Sam Howell: Career Stats, NFL Journey, and 2026 Cowboys Role

Sam Howell – Quarterback Profile, Career Stats, and What Happens Next in Dallas

Who Is Sam Howell?

Sam Howell is a 25-year-old NFL quarterback currently on a one-year deal with the Dallas Cowboys, signed in March 2026. He’s listed at 6-foot-1, 220 pounds, born September 16, 2000, in Waynesville, North Carolina. That’s the quick version. The longer version is more interesting: a player once considered a potential top-10 NFL draft pick who fell to the fifth round, started a full NFL season, got traded three times in two years, and is now fighting for a backup job behind Dak Prescott. Five teams before his 26th birthday. There’s a specific kind of NFL career path that tells you a lot about both a player and the league, and Howell’s is one of them.

Three Years at UNC That Should Have Made Him a First-Rounder

Howell enrolled at Chapel Hill in January 2019 after flipping his commitment from Florida State. He had committed to FSU out of Sun Valley High School in Monroe, North Carolina – the second-ranked recruit in the state that cycle – but when offensive coordinator Walt Bell left Tallahassee and Mack Brown was announced as the new UNC head coach, Howell changed course. That decision turned out to be consequential for both him and the Tar Heels program.

As a true freshman, he completed 259 of 422 passes for 3,641 yards and 38 touchdowns against seven interceptions. That TD total set an FBS freshman record. He was named ACC Rookie of the Year, won the Military Bowl MVP award, and finished with third-team All-ACC honors. The 38 touchdowns aren’t a number that needs context to understand – it’s just a remarkable freshman season by any measure.

His sophomore year in 2020 was arguably better. Against Wake Forest alone, he threw for 550 yards and six touchdowns while rushing for an additional score – both school records – in a game where North Carolina put up 742 total yards, also a program record. He finished the year with 3,586 passing yards, 30 touchdowns, seven interceptions, and a 68% completion rate. By the end of that season, his name was appearing in first-round mock drafts with regularity.

Then 2021 happened. Javonte Williams, Michael Carter, and Dyami Brown – three of his most important offensive weapons – all left for the NFL after the 2020 season. Howell’s numbers dropped across the board: 3,056 yards, 24 touchdowns, nine interceptions, 63% completion. He still ran for 828 yards and 11 touchdowns, which at least showed something, but the passing decline was real and scouts noticed. Whether the dropoff was the supporting cast or something innate in Howell’s game was the question NFL teams spent the next several months trying to answer.

The 2022 Draft – Sixth QB Taken, Fifth Round

Six quarterbacks went off the board before Howell in the 2022 draft: Kenny Pickett (first round, 20th overall), Malik Willis (third round), Desmond Ridder (third round), Matt Corral (third round), Bailey Zappe (fourth round), then Howell at 144th overall in the fifth. That ordering aged strangely. As of 2026, none of the QBs drafted ahead of him in rounds two through four have developed into clear NFL starters either. Pickett was traded twice. Corral barely played. The class as a whole was a reminder that drafting quarterbacks outside the top 10 is close to a coin flip regardless of round.

Washington selected Howell with pick 144 and immediately treated him as a developmental starter rather than a career backup. He played one regular season game in 2022 – Week 18, after the team was eliminated from playoff contention – and completed 11 of 19 passes for 169 yards with a passing touchdown, a rushing touchdown, and one interception in a 26-6 win over Dallas. The Cowboys, coincidentally, are now his employer.

Going into 2023, the Commanders told offensive coordinator candidates during the hiring process that Howell was the starter. Not that he’d compete for the job – that he had it. That’s an unusual level of organizational commitment to a fifth-round pick in year two, and it set up what became his only full starting season in the NFL.

The 2023 Washington Season – Almost 4,000 Yards and a League-Worst Supporting Story

The final line: 17 starts, 3,946 passing yards, 21 touchdowns, 21 interceptions, 63.4% completion rate, five rushing touchdowns, and a 4-13 record. He led the league in interceptions and absorbed 65 sacks – more than any other quarterback in the NFL that year by a margin of 14. According to Next Gen Stats from that period, he was also the most hit and most pressured quarterback in the league.

The 65 sacks number is the one that tells the story most cleanly. Washington’s offensive line was genuinely terrible, and Howell took punishment that would have distorted almost any quarterback’s numbers. His 21 interceptions look bad; some of them were bad decisions, but a chunk came from plays where he had nowhere to go and was forcing throws under duress. The 21/21 TD-INT ratio made him the only quarterback in the league with at least 14 starts who failed to throw more touchdowns than interceptions that season.

There were real flashes. Week 8 against Philadelphia: 39-for-52, 397 passing yards, a 4:1 touchdown-to-interception ratio. That’s a competent NFL quarterback’s game against a good defense. Pro Football Focus had him leading the league in big-time throws at 24 through Week 11 of that season. The problem is that the last four games were particularly bad – three touchdowns, seven interceptions, 4.7 yards per attempt – and that stretch sealed his fate in Washington.

What’s genuinely hard to square is this: Washington handed a fifth-round pick with one career NFL start a full season with one of the league’s worst offensive lines, then evaluated him on the results. The 65 sacks alone should have been enough to pause that evaluation. They weren’t a data point in his favor, obviously, but they were context. Teams didn’t universally treat his 2023 season as a failure – Minnesota’s front office, when they traded for him in April 2025, specifically cited the 397-yard game against Philadelphia as evidence the talent was real.

What Scouts Actually Think of His Game

His footwork coming out of college drew nearly universal praise from scouts, which is unusual. Multiple pre-draft evaluations called it among the best they’d seen at the college level – specific praise for his base maintenance, his ability to reset quickly under pressure without crossing his feet, and his consistency in creating a platform to throw from even when the pocket was collapsing. That foundational mechanics quality is the reason teams kept being interested despite mixed results.

The arm is adequate, not exceptional. He can make all the throws, and his deep ball at UNC was legitimately good – one 2022 scouting report from WalterFootball described him as potentially the best deep-ball passer in that entire draft class. In the NFL, his arm strength hasn’t been a problem. What has been a problem is pre-snap recognition. He doesn’t process defensive information as quickly as the position requires at the professional level, and his tendency to hold the ball when his first read is covered contributed directly to the sack numbers in Washington.

His mobility is functional – 828 rushing yards in his junior season at UNC, five rushing touchdowns in 2023 for Washington – but he’s not a player who extends plays consistently with his legs the way Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson does. He runs when the opportunity presents itself. He doesn’t create those opportunities by design with any regularity.

Seattle, Minnesota, Philadelphia – Three Teams in Twenty Months

Washington traded Howell to Seattle in March 2024 along with a fourth-round pick and a sixth-round pick, getting back a third and a fifth. The Seahawks wanted a backup behind Geno Smith, and that’s exactly what Howell was. He appeared in two games – most notably a Week 15 loss to Green Bay when Smith got hurt, completing 5-of-14 passes for 24 yards with an interception. That’s the entirety of his 2024 production on paper.

Seattle then signed Sam Darnold in free agency, drafted Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe in the 2025 draft, and Howell became expendable. On April 26, 2025, Minnesota traded a fifth-round pick (142nd overall) for Howell and a fifth-round pick (172nd overall) from Seattle. Kevin O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah both said publicly that Minnesota had done their homework on Howell going back to the 2022 draft and had maintained appreciation for his film since then. He was supposed to back up J.J. McCarthy.

He was in Minnesota for roughly four months. On August 24, 2025, the Vikings traded Howell and a 2026 sixth-round pick to Philadelphia for a fifth-round pick and a seventh-round pick. In Philadelphia, he was third on the depth chart behind Jalen Hurts and Tanner McKee, designated as the emergency QB3 for most of the season. He never appeared on offense in 2025.

Five teams. Four seasons. Eighteen months between his last NFL pass and the start of Cowboys training camp in 2026.

Dallas in 2026 – Competing with Joe Milton for One Job

The Cowboys signed Howell on March 10, 2026, one year to the week after Washington had traded him to Seattle. Head coach Brian Schottenheimer described it at a March 30 press conference: “Sam was a guy, we watched the film, we were like, man, if we could have Sam Howell and Joe Milton on this football team and give those guys both a chance to compete.” That’s transparent enough – Dallas wasn’t satisfied with Milton as the unchallenged backup after one season.

Milton has the edge in one specific way: he spent all of 2025 in Schottenheimer’s system learning the offense. Howell is starting from zero on the playbook. But Howell has 18 NFL starts; Milton has fewer meaningful reps in actual games. The Athletic’s Jon Machota projected in May 2026 that Dallas would ultimately keep Milton and cut Howell when the 53-man roster is finalized, which would be the correct interpretation if the organization trusts the familiarity advantage. What that projection doesn’t account for is whether Howell wins the competition on merit during training camp and the preseason – which is an open question right now.

Behind Prescott, the Cowboys’ offensive room includes CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens at wide receiver. If Howell were ever pressed into starting duty – which requires Prescott getting hurt – he would be throwing to two of the better wideouts in the NFC. Whether that scenario plays out or whether he’s cut before September is a question training camp answers.

Fantasy Football Value in 2026

There isn’t much. In standard 12-team leagues, Howell is irrelevant unless Prescott misses time. In two-QB or superflex formats, he’s a watchlist name at best – someone to add off waivers if Prescott goes down for more than a week, not someone to roster speculatively before the season. His 2023 Washington season (3,946 yards, 21 TDs, five rushing TDs) is proof he can produce statistics in a starting role. The Cowboys’ receiving corps is better than what he had in Washington. But none of that matters while he’s third on the depth chart.

Career NFL Stats

Before All of This – Growing Up in North Carolina

Howell grew up in Union County, North Carolina, and attended Sun Valley High School in Monroe. He’s the son of Amy and Duke Howell. As a recruit, 247Sports rated him a four-star prospect and the second-ranked player in North Carolina, with a ranking as the third-best dual-threat quarterback nationally in the 2019 class. His original commitment to Florida State was genuine – Walt Bell’s departure changed the calculation, and Mack Brown’s reputation for developing quarterbacks made UNC a reasonable alternative. He enrolled in January 2019 and won the starting job as a true freshman, which had never happened at Carolina before him.