Ranking 20 college football QBs with best chance to succeed in NFL

No one player had a bigger hand in a midseason turnaround with a Power Five conference team than Sam Darnold had with the USC Trojans. He took USC from essentially “dead in the water” to a top 10 team that gave eventual PAC-12 champion Washington their only regular season loss. Darnold also led the Trojans to a victory over the Penn State Nittany Lions in one of the most exciting Rose Bowls in recent memory.

According to Walter Football, Darnold will be the first overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft. That tends to be a commonly shared opinion by the majority of scouts and experts. A fall from glory could certainly derail Darnold’s chances at being the number one overall pick in next year’s draft but he’s currently the favorite to get picked first.

Darnold was quoted saying no team should “tank their season because of me”, so he seems to still have his motivations focused on the right thing. Leading USC to a PAC-12 Championship and an appearance in the College Football Playoff is the immediate goal at hand for Darnold.

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The recent success, or lack thereof, for USC quarterbacks in the NFL will caution a few teams from making too big of an effort to draft Darnold. For example, Mark Sanchez, Cody Kessler, and Matt Leinart, are just a few names of past Trojan QB’s with high expectations and disappointing results at the NFL level (it might be too early to judge Kessler). At the end of the day, all we can do is wait and see wait happens with Darnold this season and in the future when he gets drafted into the NFL.