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.

Moving forward, the ‘Grinding Out the Profits’ section in the Coffee Club will share exclusive insight into the 2026 College Football season directly from the 2026 Playbook Football Preview Guide magazine. Check out today’s insight:

‘STAT YOU WILL LIKE’:

Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz is tied
with Woody Hayes for most wins by a
Big Ten coach with 205.

Dillon Brooks and the Suns were feeling good after they eliminated Steph Curry and the Warriors in the play-in tournament. After the game, Brooks boldly predicted that Phoenix was going to go into Oklahoma City and steal Game 1. That, uh, didn’t happen.

The Thunder waxed the Suns 119–84, making easy work of the No. 8 seed to open the series. That’s not necessarily a surprise, but Brooks is enough of a pest that he can get under any team’s skin. On one hand, what else was he supposed to say? That he didn’t believe his team had any shot against the defending champs? That’s not realistic, but it’s still fun to look back on with the actual events of Game 1 in mind.

"We're going to go out there and steal Game 1."

Don’t think so.

Uh oh. Here we go.

A White House-backed presidential committee – that never sounds good - has reportedly floated the idea of expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams.

Talks are reportedly taking place over a significant College Football Playoff expansion.

It seems the presidential committee has reportedly floated the idea of expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams.

Key college football members are showing growing support or openness to doubling the CFP field.

College football already saw a major CFP boost when the bracket multiplied from four to 12 teams in 2024. The postseason will stay at a dozen next season, but it could be a matter of time before the pool expands again.

Furthermore, a member of both the presidential and CFP governance committee said both groups are “coalescing” around a 24-team postseason.

“The growing support for a 24-team playoff not only exists among those presidential committee members working outside of college athletics,” said Yahoo Sports. wrote. “During last week’s meeting, at least three of the four power conference commissioners, and Notre Dame, expressed outright support for, or at the very least an openness to deeply explore, a 24-team proposal.”

College football fans aren’t enthused about a 24-team College Football Playoff, and they don’t like the idea of a presidential committee having a say. However, some think it’s only a matter of time before more spots are added to the fold

“A White House committee has no business even being mentioned in the College Football Playoff picture,” said one fan.

“24 teams definitely makes the regular season meaningless,” said another.

“One thing everyone always says: ‘Man I would love for the American government, who already does so many things well, to get involved in College football,'” a fan said sarcastically.