It might have been the first time that Jaxson Dart learned the football world is unfair.

Before his senior year at Corner Canyon High School outside of Salt Lake City, Dart attended the 3DQB camp in California. He was competing against Bryce Young and C.J. Stroud, who were two years older. And at times, Dart outperformed the two then-college passers. But he was virtually unknown in college circles — with no offers — while Young and Stroud had received almost 30 offers each and chosen Alabama and Ohio State, respectively.

“Why don’t I have any?” Dart wondered aloud.

But by the end of his senior season, he had 67 passing touchdowns (67!?!?), just four interceptions and 4,691 passing yards. He added 1,200 rushing yards and 12 rushing touchdowns (79 total touchdowns!?!?). And then there were offers. Plenty of them. Dart started his college career at USC before transferring to Ole Miss, a series of moves that seem to have set him up to go high in this year’s NFL Draft. 

But how high? That’s anyone’s guess.

This quarterback class is as polarizing and hard to project as any in recent memory. Dart won’t go as high as Young or Stroud did. Is it fair? Well, by now, Dart must know that “fair” has nothing to do with it. What does matter is that he will try to replicate that moment from five years ago when no one gave him credit, nor did anyone predict what he was about to achieve.

“He’s always able to exceed expectations, and I think that that’s always going to be the plan: to exceed expectations,” Brandon Dart, Jaxson’s father, told FOX Sports. “He has a desire to be the best of the best, and we know that he’s going to work to get his full capabilities to where they need to be. And then whatever that is in the NFL, it is.”

If you ask the people close to Dart, they’ll tell you they expect a team to draft him somewhere between ninth and 34th overall. And they’re not discounting the possibility that Dart could go second among quarterbacks, ahead of Shedeur Sanders. If any of that is going to happen, it’s a matter of whether Dart answered enough of the questions to the satisfaction of at least one NFL team. All he needs is one team that understands him.

“He’s always had a brilliant football mind, which I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions,” Brandon said.

The 21-year-old will be the youngest QB in the NFL next year, but he also has no shortage of experience with 45 college starts, which is more than Cam Ward. But maybe — even after putting up all that tape — Dart is still misunderstood.

Most teams look for a superpower when evaluating a QB prospect — a physical quality or a skill that sets him apart from the rest. Dart’s superpower isn’t as obvious. But he has one.

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Dart had a curfew at Ole Miss. But it’s not the kind of curfew you’d think. Dart isn’t a partier. He’s a film junkie. And so offensive coordinator Charlie Weis and senior analyst Joe Judge, who both worked intensively on Dart’s development last year, had to kick him out of the coach’s offices at 10:30 p.m.

Almost every night.

“I’ll just sleep after practice,” Dart would say.

The players had to be at the facility at 7 a.m., so the Ole Miss coaches made sure to get Dart off to bed after he’d logged as many as three hours of film study on his own in the evenings. The Rebels’ game plan changed every week based on their opponents. It’s a free-flowing offense in which receivers find space in a defense, rather than running prescribed routes. That might not have required the typical post-snap read we see in the NFL, but it required tremendous preparation and pre-snap recognition.

By his final college season, Dart had a big say in what Ole Miss ran on Saturdays because of his deep knowledge of the offense.

“He was really, really good thinking ahead of, ‘Hey, we could try this scheme to expose this matchup,’ based on the study he did,” Judge told FOX Sports. “It also allowed him to help give input that you value from a player like him on the sideline to make adjustments in the game.

“There’s a lot of times his ideas got added in and we got big plays out.”

Dart took ownership of the offense, which coach Lane Kiffin embraced and encouraged. The quarterback did everything he could to make life easier for the Rebels’ staff.

“I’ve always prided myself on just trying to be in the most controlled game as you can be and keeping it easy for the offensive playcallers to keep that train rolling and put your team in a really good situation,” Dart said at the combine.

There might not be a game that Dart and his camp are more proud of than his performance against Georgia last November. It was a confluence of many of the things that made him special — a heavy dash of preparation, a handful of solid throws, but also the toughness to play through an ankle injury he suffered early in the game. It wasn’t a smooth start for Dart or the Ole Miss offense. But he kept at it, and he was playing some of his best football by the time the Rebels closed out a 28-10 upset over the third-ranked Bulldogs.

Just two games after his worst performance of the season, featuring a pair of late interceptions that led to a loss to Florida, Dart pummeled the Duke Blue Devils in the Gator Bowl with 404 passing yards and four touchdowns in a 52-20 win. He refused to leave that game, even with his coaches giving him the option to call it. His backup didn’t enter until the 59th minute on the final drive.

Dart hasn’t lost that edge during the pre-draft process. During the busiest days of his visits with NFL teams, you could still hear him yelling throughout the Ole Miss facility. While studying NFL playbooks, he was working on his cadences, one of the many things that the pro scouts were asking him to demonstrate.

“I think part of that is like — he does have a fear of failure, as far as not performing at his very best. That drives him to make sure: ‘I’m going to overly prepare,'” Brandon Dart said.

Dart has been preparing for the draft with his private QB coach, Taylor Kelly, at Tom House’s 3DQB in California, starting each day at 8 a.m. They will do pre-draft prep for an hour and then throw for two hours. Dart will move on to speed training and lifting for an hour after that, then physical therapy. He’ll then get a break until about 5 p.m. when he and Kelly will study film for about three hours.

“There’s a lot of similarities to Jalen Hurts and Baker Mayfield in how they’re wired,” Kelly told FOX Sports. “He believes in himself, and it doesn’t matter who he’s going against. He’s going to do everything he possibly can to outperform you. And he thrives in that.”

That’s the kind of work it’s going to take if Dart wants to leapfrog over Sanders in the draft — and make sure that the likes of Alabama’s Jalen Milroe and Louisville‘s Tyler Shough don’t leapfrog Dart. Ward will go first overall, but after that, each of the next four quarterbacks has at least one big question about his game. In fact, if you ask different scouts, you’ll get a different answer on where Dart should go and how his skills translate to the NFL. The same is true of Sanders, Milroe and Shough.

Brandon Dart said he’s well aware that the draft could be a wild ride for his son, who will not be in Green Bay on Thursday.

“There’s a million different scenarios,” Brandon said. “He could go at nine, probably his ceiling. And he could go at 34. That’s probably his floor. But you know, he can only control what he can control. … Everybody else can have all the hype. We’ll just sit over here and work and make sure that we’re as prepared as you can possibly be to make a run at this.”

So why is Jaxson Dart’s future shrouded in uncertainty?

At Ole Miss, Dart operated Kiffin’s system, which — until recently — was a run-and-shoot offense. It was not the type of framework to produce a quarterback who’s all that useful in the NFL. Kiffin ran a small selection of plays that the team dressed up differently to beat the weekly opponent. And that’s what it did: beat the heck out of college defenses.

In the end, Dart finished fourth in SEC history in total offense (12,115), fourth in total offense per play (8.14), fifth in total offense per game (310.6) and ninth in passing yards (10,617). He is also the all-time winningest starting QB in school history, with 28 victories and a .737 winning percentage, topping even Archie and Eli Manning. Those wins are important. After all, when Dart sat down in pre-school, he didn’t write down that he wanted to be an NFL quarterback. He wrote that he wanted to be a “Super Bowl-winning quarterback.”

But an NFL passing-game coordinator admitted to me that no one knows quite what to do with Ole Miss quarterback prospects these days. Or QBs from Tennessee, another unique system. Even Bo Nix was a tough evaluation out of Oregon. 

“Bo Nix is probably a comparison of how it can work,” that NFL coach said. “There’s just some extra variables.” 

These air-raid systems are just foreign enough to give evaluators pause. There are NFL throws in there. But the reads, the routes and the progressions are all unlike what Dart will likely run in the NFL.

But … that’s just one line of thought.

“I think that’s kind of just a lazy narrative,” Dart said.

The thing that he has tried to make clear to NFL teams during the pre-draft process is that, over the past three years, Ole Miss has introduced more pro-style concepts and, in turn, a more complicated offense.

“I want to take that narrative out of it, because I don’t feel like it’s fair,” Kelly said. “It’s changed a little bit, and I feel like more people have watched his game. I think that’s why he has crept up on people’s boards and what they want to see, what they like about him. It’s like, ‘Oh, he actually did do this in his offense. We just didn’t really watch it, or we just assumed it didn’t show up. But hey, we have that same play in our offense.'”

If the Rebels have ramped up the degree of difficulty for Dart over the past few seasons, he hasn’t faltered. Despite at least 15 pass-catcher drops each season at Ole Miss, per CBS Sports, Dart’s completion percentage improved every year. In his final college season, when the Rebels’ offense was the most complicated, he finished with 4,279 passing yards, 29 touchdowns and six interceptions. He added 495 rushing yards with three rushing touchdowns.

There are more than traces of NFL throws on Dart’s tape. There is evidence of an NFL-caliber processor who is ready to stand in the pocket and deliver accurate throws to every part of the field. There’s evidence of creativity to make plays out of structure.

“When anybody ever says that he’s a one-read guy and he plays in a very simplistic offense — like, yes, they do make it easy. But a lot of that is the amount of preparation that he does,” Brandon Dart said. “And I don’t think people realize that their scheme or what they do, as far as run game and passing game, they change every week.”

Jaxson has to hope that an NFL team recognizes his superpower: his maniacal work ethic. His preparation is what sets him apart from other quarterbacks. He even said as much in an interview with “Good Morning Football” when asked the most important thing he wants people to know about the Jaxson Dart quarterback experience. 

“You’re gonna get somebody that cares about every little thing when you step into the office or when he steps into a room with his teammates,” Dart told GMFB. “I think that’s one thing that can really separate great players from just good and average players — your accountability, your self-discipline and consistency in everything that you do. Everybody at that level is going to have a special and unique talent, but what is it that pushes you and makes you even better? I think that it’s my work ethic.”

The New Orleans Saints, Pittsburgh Steelers, Cleveland Browns and New York Giants all make sense for Dart in Round 1 or 2. The Saints, in particular, seem to have an affinity for him. But even the Los Angeles Rams would fit, with Dart taking some time as a true developmental backup to Matthew Stafford.

All Dart needs are an NFL facility and coaching staff. All he needs are a meeting room and a notebook. All he needs is some homework. 

Jaxson Dart is ready to work.

Prior to joining FOX Sports as an NFL reporter and columnist, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @henrycmckenna. 

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