Former Missouri quarterback Drew Lock is one of the most overrated players in this year’s NFL draft. He has an arm as strong as a Transformer’s and is built like the vitruvian athlete. At 6-foot-4-inches tall and weighing in at a lean 225 pounds, Lock looks the part as the Denver Broncos’ next franchise quarterback — but he can’t read the metaphorical lines to save his life.

The 22-year-old signal caller isn’t fit to be the frantic pick from an organization in desperate need of one. He’s not a universal USB that can fit in every port, but a proprietary plug that needs the right socket. And unfortunately for the Broncos, Lock is too much of a risk.

It took four years for Lock to develop the necessary skill of progressing through his reads on a play. If you were a receiver and played with Lock through his junior season, chances are you wouldn’t get the ball if you weren’t the first receiver he looked at. It’s a fix made through intense coaching, but a weakness that requires more attention is his touch on passes. In key situations, such as during an eventual 39-10 loss to Alabama in 2018, Lock would underthrow receivers with open roads to a first down, or overthrow wide-open targets downfield costing a touchdown.

Yes, these issues can also be fixed, but it’s a common trait that has held back a platoon of prospects in the past.

Teams have fallen in love with Lock’s rocket arm, but in the process, have overlooked his mechanical and statistical shortcomings.

In over three seasons as the starter for Mizzou, Lock led a series of bombardments against college defenses, posting 99 touchdowns and 12,193 yards according to SportsReference. Both of those marks are second in school history. The caveat is that just 10 of those touchdowns came against schools ranked in the top 25, according to numbers obtained from ESPN Stats & Info.

In fact, against the nation’s best, Lock completed just 52.5% of his passes, threw four more interceptions than touchdowns and won a grand total of one of those games.

Crumbling against quality opponents is Lock’s lasting legacy in his college town of Columbia. It stretches to, remarkably, just about every facet of his resume. He was a high school bully who could only pick on kindergartners. In his career, Lock faced a Power-5 school — a member of either the SEC, Big 12, Big 10, ACC or Pac-12 conferences — 24 times. He won just two of those games. He also lost both of his bowl games.

While his stats say he was as good or better than school legends Chase Daniel, Blaine Gabbert, James Franklin and Brad Smith, his on-field results say otherwise.

Daniel spearheaded arguably the best Mizzou team and led them to the school’s first No. 1 ranking in 47 years in 2007. Franklin never had a shot in the NFL, but he led a Cinderella team to a No. 5 ranking in 2013 and a Cotton Bowl win over Oklahoma State. Brad Smith was a perennial candidate for the Heisman Trophy. Even Gabbert, who was overrated in his own right, had an iconic primetime upset over No. 1 Oklahoma in 2010. What does Lock have? A 7-touchdown performance against a wimpy Missouri State University team.

Terrible offensive play calling certainly deserves a lot of blame for Mizzou’s shortcomings in the past four seasons, but the offensive coordinators weren’t the ones underthrowing receivers. It’s not their fault he had passes batted down at the line of scrimmage with alarming regularity.

If linebacker Devin White is off the board like many predict by the time the Broncos pick for the first time on April 26, then the front office — namely general manager John Elway — will be faced with a decision that will alter the course of the franchise’s future. Do you take the best player available? Do you take TJ Hockenson, who is as surefire of a tight end as anyone else this decade? Or take Lock, the massive project guy? If the front office goes with the latter, then all of them are running on borrowed time.