The 2026 NFL draft is best known right now as the preamble to the 2027 NFL draft, which is both a beacon of hope for teams that have squirreled away capital for next offseason and a timeless reminder of how little we know and how foolish we could be at this point in the year.
This past week on The MMQB Podcast, we had longtime NFL coordinator and quarterbacks coach Scott Turner on to break down the QB class. And, within those parameters, he mentioned the profound disconnect between general managers, coaches and outside analysts during the frantic and desperate January-to-May window when it comes to the benefit of waiting on a certain pick or player. In this case especially, a quarterback.
After a question about the theoretically generational 2027 quarterback class, Turner pivoted back to us with a fair rebuttal: Were’t Garrett Nussmeier, LaNorris Sellers and Drew Allar going to accompany Arch Manning at the top of this draft at one point? The 2026 class was supposed to be the destination that 2027 now promises to be. Turner’s right, by the way. You simply have to pour through the Mock Draft Time Machine to see a 2024-esque class with three quarterbacks going off the board in three picks, or four in the top seven.
Both Allar (Penn State) and Nussmeier (LSU) spent 2025 on teams that fired their respective head coaches before the season ended. Nussmeier became a victim, oddly enough, of too much exposure, despite the growing appetite from NFL teams to see at least 25 starts from a quarterback in the NIL era. Allar never seemed to grow into his frame and, after losing tight end Tyler Warren to the NFL, appeared to regress. Both of them likely would have gone behind Trinidad Chambliss, a quarterback who was playing Division II football not long ago, had Chambliss’s petition for another year of eligibility been denied.
Now, as we stack a house of cards with similar characters, I wonder if teams are already one step ahead by laughing at us.
Dante Moore, who probably could have been a top-10 pick this year, returned to Oregon. He heads into his final collegiate year with four fewer starts than Nussmeier. His final game of the 2025 season, a College Football Playoff semifinal loss to Indiana, included a pick-six on his first snap and a pair of fumbles.
Arch Manning is at 25 starts now and just looked to be rounding into a player worthy of outsized hype. The Texas quarterback is from a family of generational wealth and is more than able to wait until the ideal NFL situation that suits him presents itself. Certainly, if the Jets and Browns are hovering, for example, as teams that are best positioned with 2027 capital, couldn’t Manning find a way, as his forefathers did, to slide out of that potential death trap? While I’m not suggesting Manning will do it, we all know that he can, thus making his contribution to the hype zeitgeist (again, if he does leave school after next season) conditional at best and exclusive to only a handful of teams he’d deem appropriate.
Chambliss will be losing his head coach and offensive coordinator amid a return to Ole Miss.
Again, this isn’t a forum to tear down prospective quarterbacks but to ask a larger question about what we can and cannot know at this point in time, and what teams can and cannot realistically plan for. One of the only general managers we can argue successfully navigated the delayed quarterback selection was Ryan Poles, who passed up the No. 1 pick in the Bryce Young–C.J. Stroud draft only to arrive in the same position (thanks to a trade with an awful Panthers team). Even still, Caleb Williams and Drake Maye felt like inevitabilities more than a year out, though the emergence of Jayden Daniels and the success of Bo Nix away from Auburn altered the profile of that class significantly.
We’re not here to say that the Jets or Browns are making mistakes for failing to secure or put together a trade package hefty enough to get Fernando Mendoza. But what we’re not saying enough is that Mendoza is as good as it gets right now and, perhaps, in perpetuity. The Indiana quarterback and his Jared Goff pro-level comparison feels like it hasn’t been given its proper weight in the grand scheme of things. For example, NFL Network scout Daniel Jeremiah noted that Mendoza would have been graded above both Young and Stroud, slotting behind just Caleb Williams, Daniels (the 2025 Offensive Rookie of the Year) and Maye (nearly the 2026 MVP). Is that worth passing up, or not fighting for, as so many teams have willingly done?
And maybe some of these teams that are passing up potential Pro Bowl pass rushers and safeties and tackles just to build up capital for next year should think twice, too.
Because, next year’s generational QB class may be just like this one and the one before. An empty term lacking in substance until a team can realistically project the player onto an NFL roster.
More NFL Draft from Sports Illustrated
Add us as a preferred source on GoogleFollowPublished | Modified 
CONOR ORR
Conor Orr is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, where he covers the NFL and cohosts the MMQB Podcast. Orr has been covering the NFL for more than a decade and is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America. His work has been published in The Best American Sports Writing book series and he previously worked for The Newark Star-Ledger and NFL Media. Orr is an avid runner and youth sports coach who lives in New Jersey with his wife, two children and a loving terrier named Ernie.
Share on XFollow ConorOrrShare on FacebookShare on XHome/NFLOriginal Article
