Free beer tomorrow, and next year’s quarterback class will be better. Only tomorrow never comes, that Miller Lite still costs five bucks, and NFL evaluators are still unhappy with the amount of talent coming out of college football at the most important position.
This time last year, as Drew Allar announced his return to Penn State, Cade Klubnik went back to Clemson, and Garrett Nussmeier stayed put at LSU, draftniks waxed poetic about how 2026 was going to be a loaded quarterback class. Instead, Fernando Mendoza won the Heisman Trophy and emerged as a clear top pick, while Allar, Klubnik, and Nussmeier all faded from the first round conversation with woeful senior seasons.
Ty Simpson isn’t about the make the same mistake.
Ty Simpson avoids senior slump, forgoes final year of eligibility for 2026 NFL Draft
On Wednesday, Simpson announced that he’s forgoing his final season of eligibility to enter the 2026 NFL Draft, and reports quickly followed that he and his father, Jason, the head coach at UT Martin, received first-round evaluations from all of the NFL general managers that they contacted.
It seems, now, after just one year starting at Alabama, that Simpson, despite his lack of experience, is going to be a first-round pick. Though they, too, were imperfect prospects, Allar, Klubnik, and Nussmeier were all receiving similar buzz a year ago. In a draft that saw only Cam Ward and Jaxson Dart come off the board on night one in Green Bay, any of them could have absolutely been in the mix. But they waited for next year, as did many hopeful NFL teams, and now they all might get burned.
This year, in a class that has a clear top two with Mendoza and Oregon’s Dante Moore, Simpson can slot into the QB3 slot. Maybe he would've played his way up to QB1 next year, in what--you'll never guess-- is expected to be a much better quarterback class. Or, maybe he would've struggled, gotten injured, and fallen out of the discussion altogether. If you have a chance to go Round 1, it's not worth taking that risk.
The NIL money that players, especially quarterbacks, can make to return to college has curbed many players’ desire to make the jump to the NFL as soon as possible. That’s a good thing for NFL teams that prefer to have as much information as possible when drafting a quarterback and prefer the player they're selecting to be as close to a finished product as possible. It’s also a good thing for players to have multiple options to make life-changing income.
However, even if it's high-end money around the $5 million mark that Simpson would have commanded to come back to Alabama or in the transfer portal, that pales in comparison to the multi-year guarantees that players command as a first-round pick by the NFL’s rookie scale contracts. Even pick No. 32 is slotted for over $16 million across four years with a fifth-year option.
Later round selections don’t carry nearly the guarantees that first-rounders do, and those players hardly ever get a real opportunity to win the starting job wherever they land. That’s the uphill battle that Allar, Klubnik, and Nussmeier will all face as they begin their NFL journeys, while Simpson, who learned from their mistakes, will hear his name called much earlier in Pittsburgh.