Right from the start, Jaxson Dart’s path to this week’s NFL draft — where he is expected by some observers to be taken in the first round — seemed preordained.
His father, Brandon, a former Utah football player, was surprised during backyard games that his preschool son could throw, catch, hit and shoot a ball in a way that was far beyond his years. The Darts — who have a history of athletes — had never had a quarterback in the family, but after other kids on his Little League team proved inadequate at the position, Jaxson volunteered, “I can do it.”
He went on to become a starting quarterback at Roy High in northern Utah when he was just 14. “I could tell right away that he was going to be a special player,” then-Roy coach Fred Fernandes recalls.
On several occasions in the ensuing years, Jaxson would be running down the field in a hurry-up situation, yelling to the sideline for the next play, when Fernandes would reply, “You’re the one who’s going to be playing on Sundays; you make the call!”
Dart was so good that after his junior year, Fernandes told him he needed to go to another school. Roy had graduated all five of its offensive linemen and they would be replaced by smallish, faster players who could run block, but not pass block.
In conversations with Brandon, who was his safeties coach, he encouraged him to transfer his son, telling him, “Jaxson deserves to be able to throw it 30 to 40 times a game. If we’re going to be successful, we won’t be able to do that.”
When his maternal grandfather told Jaxson, “You can’t do this to Coach (Fernandes) after all he’s done for you,” Jaxson’s mother, Kara, responded, “It’s what Coach wants; he agrees with this. He wants us to go because it’s the best thing for Jaxson.”
A magnanimous gesture
Fernandes called Eric Kjar, the head coach and QB guru at Corner Canyon High, to tell him that Jaxson was headed his way; he magnanimously gave away a future NFL quarterback to a rival coach.
“I was shocked,” says Kjar. “I thought (Fernandes) would be mad. He was very supportive of him moving on, just for (Jaxson’s) benefit. It’s pretty admirable that a coach understood that a kid needed more than what he can do in his program and has his best interest in mind. We’re not usually like that as coaches.”
Dart left his family behind and moved from Kaysville to Draper in the middle of his junior year to live with his aunt so he could work closely with Kjar.
Kjar, who sports a 100-8 won-lost record as a head coach at Corner Canyon the past eight years, has coached at least 10 quarterbacks at Jordan and Corner Canyon high schools who have gone on to play DI football, including Zach Wilson (Miami Dolphins), Isaac Wilson (Utah), Devin Brown (Ohio State/Cal) and Dart (USC/Ole Miss), and that doesn’t include his current starter, Helaman Casuga, who has committed to Texas A&M.
Quarterbacks go to great lengths to be coached by Kjar. Casuga transferred from Timpview High before his junior season. Brown transferred from an Arizona high school for his senior year. Dart of course did the same thing.
Off the radar to on it
It is revealing that Dart had drawn zero interest from college recruiters in three years at Roy, but as soon as it was known that he was transferring to Corner Canyon, he received a handful of offers.
Kjar had rarely seen Dart play, but that winter he watched him perform in a 7-on-7 tournament with Kjar’s oldest son, Noah, an all-state receiver. “I was shocked by his ability — his arm, touch, timing and anticipation. I was surprised he hadn’t been recruited.”
It was the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant recruiters couldn’t see recruits perform in person via visits or camps. They got their first good look at Dart during a nationally televised game between Corner Canyon and Bingham High in a showdown of Utah powerhouse programs.
Dart threw for 277 yards, six touchdowns and no interceptions, and ran for another 110 yards in a 42-20 win.
“The next morning, he got 45 offers,” says Brandon, “and hundreds of texts and calls.”
That season, Dart threw for 4,691 yards and a state-record 67 touchdown passes, ran for 1,195 yards and led Corner Canyon to an unbeaten season and the state championship. He was named to several All-American teams and was the Gatorade National Football Player of the year, the Deseret News Mr. Football and Max Preps National Player of the year — this for a kid who had never earned more than all-region honors.
A football journey
Dart had his pick of schools and ultimately chose USC, where he competed with Miller Moss — a local superstar quarterback who was the presumed heir apparent — and Kedon Slovis, a two-year returning starter. Slovis won the starting job again, but in the fourth game he was relieved by Dart, who proceeded to throw for 391 yards, four touchdowns and two interceptions despite limping noticeably after a second-quarter knee injury.
He underwent surgery afterward to repair the knee and missed the next four games. In all, he played in six games that season. He threw for 1,353 yards, nine TDs and five interceptions, and it appeared he was USC’s QB of the future. He never played again for the Trojans. Neither did Slovis.
After the season, USC hired Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley as its new head coach. He brought with him his starting quarterback at Oklahoma, Caleb Williams, who would win the Heisman Trophy the following year.
Dart transferred to Ole Miss, where, once again, he had to face several challengers for the starting position. Dart beat out the previous year’s starter for the 2022 season, and then faced two new challengers in 2023 with the arrival of transfers Spencer Sanders, an all-Big 12 quarterback from Oklahoma, and Walker Howard, a former five-star recruit from LSU.
Dart wound up starting all 39 games in three seasons for the Rebels and last season helped them win 10 games and finish 11th in the national rankings. In four years of college play, he threw for 11,970 yards, 81 TDs and 27 interceptions.
The 6-foot-2, 225-pound Dart also proved to be a strong runner, rushing for 1,541 yards and 14 TDs. (“He has a thick lower half and is really strong,” says Kjar. ”He’s faster than people think.”)
NFL prospects
Dart’s stock has had more ups and downs than the stock market the last few months — that’s the nature of the predraft buildup — going from a projected second- or third-round pick to the first round and somewhere in between. Dart was among the 18 or so players invited to sit in the green room at the site of the draft in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but he eventually declined.
Reporters speculated that perhaps this means he was informed that he won’t be chosen in the first round, but Kjar and Brandon say it’s because he prefers to watch the draft with family and friends in Draper, and he also doesn’t want to risk the potential embarrassment of going later than projected and having the cameras in his face, a la Aaron Rodgers.
A handful of quarterbacks from Utah schools have been taken in the first round — BYU’s Jim McMahon and Zach Wilson, Utah’s Lee Grosscup and Alex Smith, Utah State’s Bill Munson and Jordan Love — but only two came out of Utah high schools. Dart could be the third.
“It’s something that’s in the back of your mind for such a long time that you wonder if it’ll ever happen,” says Brandon. “Now it’s here and I just want to get it over with.”
Playing the long game
This is the payoff for the long game the family has been playing. It’s the reason he graduated from high school early to compete in spring ball at USC; it’s the reason he and his father traveled to California on and off for two years so they could train at an elite quarterback academy that had also tutored Tom Brady, Matt Stafford, Eli Manning, Lamar Jackson and Drew Brees, taking dozens of late-night and early-morning flights whenever they had a free weekend. It’s the reason he changed high schools and left home and Roy High at the age of 16.
Fernandes recalls that when it was decided Dart would transfer to Corner Canyon, “he cried for 40 minutes.” This was the path he and his parents had chosen. He would leave his home three times before the age of 19 in pursuit of his ambitions, from Kaysville to Draper, from Draper to Los Angeles, from Los Angeles to Oxford, Mississippi.
Dart moved to his aunt’s home in Draper in January 2020. His parents — one or both — would make the hourlong drive to stay with him a couple of nights during the week. Dart’s younger brother, Diesel, a sophomore receiver/safety who has received offers from BYU, is doing much the same thing. He lives alone in Draper so he can play football at Corner Canyon.
Brandon, an entrepreneur, picks up dinner each evening at the family’s Kaysville home and drives it to Draper, where he spends the night and then returns home the next morning. It’s what Brandon believes he must do if he wants his son to be “developed and have opportunities.”
The parents are as driven as the son and willing to make such sacrifices. Kara was a basketball player for Weber High and Brandon played in 12 games as a safety for the University of Utah, intercepting two passes and returning one for a 97-yard touchdown. Brandon told Yahoo Sports of an occasion when he came home to find Kara giving her son the business because he had juked a defender instead of lighting him up.
Why QB?
Jaxson once explained his affinity for the quarterback position to Sports Illustrated: “I started out as a strong safety like my dad, but transitioned into quarterback by the time I was 9 or 10. I love the position and being in control, touching the ball every play and the mental side of the game. Learning the playbook and understanding the coverages, you get a bit of everything in the position. That’s why it’s the hardest position to play in all of sports.”
“He has a dynamic personality that is endearing to teammates. He’s a good leader. He’s fun to be around. He has a great work ethic. He’s very competitive — every practice was the Super Bowl for him when he was here. He wanted to improve.”
— Corner Canyon coach Eric Kjar on Jaxson Dart
Every step of the way, everyone seems to have seen Dart’s preternatural abilities. After watching Dart play third base for the Corner Canyon baseball team, coach Jeff Eure told Yahoo Sports, “ … I don’t know if it’s OK to say this, but he was probably equally as talented on the baseball field as he was on the football field.”
Fernandes was so enamored with Dart’s ability that he asked the school’s most famous alum, McMahon, if he could pull his No. 9 jersey out of retirement and give it to Dart. “I don’t have any problem with it as long as he’s a stud,” McMahon said. Dart chose not to wear it, wanting to establish his own identity.
“He has a dynamic personality that is endearing to teammates,” says Kjar. “He’s a good leader. He’s fun to be around. He has a great work ethic. He’s very competitive — every practice was the Super Bowl for him when he was here. He wanted to improve.”
Kjar, a master at adapting and designing offenses to fit the various talents each class presents, quickly realized that with Dart on the team he “could push the envelope in the passing game.”
“We added a lot of concepts because he understood them so well and could make all the throws and allow us to stretch defenses. We were starting to see more coverages because he was throwing so well, so we were able to add more to the running game and then grow the pass game. He could handle the vertical reads. It was fun for a coach. He’s a coach’s dream. He has so much talent and has a great personality.”
Looking ahead, Kjar says, “He’s going to be a really good NFL player. The sky’s the limit. He has all the tools and talent to be All-Pro. But obviously he has got to get in the right place. The right situation is critical.
“He needs to go to a place where they know how to work to their talents and develop them. Some (teams) are good at it and some seem to struggle with it. That’s an important piece.”
Zach Wilson learned this the hard way with the New York Jets, a quarterback graveyard. Dart will hope for better during Thursday’s draft, the next step in his long quest to play quarterback at the highest level.
