Ty Simpson has had a roller coaster first season as Alabama’s starting quarterback, but the peaks have been high enough that it might be his last. While Simpson has been slumping down the stretch, including an ugly performance against Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, he’s still in the first round of SaturdayBlitz’s latest NFL Mock Draft, but his slide has been hard to ignore.
Once viewed as a potential top-five pick, Simpson is now slotted at No. 20 overall to the Pittsburgh Steelers by college football expert Nicholas Rome. Rome has long connected the QB-needy Steelers to Simpson as a replacement for the 42-year-old Aaron Rodgers, but as the Steelers continue to win and move further down the draft board, Simpson has slid with them.
Not only does that imply Simpson’s value could be dropping in the eyes of NFL evaluators, but it also implies that there aren’t many suitors for quarterbacks if Simpson falls out of the top 10. It’s bad news for Simpson’s draft value, but it could be good news for Alabama, with the chances of him returning to Tuscaloosa for his redshirt senior season growing.
Ty Simpson slotted to the Pittsburgh Steelers at No. 20 overall
The Steelers have been rifling through re-tread QBs since Ben Roethlisberger retired at the end of the 2021 season, with a quick stint from 2022 first-round pick Kenny Pickett mixed in as well. From Mitch Trubisky to Justin Fields, Russel Wilson, and Rodgers, the Steelers are still desperate for a franchise QB, and likely wouldn’t let the opportunity to draft Simpson pass them by.
Yet, Mike Tomlin and general manager Omar Khan passed on Shedeur Sanders last year after bringing him in for a pre-draft visit, and Sanders slid all the way to the fifth round after the Steelers opted for Oregon defensive tackle Derrick Harmon at pick No. 20.
Sanders’s situation was complicated by his outsized fame and the attention that he would bring as a potential backup QB. Still, it may not be wise for Simpson to bet on entering the draft with just one team as a realistic suitor in the back half of the first round.
Simpson comes with his own set of red flags, though. As a one-year starter, he has an incredibly small sample size of tape for NFL teams to evaluate him off of, and that’s always a concern, especially in a league where Trubisky became the second overall pick in 2017 off just 13 games as North Carolina’s starting QB.
Simpson can flip the entire narrative by rediscovering his highest level of play in the College Football playoff and leading the Crimson Tide on a postseason run, but unless that happens, he may have to think long and hard about another season of college football.
The redshirt junior waited long enough on the sidelines for a shot to start for the Crimson Tide; he may not be opposed to prolonging his NFL debut by another year, if it means he can lock up a spot at the top of Round 1.