Ranking the Top 50 NFL Free Agents of 2026

2025 team: Green Bay Packers
Age: 26
Drafted: 2022, second round (86th)
Pro Bowls: None
All-Pro teams: None

Willis is exactly the kind of quarterback teams should want to sign this offseason if they’re looking for a quality backup who could compete for a starting job. Throw his time in Tennessee out the window. He started only three games and played in four others over two years with the Titans, and his leap from Liberty to the NFL was clearly too much for him out of the gate. He committed too many turnovers, held the ball too long, and took bad sacks. Everything was moving too fast for him. But since arriving in Green Bay, Willis has looked like a completely different player in his 11 appearances (including six starts). It looks like the game has slowed down for him in a big way, and now we’re seeing the athletic ability and big arm talent that had people excited about him as a draft prospect. He’s valuable on designed quarterback runs, and he uses his feet to turn sacks into scrambles for positive yardage. Willis also throws well on the run because he has an absolute cannon of an arm that allows him to throw from awkward angles and off platform. He can put the ball wherever he wants with the flick of his wrist, and he’s shown special deep-ball accuracy in his limited action this season. The question about him as he hits free agency will be the small sample size of his quality starts in Green Bay. 

Maybe there is a team brave enough to give Willis $20 million per year to be a starter, like the Jets did with Justin Fields last offseason. But that would be a pretty high-risk bet. (Also, how did that pan out for the Jets?) 

Fields started over 40 NFL games before signing with New York; Willis has started only six. Daniel Jones signed a one-year, $14 million deal to compete with Anthony Richardson for the starting job in Indianapolis last offseason. Jacoby Brissett, Davis Mills, and Marcus Mariota all signed deals in the range of $6 million to $8 million annually with the expectation that they’d be backups behind locked-in starters. Willis’s value should be somewhere in the $8 million to $14 million per year range, but a bidding war among desperate teams could push his market value.

Best fit: Arizona Cardinals