The on-field chaos of the 2026 college football season has rippled into the crop of top quarterbacks being evaluated for the 2027 NFL draft.
That QB class, once considered both flush with talent and deep, has taken a significant hit since the start of the season. Players such as Texas' Arch Manning, South Carolina's LaNorris Sellers and LSU's Sam Leavitt haven't shown themselves as surefire prospects.
ESPN conducted a midseason poll of 25 scouts and executives, asking who the top quarterback will be in next year's draft. Not surprisingly, the choppy play of top prospects yielded drastically different results than the August QB1 poll.
Seventeen of the 25 scouts in the midseason poll voted for Oklahoma State's Drew Mestemaker. The 17 votes are the most a quarterback has received in the three years ESPN has conducted the poll, with the overwhelming conviction about Mestemaker perhaps more a surprise than his general emergence. (Mestemaker got zero votes in the August poll.)
One scout summed up his vote this way: "Mestemaker seems like the only real choice at this point."
Notre Dame's CJ Carr came in second with four votes, followed by Miami's Darian Mensah with three and Oregon's Dante Moore with one.
It marked a significant shift from the August poll, when Moore had 14 votes, followed by Manning (seven), Sellers (two), Leavitt (one) and Carr (one).
The consensus among scouts is that this class isn't what it was billed to be after summer optimism. Much of that optimism stemmed from the cyclical nature of draft classes, as the last two featured underwhelming quarterback crops. There were two quarterbacks chosen in the first round in 2025 (Cam Ward at 1, Jaxson Dart at 25) and two in 2026 (Fernando Mendoza at 1, Ty Simpson at 13). That came after six quarterbacks went in the first round in 2024.
There still likely will be more than two quarterbacks picked in the first round in 2027 -- by virtue of need, if nothing else -- but any grandiose notions of this class have faded.
"Before the season, this class was going to rival 1983," a scout said of the fabled class where five quarterbacks went in the first round. "But there's been a lot of moving parts and Arch has fallen. It'll be interesting to see who resurfaces."
There's a distinct pivot point for this quarterback class: Mestemaker's 317-yard, two-touchdown performance against Oregon on Sept. 12. Oklahoma State won 39-31 as a nearly three-touchdown underdog, Mestemaker ran for a 75-yard touchdown to showcase his athleticism, and he completely outplayed Moore.
Mestemaker didn't start for his varsity high school team. His Disney movie rise from North Texas walk-on is fitting among QB prospect storylines in this draft that include Trinidad Chambliss' bootstrap story from Division II to Ole Miss and Mensah's moonshot climb from one FBS scholarship offer at Tulane.
Scouts love Mestemaker's whole package, as he has prototypical QB size at 6-foot-4, 211 pounds.
"The size, the body type and arm strength are the things that stood out to me right away," a veteran scout said. "He's got arm talent, power and accuracy."
While Mestemaker's relative inexperience will be a topic around draft time, he is projected to have 27 starts by the end of 2026. Considering the projections, it's likely Mestemaker would declare for the draft after the season.
The cautionary tale is Moore, who could have gone as high as No. 2 in last year's draft and ended up sustaining a concussion on a brutal illegal hit at USC on Sept. 26 that will keep him out the rest of the season. Depending on where he is drafted, it may end up costing him tens of millions with a double-digit position fall within the first round.
Mensah has soared up boards thanks to his surgical season. He is on pace to smash the FBS completion percentage record; he currently stands at 81.4%, four points higher than Bo Nix's 77.4% while at Oregon in 2023.
Both Mensah and Carr can make big jumps in the eyes of the NFL with long College Football Playoff runs. There will be a flood of scouts in South Bend, Indiana, next Saturday when the Irish host the Hurricanes in what could be this quarterback class's next pivotal game.
While Manning will face a compelling choice about his future due to his play, it's instructive to what the NFL looks for that scouts haven't written him off as a prospect amid his accuracy and turnover struggles this season. Multiple scouts said he could still work himself into a first-round pick because of his tools, pedigree and potential.
The potential also looms that Manning could return to college -- perhaps at a different school -- and corral some of the momentum he built at the end of the 2025 season.
The other variable that will loom over the number of quarterbacks picked in the first round is how the NFL ends up viewing former Cincinnati and Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby. If he had entered the draft last year, there was interest in Sorsby late in the first round.
His admission to making thousands of bets on sports, including college football, will make him perhaps the most thoroughly vetted quarterback in the 2027 draft. Sorsby has shown on social media that he is working out with veteran NFL assistant Rich Scangarello and learning the verbiage and execution of the offense run by Kyle Shanahan and the San Francisco 49ers.
"People are almost forgetting about Sorsby," a veteran scout said. "There's no question he can be a first-rounder. We'll see how that all goes. He's got to go to an all-star game and show the talent, excel during that week and answer all the questions. It's all about how he handles it."
For now, Mestemaker has gone from an intriguing prospect to the top quarterback in this class by an authoritative margin.