Woody's Wildcards: CJ Bailey

College Players I feel are necessary names to know for the upcoming college year

Next up in my series is CJ Bailey, the QB at NC State going into Year 2 with some unexpected starting experience. This one seems like the weird one to me as people currently prioritize fellow recruit classmates such as DJ Lagway, Dylan Raiola, Demond Williams Jr, Julian Sayin, and even sometimes CJ Carr. This seems wild to me so I felt now is a good time to provide the case on why CJ Bailey will be a much bigger household name after the 2025 season.

Recruit & Current Build

CJ Bailey came to NC State as the composite QB29 of the 2024 recruiting class. Going into the season he was the clear backup behind Grayson McCall with a plan to develop behind the scenes. His build of 6’6” 190lbs by fall was a little less than ideal. However he is up to 210lbs now as of this spring as reported by the training program at the university. His high school stats showed a poised pocket passer who started his final 3 years with a knack for scoring and limiting turnovers. He was not a big time runner as he averaged under 20 yards per game in all three of his final seasons. Even so, Bailey was in some great company as he sat with an 84 recruit score around names that show promise for upside such as Justin Herbert, Jalen Hurts, Patrick Mahomes, Sam Howell, Sam Darnold, and Bo Nix. There are for sure some misses as well here but the upside was clear for me. His score also put him tied for fifth in the class in my recruit scores so playing him for a value play later in drafts made sense.

Year 1

I am not here to say CJ Bailey lit the world on fire and should have been a Heisman contender. I do think it helps put some perspective to his year when we look at it in comparison with some other first time starters in the same season like Leavitt, Mensah, Johnson, Iamaleava, Sellers, Chiles, and fellow freshmen Raiola and Lagway. For easy comparison sake, I did use PFF for all numbers so it should be a level comparison field for everyone. I believe games played (GP) are set for any game in which a pass was attempted. A few other metrics to make aware are BTT% (big time throw %) and TWP% (turnover worthy play %) which I calculated by taking the number of throws PFF quantified in either bucket and divided by number of attempts. How they calculate their percent for these throws does not match my method. When we compare how close some of these numbers are to then see how many have Bailey low (more in the next section on that) and the rest fairly high, either one or two mistakes is happening. Someone is getting ranked too highly or someone is being ranked way too low.

McCall led the team against WCU and Tennessee before an injury knocked him out of the La Tech game before halftime. This was the first game in which Bailey had to step in and take over for the remainder of the game right before halftime. McCall came back two weeks later in the Wake Forest game before taking a hit in the first quarter that ended his season and career. Bailey had his first start against Clemson and Northern Illinois before the Wake Forest game and then went on to start against Syracuse, California, Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, and East Carolina in the bowl game.

With that little context added, we should see where the opportunity for more was there for CJ Bailey. He made a few mistakes along the year with interceptions and turnover worthy passes, but he was a true freshman who was meant to sit and learn behind McCall. His numbers meanwhile kept pace in areas like completion percentage and passing yards/game with these other dudes who are all valued higher going into 2025. And we even see some positive signs from Bailey over the second half of the season when he is the guy moving forward in week 7 and onward.

Bailey’s ADOT for the final seven games ranges around the ten mark with a low game of 7.7 and a high of 15.4. His BTTs become a little more consistent while his TWPs starts to not keep hitting 2/game for four of the final seven weeks. It also helped over the final seven games that Bailey hit 55 rushes for 312 of his 390 rushing yards. That pace put him at 44.6 rushing yards/game. Just look at the difference from early season to mid and late when he has to step up as the guy for NC State.

2025 OFFSEASON

Currently if we look at Campus2Canton for a reference on how the community feels about CJ Bailey, we see a big path to opportunity. Right now, the C2C rankings place him as QB6 of the class and QB41 overall. Even with everything he showed, that QB41 spot puts him behind five guys who were 2024 NFL eligible, 10 guys who were 2025 eligible, 11 guys 2026 eligible, and a whopping 9 2028 eligible guys.

If we change it over to devy rankings, we see him sitting at QB29. It is tough to swallow still when there are 7 2028 NFL eligible QBs ahead of him along with names like Nico Iamaleava, Aidan Chiles, and Gunner Stockton. This is not just on Campus2Canton though so let me clarify. DraftSharks does not even have him in their top 100 players. Draft Countdown leaves him out of their top 46 quarterbacks. The community as a whole is behind on his upside. His ADP of 164.2 in C2C leagues makes him such an easy cheap dart throw for upside at around QB36 pricing. Even in devy ADP as I have shown above he sits outside the top 100 in SF/2QB settings.

We know CJ Bailey’s team will look a little different in 2025. He does manage to keep Daylan Smothers in the backfield but loses Jordan Waters and Kendrick Raphael. KC Concepcion is off to Texas A&M while Dacari Collins moved to Louisville. However, his top group will still include Justin Joly, Noah Rogers, and Wesley Grimes.

Model Outlook

I mentioned above that CJ Bailey was a Pocket passer recruit type with a score of 84. If I leave out the 2025 and 2026 class, that puts Bailey tied for 47th of 228 names in the High School database. I typically only consider guys above 75 as my cut-off out of high school and avoiding the statue recruit type. Bailey was well positioned for that in the 2024 class as a big value too. Most NFL QBs were at least 75+ coming out of high school. Looking at the current starters, 18 of 24 QBs were in this category (older names like Rodgers, Geno, Dak, Goff, Mayfield, and Stafford were prior to the start of my models).

We only have one year of data to project off of for Bailey so I will start by just narrowing down his career path some.

We know he is above 75 on the recruit score. This leaves 104 names for anyone who was eligible to have played a snap by or before 2024 season.

If we limit it to names with an adjusted yards per attempt greater than or equal to 7, we are left with 41 names.

Now obviously I showed Bailey is a bit of a runner too so I will cut the field down to those who showed at least 1PPG rushing. I do believe Bailey to be even better than the 4.85PPG rushing he showed too. However I know teams may limit some guys in year 1 thinking forward to avoid injuries so I will just cut down the minimum amount. We get 28 names left over.

The final metric I will limit is sacks/dropback. I know CJ Bailey was a little bit on the higher end at 6.37% which is not the end of the world as a QB with some rushing talent, but we want to see it still under 8%. This cut me down to 21 names to know. While the list below sorted by YR2 scores (going into year 2) is showing a limited scope based on a limited number of games and high school recruiting, we see why I am making a case for the upside that CJ Bailey is offering at NC State. Getting another year of data to update the career numbers will be quite fun to see for how we can look at YR3 scores and onward for CJ Bailey. His unexpected starting experience out of the gate should be setting the foundation for a name people need to know in 2025. Obviously I let the bucket be a little wide to not narrow down too much so we can see the risk and reward that Bailey may offer but this is a swing I will gladly take in leagues.