ON TODAY'S SCORECARD
Where Did All the QBs Go?

The 2026 quarterback class once had so much promise, Sports Illustrated contended.
Garrett Nussmeier was going back to LSU, Drew Allar back to Penn State and Cade Klubnik back to Clemson. LaNorris Sellers was the avatar at South Carolina, full of talent and promise.
Maybe all wouldn’t be first-round picks, but enough would surely deliver to give quarterback-needy NFL teams the options they lacked after Cam Ward came off the board in 2025.
Then, they all started playing football again.
Twelve months later, the one left standing as a surefire first-rounder is the endearingly goofy kid who was transferring from Cal that no one was talking about.
And if another quarterback goes in the first round, it’ll be a guy, who, after the 2025 draft had concluded, was three months away from winning the starting job at Alabama.
So, no, no one is going to confuse this year’s class with 1983, 2004, or even ’18, ’20 or ’24. Nussmeier and Allar’s coaches, Brian Kelly and James Franklin, didn’t even keep their jobs until November.
Klubnik was part of a similar meltdown at Clemson. All three were on teams in the AP preseason top 10 that finished unranked. Sellers went through growing pains, and his Gamecocks, similarly, fell well short of expectations.
What’s left now is a beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder quarterback class, with a lot of teams casting their eyes to 2027, when Oregon’s Dante Moore, Texas’s Arch Manning, Notre Dame’s C.J. Carr, Ohio State’s Julian Sayin and a host of others will atone for all this, and give all those teams that were waiting for this year’s class what they crave.
Anyway, the cupboard isn’t completely bare in 2026. How you see this year’s group comes down to how you assign blame for what went wrong in the fall.
Was Allar simply in the wrong offense? How much was Nussmeier’s injury to blame for his decline? And so on and so forth.
“I think you have guys who can be a starter in the league, in [Fernando] Mendoza, and a guy who needs some time, Ty [Simpson],” said one offensive coordinator. “And then you have two guys with NFL traits, who maybe can be Davis Mills or Jacoby Brissett, and that’s Allar and Nuss. It’s not a great group.”
As such, opinions vary. |