The biggest story of the offseason in college football has been the arrival of Arch Manning, who, in his redshirt sophomore season, is finally taking over as the starting quarterback for the Texas Longhorns. While name-recognition has Arch at the top of the Heisman Trophy odds heading into the year, he’s not the only SEC quarterback capable of winning the award and leading his team to a conference title.
With Jalen Milroe, Quinn Ewers, Jaxson Dart, and Carson Beck all moving on to either the NFL or, in Beck’s case, the ACC, there is plenty of QB turnover amongst the league’s top contenders. Can Alabama return to the College Football Playoff with Ty Simpson? Is Gunner Stockton the next Stetson Bennett at Georgia? Can Lane Kiffin develop another star QB?
Well, let’s jump into my preseason SEC QB rankings and see where things stand ahead of fall camp.
Tier 1: Heisman Trophy Candidates
Garrett Nussmeier is the son of New Orleans Saints offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier, and it shows. The veteran, who waited his turn behind Jayden Daniels at LSU, has impressive feel for the position to go with an arm that can make every throw. Nussmeier’s natural anticipation, quick release, and plus arm strength allow him to access every level of the field, but there are still aspects of his game that need fine-tuning.
Watching a Garrett Nussmeier game is a unique experience. It’s almost like when you start to fall asleep too quickly, and you’re dreaming about a nice walk. You’re strolling along with this quarterback who seemingly knows every lever to pull to manipulate a defense, then suddenly you trip and are jolted awake as Nussmeier makes an inexplicable decision to throw the ball right into the hands of a linebacker or an underneath corner he just never saw.
Nussmeier’s turnovers, and there are far too many with 12 interceptions last season, are truly that jarring. If he cuts them out, especially in the intermediate middle of the field where five of those interceptions came, he’ll be a Heisman Trophy front runner because there are few QBs who can aggressively hunt downfield like him. Last season, on his 86 attempts of over 20 air yards, Nussmeier registered 25 big-time throws (according to PFF) to just four turnover-worthy plays.
There is a fundamental reality about dual-threat quarterbacks that is often overlooked when viewing them through the traditional quarterback lens. Yes, you would prefer the elite runners to also be lights-out pocket passers who can work through progressions and throw with accuracy to beat defenses on obvious passing downs, that’s how you get Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen. But sometimes, Jalen Hurts will do.
However, even if an elite runner has work to do in that department, he can be a viable and even elite offensive nucleus because the threat of his rushing ability drastically lowers the bar he needs to clear as a dropback passer. The vision for LaNorris Sellers as a potential No. 1 pick in the 2025 NFL Draft is a future Allen, not a Hurts, but even the latter just won a Super Bowl.
It’s undeniable that Sellers has limitations as a passer, but throwing for 2,534 yards and 18 touchdowns and rushing for 674 yards with seven more scores as a 6-foot-3, 242-pound redshirt freshman in the SEC is also undeniably impressive. Once Sellers got healthy on the back half of the season, he led South Carolina on a six-game win streak and nearly snuck the Gamecocks into the College Football Playoff, and he’s far from a finished product.
In college football, where sample sizes are inherently small and recruiting rankings loom inordinately large, we can often overvalue potential against production. But man, was it hard not to put DJ Lagway at No. 1.
Lagway can make everything throw imaginable and from every platform or arm angle. It’s not just his deep shots that jump off the tape, but his incredible touch when layering the ball to the second level, that’s the skill that was truly advanced for a true freshman last season. Lagway was phenomenal once he took over full-time for the injured Graham Mertz at Florida last season, but with fewer than half the dropbacks of Nussmeier and without the rushing baseline that Sellers affords South Carolina, I couldn’t push him any higher.
For all the impressive throws, Lagway threw four interceptions across his final three starts, including two in the Gasparilla Bowl win over Tulane. More opportunities could reveal a turnover problem on par with Nussmeier’s frustrating lapses, or it could reveal the best quarterback in the country and the No. 1 overall pick in the 2027 NFL Draft.
Let’s start here: anyone putting Arch Manning at No. 1 in the SEC or national QB rankings is doing so on name recognition and potential alone. With just 101 dropbacks last season, we just don’t have enough evidence to conclude that he’s the best quarterback in the conference, let alone the country. Especially considering that 85 of those dropbacks came against Colorado State, UTSA, Louisiana Monroe, and Mississippi State, and that despite the obvious limitations of an injured Quinn Ewers late last season, Steve Sarkisian didn’t give Manning the nod.
Still, those 101 dropbacks were quite impressive. Like most talented young quarterbacks, when Manning has the answers pre-snap, and Sarkisian’s offense is uniquely adept at providing them, he throws an incredibly pretty football. In his limited action, Sark did his best to give Manning simple reads and get him on the move, where he split the field in half and put defenders in conflict with the threat of his legs.
Expect those to be the staples of the offense this year, and that alone will be enough for Texas to contend for the SEC title. For Manning to elevate the Longhorns to a national championship and enter his name into Heisman contention, it’ll be about what how well he operates off script and how often he can manipulate the pocket to work through his progression and throw the backside dig, all the ways in which he can layer his skillset onto the simplicities of Sark’s RPO and pre-snap motion-heavy system.
Tier 2: Proven Starters
Diego Pavia brought the bulldog mentality he had at New Mexico State and infused the entire Vanderbilt program with his infectious competitive spirit. Those intangible qualities jumped out with Pavia even before he became a national star by upsetting Alabama, but he also had a tangibly impressive 2024.
Pavia finished his first season in the SEC with 20 touchdowns to just four interceptions, and added eight more trips to the end zone on the ground. The veteran is a high-level decision-maker who doesn’t put the ball in harm’s way, was sacked on just 10.1 percent of his pressured dropbacks, and loves to attack with play-action.
Last season on throws with play-action, which accounted for just over 30 percent of his dropbacks, his average depth of target ticked up to nearly 11 yards, and he averaged 9.8 yards per attempt with 11 touchdowns to one interception.
John Mateer was one of the most efficient quarterbacks in the country last season, managing 0.32 EPA/dropback (6th in the country), and a 52 percent passing success rate (5th), but his prolific season with 3,139 passing yards, 29 passing touchdowns, 826 rushing yards, and 15 rushing TDs, came Washington State’s Mountain West schedule.
Mateer feasted against lesser competition, but opponents like Boise State and Washington revealed some of his accuracy issues and the issues that his frantic play style can create. Oklahoma may have gotten the top quarterback in the transfer portal, and if Mateer cleans up his mechanics, he could be a Heisman Trophy candidate.
Still, before I believe fully in Mateer, I need to see him get more comfortable dissecting a defense from the pocket rather than bailing to create outside of structure or scramble. You can get away with happy feet as your default when you’re the best athlete on the field, but in the SEC, it could be a different story.
Taylen Green’s former team, Boise State, made it all the way to the College Football Playoff without him last season, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a huge loss for the Broncos, and a crucial addition for the Razorbacks, who bounced back with a 7-6 season after going 4-8 in 2023.
Green is an imposing force at 6-foot-6, and an impressive athlete. He finished last season with 3,154 passing yards with 602 rushing yards, and eight rushing touchdowns. His long strides allow him to eat up ground in the open field, and the threat of his legs on scrambles, bootlegs, keepers, and in the option game allowed Arkansas to finish with a 99th percentile explosive rush rate of 11.3 percent last season.
However, his long levers make it difficult for Green to remain consistently accurate, and his 3.19-second time to throw led him to be sacked the third most times in the SEC, and on 18.1 percent of his pressure dropbacks. His long stride makes it hard for him to navigate a muddy pocket, so he must get the ball out quicker. He’ll never be a 70+ percent passer, but if Green can speed up the decision-making process, he can be one of the most productive quarterbacks in the SEC.
Tier 3: Big potential, small sample
Lane Kiffin runs one of the most quarterback-friendly systems in the country, simplifying post-snap reads and relying heavily on a few staples in the passing game. While that was used as a knock against Jaxson Dart in the draft process before he became a first-round pick of the New York Giants, it’s great news for his successor in Oxford, redshirt sophomore Austin Simmons.
The southpaw attempted just 32 passes, but was decisive with his quick release and hyper-efficient. Most impressive was his drive in Ole Miss’s win over Georgia with Dart out of the game when he led a touchdown drive going 5/6 for 64 yards.
Early in his career, Simmons won’t be the off-schedule creator Dart was, taking big hits to make even bigger plays, but he will be an ideal conductor for a play-caller like Kiffin, getting to everything on time and in rhythm. How the rest of his game develops will determine his ultimate ceiling.
Like with LaNorris Sellers, Marcel Reed’s rushing ability lowers the bar he needs to clear as a passer to facilitate an efficient offense, but in Year 1 after taking over for Conner Weigman, you can argue whether he did or not. Reed finished the year 30th in EPA/dropback among eligible quarterbacks, a few spots ahead of Quinn Ewers, Nico Iamaleava, Cade Klubnik, and even Jalen Milroe.
Reed was effective on in-rhythm dropbacks of under 2.5 seconds, completing over 70 percent of his throws for 7.1 yards per attempt, but when pressured, his game began to fall apart as a redshirt freshman. Reed completed under 40 percent of his throws on his pressured dropbacks for 4.4 yards per attempt with a 5.1 percent turnover-worthy play rate.
The former five-star’s debut as a full-time starter in the SEC couldn’t have gone worse, but then, his circumstances at Oklahoma couldn’t have been worse. Nearly all of his top receivers missed time due to injury, and the Sooners’ offensive line was as leaky as any in the conference. That led him to finish 128th of 130 eligible quarterbacks in EPA/dropback last season and to be temporarily benched for Michael Hawkins Jr.
Arnold gets a mulligan from me; he’s still a talent thrower and an athletic mover with feel for the position, but if he can’t perform at Auburn, with Hugh Freeze and one of the most talented young receiving corps in the country, he’ll no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Ty Simpson is another former five-star, but with just 50 career pass attempts entering his fourth year at Alabama, he’ll need to prove himself quickly to hold off five-star freshman Keelon Russell, the No. 2 overall QB in the 2025 recruiting class. With an elite roster around him and one of the best receivers in the country in sophomore Ryan Williams, though, Simpson just needs to be competent for Alabama to be in the SEC Title and subsequent national title discussion.
While he appears to be a passable athlete at the position, without jaw-dropping physical tools, Simpson must be a decision maker, distributor, and, dare I say, a game manager for the Crimson Tide.
Tier 4: Starting caliber, but with real limitations
Kirby Smart never asked Stetson Bennett to be the best quarterback in the country, and that’s not who he’s expecting Gunner Stockton to be either. Georgia needs toughness, leadership, which it seems the offense was lacking last season, and a healthy dose of moxie from the 6-foot-1, 215-pound redshirt junior to be in the mix for the SEC title once again.
The first start of Stockton’s career came in the Sugar Bowl CFP quarterfinal against Notre Dame, and while he completed 20 of his 34 passes for 234 yards and a touchdown, Georgia scored just 10 points, Stockton was sacked four times, and the game plan may have revealed the blueprint for his 2025 season. In that game, a quarter of Stockton’s throws were behind the line of scrimmage, and he averaged 13.6 yards per attempt with play-action to 4.5 without it.
Joey Aguilar finished seventh in the country in passing yards in 2023 at Appalachian State, but took a significant step back in 2024, in large part because his 25 turnover-worthy throws turned into interceptions after only 10 of his 26 went the other way in 2023. Aguilar is a fearless thrower who loves to attack the middle of the field and thrives off true play-action more than the RPO-heavy system he’s entering as Nico Iamaleava’s replacement for Josh Huepel at Tennessee.
With tighter throwing windows than the Sun Belt, Aguilar’s aggressiveness could burn him in the SEC, but his willingness to play on time and point and shoot in the structure of an offense could make for an interesting pairing with one of the sport’s preeminent offensive minds.
Even with Drew Allar entrenched as the starting quarterback at Penn State, James Franklin couldn’t keep Beau Pribula off the field. An impressive athlete, Pribula was a red-zone weapon in the run game, giving the Penn State offense a unique element in the option game, but when Allar went out with an injury for the second half against Wisconsin, Pribula got to showcase what he could do as a passer.
Pribula isn’t going to be a star as a traditional dropback thrower; his arm strength will limit how he can attack downfield and outside the numbers. But as an RPO dart thrower with the threat of his legs freezing linebackers, he can quickly get the ball to his playmakers with impressive accuracy. However, his dependency on play-action and the run game could make him a game-script dependent player who struggles to come from behind in obvious passing situations.
Tier 5: Retreads with a lot to prove
Baylor transfer Blake Shapen was quite effective in Jeff Lebby’s veer-and-shoot offense for four games last season before suffering a season-ending shoulder injury and ceding the job to Michael Van Buren Jr. Going 1-3 with his lone victory coming over Eastern Kentucky, Shapen completed 68.5 percent of his passes with eight touchdowns to one interception and generated 0.13 EPA/dropback, which would have ranked 33rd in the country over a full season.
Zach Calzada had his moment in 2021, upsetting Alabama as the quarterback for Texas A&M with 285 passing yards and three touchdowns to one interception. Since then, Calzada transferred to Auburn, where he didn’t see the field, then he has spent the past two seasons as the starting quarterback at Incarnate Word.
Mark Stoops is betting that his quarterback, who turns 25 in November, will be ready for the jump back to the SEC level, but that’s a roll of the dice at this point.