With the 12-team College Football Playoff, the national championship race is more wide open than ever, and while there’s a clear top-tier of contenders heading into the 2025 season, uncertainty at the most important position on the field has the potential to be the dominant storyline.
Seven of the top 12 teams in the preseason AP Top 25 are breaking in new starting quarterbacks, including six who are first-year full-time starters. Texas, Ohio State, Georgia, Notre Dame, Oregon, and Alabama all look to have championship rosters, but if the quarterback doesn’t play to expectations, it could sink their respective seasons.
So, rather than predict the 12-team CFP field by looking at the whole roster, I’m just honing in on the quarterback position, giving my top 11 from the Power 4 conferences, plus my top Group of Six passer, who all hope to lead their programs to postseason success.
Methodology:
As a collective, we tend to overrate two things when evaluating the position at the college level: upside and NFL Draft status. This is not a draft ranking, though it does have some overlap with my assessment of their NFL futures, and in most cases, I’ve favored the more proven commodity over the talent of a first-year starter. Just because a young player hasn't yet realized his flaws in a small sample size doesn't mean they aren't there.
Most of all, I want the players who elevate their offense, not the ones who are a beneficiary of it, so I’ve attempted to separate the player from their circumstance. Particularly when those circumstances -- the wide receivers they threw to or the opposing defenses they faced -- helped to juice their statistical profile. So, while much of the analysis considers the situation, the rankings largely attempt not to.
Basically, if every quarterback in the country were surrounded by a replacement-level roster, which 12 quarterbacks would do the most with it?
With a defense in the midst of a multi-year rebuild and a struggling run-game, Brian Kelly put major playmaking responsibility on his first-year starter’s shoulders, and for the most part, Nussmeier delivered. There were a few too many untimely turnovers, but Nussmeier has the arm to attack all levels of the field, is athletic enough to create off-schedule, and with a pressure-to-sack rate under 10% the good far outweighs the bad.
Leavitt benefited from a few more bells and whistles than Nussmeier last season, but he was no less impressive. Another negative play mitigator, Leavitt avoided sacks, kept Arizona State, with its great run game, on schedule, and when he was asked to deliver a kill shot, he did it with John Wick-level precision. The redshirt freshman led Arizona State to an 11 percent explosive pass rate and graded out with 13 big-time throws to just two turnover-worthy plays on his 56 attempts over 20 yards downfield.
LaNorris Sellers is far from the most polished dropback passer in the sport. He holds onto the ball too long, and for his freakish size and athleticism, he takes too many sacks. Yet, the bar he has to clear as a passer is comparatively lower than just about every other quarterback in the country because of his dominance with the ball in his hands. It may still be a bit rough around the edges, but Sellers is an offense unto himself, and he’ll need to be this season with his pedestrian receiving corps.
While he’s a former top recruit, Klubnik hovers around a B+ in most categories. He’s an above-average athlete, with an above-average arm and above-average accuracy. With the best roster in the ACC, that’s proven to lead to elite production, but can he elevate the Tigers against SEC competition? He carried the offense against Texas in the CFP first round, but struggled against Georgia in the season opener. For the season, his most important improvement came on pressured dropbacks, where he increased his 4.5 yards per attempt from 2023 to 7.2.
At 6-foot-5 and 235 pounds, Drew Allar has prototypical size at the quarterback position, and the former five-star prospect has all the physical tools to lead Penn State to the national championship and then succeed at the next level. With Andy Kotelnicki taking over as Penn State’s offensive coordinator last season, Allar got more comfortable as a processor and began to up his risk profile.
Still, he’s a bit of a conservative passer, and with his long levers, his footwork is inconsistent, and his accuracy comes and goes. If he begins to trust his revamped wide receiver room and starts to write the types of checks that his arm is capable of cashing, the Nittany Lions offense will reach a new level and be one of the best units in the country.
If you thought Sam Leavitt’s 20 percent big-time throw rate on throws over 20 yards downfield was impressive, get a load of Lagway’s nation-leading 39.5 percent (per PFF). He attempted 36 passes of over 20 air yards, completed over 50 percent, and averaged over 20 yards per attempt. He’s the most talented deep ball thrower in the sport, and “deep ball” might be an unnecessary qualifier. There were some shaky moments for the true freshman, but on pure talent and upside, there is no more intriguing quarterback in the sport.
Arch Manning has started two games across his two years in college football. That’s too small a sample size to give him deference over proven starters like Klubnik, Allar, and even Lagway, who I view to have greater physical tools and more upside. Yet, in those two starts and his 108 career dropbacks, Manning has looked the part, a rhythm thrower who is comfortable progressing through his reads and has surprising mobility considering the most recent branches of his family tree.
John Mateer was arguably the most prolific quarterback in the country last season, throwing for 3,100 yards and 29 touchdowns while rushing for 826 yards and 15 more scores at Washington State. Now, he and his play-caller, Ben Arbuckle, are taking the show to the SEC, and the only question is how much of what they did to light up a Mountain West-caliber schedule will translate to the best conference in the country?
Let’s just put the three-interception, two pick-six College Football Playoff performance against Penn State aside for now. It was a disaster that got away from Jennings after a wildly productive season that led SMU to that point. Jennings is an accurate thrower with a big arm who can create off-schedule, which was crucial for the Mustangs considering their early-season struggles along the offensive line. For a player who is a bit of a livewire, Jennings impressively mitigates negative plays, rarely taking sacks and effectively scrambling against pressure.
Heading into the 2024 season, Carson Beck was viewed as the top quarterback in the country, but without Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey to throw to, Beck’s worst impulses bubbled to the surface. He still throws with great anticipation, so if he’s protected and can play in rhythm, he’ll be effective, even coming off elbow surgery. However, if he’s forced to create the turnover bug will start to bite again.
Mendoza is an early 2026 NFL draft darling, a favorite of talent evaluators because of his flashes of touch and anticipation as a passer. However, he was far from a finished product at Cal last season, one of just three players sacked 40 times or more with an alarming 25.6 percent pressure-to-sack rate. The hope is that he’ll iron those issues out in Bloomington with Curt Cignetti and Mike Shanahan, who produced the most efficient passing offense in the country by EPA/dropback and success rate with Kurtis Rourke playing on a torn ACL.
If a team from the Sun Belt grabs the Group of Six’s automatic qualifier into the College Football Playoff, it’ll probably be James Madison, but coming off a 1-11 season, Southern Mississippi has a case as a dark horse conference winner. The program hired Charles Huff from Marshall, which topped the league last season, and Huff brought most of his roster, including quarterback Braylon Braxton, over with him.
Braxton is a physical downhill runner who creates conflict for defenses in the option game, but is even better utilized on quarterback power and QB draws. As a thrower, Braxton was efficient, getting the ball out decisively and throwing 19 touchdowns to two interceptions and showcasing impressive accuracy on intermediate throws, completing passes of 10-19 air yards at a 59.1 percent clip.