NCAA Football: CFP National Playoff First Round-Clemson at Texas
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Regardless of which type you are, there is no underselling how important next year’s draft in Pittsburgh will be for the home team. Finding a player that can stabilize the quarterback room will not only impact the next several years for the organization, but it will also impact the legacies of everyone from decision makers like Mike Tomlin and Omar Khan, to players still searching for a playoff victory like T.J. Watt and Minkah Fitzpatrick.
That’s why I plan to follow along with the college football season and provide you with updated temperature reads on which quarterbacks are trending towards being first-round picks. With the college football season roughly 94 days away, the next several weeks seem like the perfect time to start familiarizing ourselves with the quarterbacks who could declare for the draft in 2026.
But, as a lifelong sports fan, I know how easy it is for biases against certain players — or more often, schools/teams — to cloud our judgment when it comes to talent evaluation. If the NFL Draft has taught us anything over the years, it’s that projecting quarterback success isn’t an exact science.
Entering their final year of college ball, neither Joe Burrow nor Jayden Daniels were considered a player who would hear their name called early on Night 1 of the draft. The same could be said of this year’s first overall pick, Cam Ward. After his 2023 season at Washington State University, Ward was advised he would not be considered a Day 1 prospect in the 2024 draft, so he made the wise decision to head back for one last year of school.
Meanwhile, Trevor Lawrence was considered a generational, can’t-miss type of player, yet he hasn’t fully lived up to the potential we all envisioned for him so far. Caleb Williams didn’t have quite the same hype as Lawrence, but his debut season was bumpier than many anticipated.
NCAA Football: Penn State Blue-White Spring Game
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That’s why I wanted to find a way to present these players to you blind, at least initially, for this exercise. I want to combat those biases in you, the readers, as well as the ones I know I hold for some of these quarterbacks.
There’s also the issue that this class is marked by uncertainty. That’s not entirely unique this time of year, but it will mark the second straight class without a definitive frontrunner at quarterback.
Of the 15 quarterbacks I will profile in this series, only six are seniors or grad-transfers in the final year of their eligibility. The rest are all underclassmen who possess traits that could make them high picks if paired with an exceptional 2025 season, but who could just as easily decide they need one more year of seasoning before going pro.
And yes, that includes the quarterback prospect with the famous family and only two career starts. You know the one.
NCAA Football: Peach Bowl-Texas at Arizona State
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Add in that, generally speaking, we know only a handful of these quarterbacks will end up being worthy of a first-round grade. A class with three or more quarterbacks taken in the first is not always a given, as we just saw with the most recent draft class.
With all of those factors to consider, I knew contextualizing this crop of quarterbacks in a way that was equally informative and entertaining was not going to be an easy task.
But that’s when I had an idea.
While I’m certainly an NFL Draft nerd, I also have an interest in pop culture, including from eras before my time. While this may be the result of my childhood home having TV Land included in our television package, as I thought about how I wanted to talk about this group, I was reminded of the old game show The Dating Game.
First airing in 1965, The Dating Game had iterations air sporadically across the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, as well as a short-lived celebrity version that ran as recently as 2021. For those who have forgotten or weren’t alive when the show was at its peak in popularity, the show has a pretty simple premise: three contestants are hidden behind a barrier that allows their voices to be heard but keeps them out of sight from the person who will be interviewing them. That person takes turns asking each contestant questions about themselves, and then by the end of the show, they pick one to go on a “date” with.
Over the years, the show would include everything from regular folks, to pre-breakout celebrities such as Farah Fawcett and Arnold Schwarzenegger and even, infamously, a man who would go on to be convicted as a serial killer.
All of that’s to say, like this quarterback class, The Dating Game featured a mixed bag of characters.
With that in mind, I will be periodically releasing entries in this series over the next several weeks, leading up to the kickoff of the 2025 college football season. I’ve identified 15 quarterbacks that are either commonly discussed as potential first-round picks or that I think could rise to that level with a strong 2025 performance.
NCAA Football: Oregon State at California
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While I hope to make a fun game out of obscuring their identities when I present them, I see no reason to hide that quarterback list from you now if you wish to get started on your own research. Leading up to the start of the college football season, I will present the cases for the following players, in no particular order or ranking:
Arch Manning, Texas
LaNorris Sellers, South Carolina
Cade Klubnik, Clemson
Drew Allar, Penn State
Garrett Nussmeier, LSU
Sam Leavitt, Arizona State
Taylen Green, Arkansas
Fernando Mendoza, Indiana
Nico Iamaleava, UCLA
John Mateer, Oklahoma
Aidan Chiles, Michigan State
Sawyer Robertson, Baylor
Jayden Maiava, USC
Dante Moore, Oregon
Carson Beck, Miami
During this series, I will try to keep my own biases in check about certain players — like Klubnik (positive) and Beck (negative) — as I present to you the positives and negatives about their football journeys so far. Each entry in the series will feature three signal callers whose identities will be initially withheld and then revealed at the end of the article.
This is where I’ll need your help. With each entry, I’ll need you, the audience, to vote in the poll at the end of each article and sound off in the comments to pick the “winner” from each installment. Then, before the first college game of the season, I’ll do a film breakdown of the five winners in our series and do one last vote to determine which player the BTSC readership is favoring in August. If nothing else, it’ll be fun to revisit after the season and see how good we were at determining which quarterbacks we’ll be talking about next spring.
The draft is just 337 away and counting, Steelers Nation. It’s time to get to work.
