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The two first met when McCord attended the Elite 11 quarterback competition in high school. Then, when McCord decided to transfer from Ohio State to Syracuse last offseason — a decision many (wrongly) assumed happened because McCord wasn’t good enough to play in Columbus — Palmer reached out again.
He was convinced McCord remained one of the country’s most talented passers, no matter how angry Ohio State fans were with him. Palmer ultimately convinced McCord to train with him in California last March.
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Which brings us back to that first workout — one that took place in a gym, not a football in sight.
“We didn’t touch a football for at least the first three or four hours,” McCord says with a laugh. “It was all about feeling the ground and movement. At first, yeah, I was a little skeptical of it — asking, like, ‘Is this really going to help?’”
If there’s been a trend in quarterback play the last 25 years, the 40-year-old Palmer (younger brother of three-time Pro Bowl QB Carson Palmer) has personally seen its origin. Drew Brees taught him in high school; two of his first Elite 11 pupils were Tim Tebow and Matthew Stafford.
Now, more than a decade removed from an eight-year pro career of his own, Jordan Palmer is the preeminent voice in the world of personal QB tutelage. His client list, ranging from Josh Allen to Patrick Mahomes and many points in between, reads like an All-Pro ballot.
When Palmer makes an observation about a quarterback, he has the receipts.
“Kyle McCord,” Palmer says flatly, “is quickly becoming one of the most athletic guys I’ve ever worked with.”
With Wilson football and the East-West Shrine Bowl this winter, Palmer hosted the first-ever “QBX Throwing Session” in Texas. All 32 NFL teams had reps in attendance as the 2025 Shrine Bowl quarterbacks went through drills using footballs implanted with data sensors, designed to measure anything you’d ever want to know about arm talent.
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McCord’s performance wasn’t just the best in the session. His spin rate, spiral efficiency, velocity and a host of other metrics were on par with some of the best passers Palmer has ever had.
Having that level of information means Palmer doesn’t have to guess when it comes to quarterbacks — and it’s his goal to make sure nobody else ever has to again.
“I believe quarterback development is about 15 years behind golf, and probably 10 behind baseball,” Palmer says. “A baseball swing is not based off subjectivity; a golf swing is not based off subjectivity.
“I want to bring more objectivity to quarterback play.”
McCord only needed about a week to come around to Palmer’s methods. A year later, his rising 2025 NFL Draft stock is proof of concept.
“Looking back,” McCord says, training with Palmer “was the best thing I could’ve ever done.”
Dr. Scott Goldman is quick to point out that neither he, nor his research partner, Dr. Jim Bowman, reinvented the wheel. They did something else.
“We sort of brought this really old wine to a new world,” says Goldman, a psychologist who, with Bowman, invented the Athletic Intelligence Quotient (or, the AIQ Test) after being inspired by the archaic and simplistic way analysts broke down the famed Peyton Manning-Ryan Leaf debate of 1998, “We took the gold standard of intelligence and applied it to sports.”
The AIQ test has been on the market for more than a decade now, and it’s used by teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS to evaluate the athletic intelligence not only of draft prospects but of players on their current rosters.
Did you know? AIQ was originally named AIM. Our mission: help teams make smarter decisions, find hidden talent, & develop athletes to their fullest.
Hear more from @ScottGoldmanPhD on The Bye Round Podcast 👇
🎧: https://t.co/Ap5waHO4EF
🎥: https://t.co/0vh6rz3zvc pic.twitter.com/Ojmr6Qyfm6— aiq.team (@aiq_team) February 18, 2025
At present, 10 NFL teams use AIQ as a measurement. The 35-minute test, administered on an iPad, is based on the famed Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory of cognitive abilities — widely known as the best and most comprehensive of its kind. AIQ is designed to determine a player’s complete intelligence profile, as well as their ability to physically and mentally solve the “constantly mutating puzzle” of an NFL football game.
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“We studied so many things — firefighters, police officers and first responders, military personnel, astronauts,” Goldman says. “If you think about a quarterback, who has to examine a coverage scheme, move people around and make decisions with defenders coming at him, that’s pretty similar to a firefighter who’s had to kick a door down and immediately identify threats and dangers.”
The test measures everything an evaluator needs to know, including learning efficiency, spatial awareness, reaction time and something defined as “manipulation/rotation” — a quarterback’s ability to read a defense from the pocket. For years, some of the top QB coaches in football have had to gauge those aspects mostly from feel.
AIQ attempts to provide a much firmer answer.
And McCord’s performance on the test was elite, nearly across the board. He scored in the highest bucket (“superior”) in five different categories and was awfully close to that level in both spatial awareness and learning efficiency (how long it takes a player to retain information).
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The data Wilson gathered from McCord’s QBX session further proved Palmer’s instinct about him: His arm is elite, but so is his brain.
On the former, McCord was, by a wide margin, the best thrower in nearly every area during the Shrine Bowl session. He posted a spiral efficiency of 93 percent, with 12 of his 28 throws rating at a perfect 100. He clocked an average spin rate of 699 rpm, well above the NFL average of 592. Sixteen of McCord’s throws had a spin rate higher than 700, topping out at 740 (per Wilson’s Blake Rus, a spin rate of 800 qualifies as “elite” in the NFL.)
“The data showed that Kyle, for a lot of the starters I’ve worked with — I can’t name names here — but when he’s in that 95th percentile on some of these, it’s not just against the other guys at Shrine,” Palmer says. “It’s everybody.”
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The ability to show NFL teams these numbers obviously has helped McCord throughout the draft process, as there’s really no need for scouts to cite “gut feelings” about his throwing ability.
“It was funny, when we were in Dallas waiting for the numbers — Jordan didn’t have them when he went to present to the teams,” McCord says. “And right as he got to mine, he sorta stopped and smiled at me.
“That work paid off.”
Palmer’s been ready for the quarterback revolution since sixth grade, when his father, Bill, called Student Sports Magazine and asked whoever answered first whether or not the organizers of the inaugural Elite 11 needed a water boy.
Jordan and Carson Palmer were exposed to some of the best quarterback coaching in the country before either could drive a car. Jordan knows the traditional methods better than most. And though he’s careful not to flat-out call anyone “wrong,” he’s also not afraid to point out what research and experience has taught him: The developmental system, at its core, is dated.
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“You hear this all the time from people: ‘When I watch Aaron Rodgers throw, this is what I see’ — that’s subjective,” Palmer says. “If you talked to the 10 best swing coaches in golf, you’d hear different things. But there’s a similar belief structure of what needs to happen in that sequence. I think the discussion around a throwing motion in football right now is subjective, whether people want to admit that or not.
“I’m not trying to tell anyone they’re right or wrong. I want to find more ways to bring objectivity to this, because I was taught to get my toe at my target and keep my elbow up — and I learned those things from, at the time, the best QB coaches in football. And now, I understand those are two irrelevant cues.”
Instead of weed-whacking, Palmer’s in the dirt, pulling at the roots.
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When Palmer began his offseason program with Sam Darnold this winter, they spent the first three weeks on a basketball court, without a football, same as they’ve done each of the past five years. And when he reconnected with McCord, one of the first things they worked on was something most coaches never think about: how you’re supposed to stand in the shotgun.
Go back and watch McCord’s stance at Ohio State and compare it to what you see from his Syracuse games. His stance is noticeably different. For both McCord and Palmer, it’s no coincidence that after McCord made the change, he wound up leading the FBS in what Pro Football Focus describes as “Big Time Throws” with 36 — five more than Miami’s Cam Ward.
“We’ve got three goals when we’re playing quarterback,” Palmer explains. “I want to start in a place of stability, I want to have an efficient first movement, and I want to maintain connection to the ground throughout whatever comes (after the snap) — be it a bubble screen, three steps and a hitch, the center fumbles the snap, whatever. So, we start with the ‘gun stance.
“Stability. Staying connected throughout whatever the movement is.”
In Palmer’s world, a quarterback’s athleticism has almost nothing to do with the 40-yard dash or vertical jump. Instead, it’s about one question: How quickly can he habitually replace an old movement pattern with a new one?
Current Bengals backup Jake Browning, for example, recorded average burst and below-average agility scores during his 2019 NFL Draft process. But in terms of being able to absorb and implement new movement habits quickly, Palmer found Browning to be almost off the charts. Browning took to Palmer’s coaching and ultimately climbed from the undrafted free agent scrap heap to become a respected NFL backup quarterback.
“Jake Browning is one of the most athletic quarterbacks I’ve ever worked with,” Palmer says bluntly. “And that would buck the whole system, right? But in terms of taking something and then seeing it show up on game tape, that’s the way I judge it.”
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It’s no secret the NFL is currently in the midst of a quality quarterback crisis. Who, or what, gets the blame usually depends on the person you talk to. Most agree, though, that something needs to change — from the way young athletes are taught to play quarterback in high school and college to the criteria NFL teams use to evaluate them.
“Playing quarterback is different,” Palmer says. “Golfers swing when they’re ready. When I tell you a pitcher throws 94, you wouldn’t ask me, ‘From how far away?’
“Everything quarterbacks do is a reaction. And you do not need to be the most dynamic athlete in the world to create time and space, to make plays.”
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Palmer’s optimistic about a great many things. He believes McCord will be among the top quarterbacks selected in this spring’s draft. He believes coaches and organizations are inching closer to seeing things a bit different when it comes to player evaluation, especially at quarterback.
He also believes the game is still at least a decade behind where it should be, although he’s convinced it won’t take another decade to make up that ground.
“Ten years ago, if I would’ve said, ‘That receiver over there runs 22,’ you’d have said, ‘Twenty-two what?’ Now, they’re talking about how a kid runs 22 miles per hour before they talk about his 40 time,” Palmer says. “I believe, within the next few years, you’re going to (be able to) point to that quarterback, and I’ll ask you, ‘How good is he?’ And you’ll say, ‘He’s a 760.’ And I’ll be like, ‘Wow, he can spin it.’ Or, ‘That guy has small hands, but he’s a 770′ — and I don’t care that he has small hands, because he can spin it.’
“We’re replacing the nomenclature over time.”
(Top photo of Kyle McCord: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
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