Examining Connor Halliday's NFL Draft prospects

With less than a month to go to the NFL Draft and in light of Tuesday's fun comments, I figured now might be a good time to check in on where former WSU quarterback Connor Halliday is being rated relative to his peers in the run-up to professional football's amateur athlete dispersal process.

SB Nation's Dan Kadar is no fan of the 2015 quarterback class, calling the players after the established top two of Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota simply "yikes." However, he does like Halliday, sort of:

Under the radar: Everyone is looking for a sleeper quarterback prospect that could develop into something. But of any position, that is the least likely to happen at quarterback. For the purposes of this section, lets go with Connor Halliday of Washington State. He's going to be a late-round pick, or even an undrafted free agent. He's coming out of a wide open gimmicky system, but he knows it. There's something to say about a self-aware quarterback. If his physical tools can match up with his mental tools, he could be a decent NFL player.

I guess we'll take that as some sort of endorsement. He ranks Halliday ninth overall, between Southeastern Louisiana's Bryan Bennett (an Oregon transfer) and Alabama's Blake Sims. Moving on ...

Rob Rang of CBSSports.com actually was at Halliday's pro day (Rang is based out of the Tacoma area), and while he doesn't appear to have updated Halliday's scouting profile based on what he saw, he did update his quarterback list yesterday and has Halliday as his eighth QB, projecting him as a 6th or 7th round pick -- solidly draftable:

For what it's worth, I don't know if this is any different from what it was before his pro day.

ESPN's evaluation isn't nearly as strong. It's unclear whether the overall ratings come from Mel Kiper Jr., Todd McShay or some other person at ESPN.com, but while he's ranked as the ninth-best quarterback (same as Kadar), he's ranked 275th overall ($) -- squarely in the 7th round-to-undrafted range.

This all might just be silly speculation, anyway; all it takes is for one time to fall in love with Halliday while believing that another team might also be love with Halliday for him to come off the board early. That said, anything before the sixth round would be a surprise at this point.