Rourke readying for NFL Draft process
Published
With the NCAA college football season officially over, the countdown is on towards the 2025 NFL Draft, which starts April 24 in Green Bay.
For Indiana quarterback Kurtis Rourke of Oakville, Ont., the road to that date is going to look a little different than most NFL prospects.
Rourke revealed on Jan. 3 through his agent that he had played the entire season with a torn ACL, an injury suffered in July to the same knee he’d torn in 2022 when he was at Ohio University.
So, Rourke will skip the East-West Shrine Game at the end of January altogether while recovering from surgery he had on Jan. 8, but does plan on attending the NFL Combine at the end of February, even though he won’t be able to participate in workouts.
There he will meet with teams who can request medical information, which will go a long way towards influencing his draft stock.
Based on conversations with current and former NFL scouts and executives, Rourke’s injury is likely to cost him some draft position, moving him from a possible third- to fifth-round pick to more likely a fifth- to seventh-round selection.
If teams are satisfied with what they learn medically, there’s no reason to believe Rourke doesn’t remain a viable NFL draft pick, given what he showed this past season. He’ll also have a chance to make an impression on teams through the interview process.
With NFL height and size (6-foot-5, 223 pounds), teams that liked him before the injury will still like him. They simply may have to wait longer on his development, given the expected time of recovery from ACL surgery. (When Rourke suffered his first ACL tear at the end of November 2022, he wasn’t cleared for play until the latter stages of August 2023.)
Rourke is consistently rated among the top-10 quarterbacks for the upcoming draft, ranking as high as sixth on ESPN Mel Kiper Jr.’s Big Board during the College Football Playoff. NFLDraftbuzz.com rates him eighth, sandwiched between the starting quarterbacks from Monday’s national championship, Ohio State’s Will Howard (seventh) and Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard (11th).
Though Rourke’s injury may have limited his mobility, given his negative rushing total for the season, it didn’t affect how he threw the football. The Canadian showed great precision as one of the most efficient quarterbacks in the sport, featuring 29 touchdown passes against just five interceptions while completing 69.4 per cent of his passes.
Rourke played his one and only season at Indiana in 2024 after transferring from Ohio University, helping turn the Hoosiers from perennial losers to unlikely participants in the first 12-team College Football Playoff.
The Hoosiers lost 27-17 to Notre Dame on Dec. 20 in a game where Rourke struggled until the very late stages.
The only other team Rourke truly struggled was against Ohio State, the team that defeated Notre Dame in the national championship Monday night.
Rourke is also the No. 1 rated prospect for the 2025 CFL Draft, where teams will be paying close attention to what NFL opportunity awaits him at the end of April.