SEC QB Rankings, Week 12: Garrett Nussmeier endured it all at LSU but leaves nothing behind
By Matt Hinton
Published:
Quarterbacks: There are a lot of them! Each week throughout the season, we’ll help you keep the game’s most important position in perspective by ranking the SEC starters 1-16 according to highly scientific processes and/or pure gut-level instinct. Previously: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10 | Week 11.
1. Diego Pavia, Vanderbilt
Pavia remains a long shot in the Heisman race, and any chance he has of punching a ticket to NYC as a finalist will have more to do with his one-in-a-million career trajectory than his stat line. But if there were any doubts about how he stacks up on paper, he’s put them to bed the past 2 weeks. Saturday’s back-and-forth, overtime win over Auburn was arguably the best game of his career, and his team needed it to be. After nearly erasing a 24-point deficit against Texas in Week 10, Pavia rallied the Commodores from an early 2-touchdown hole against the Tigers and kept trading blows until Vandy was the last team standing. He set career highs for passing yards (377), rushing yards (112) and EPA (15.4), turned in his best ever passer rating (201.7) against an SEC opponent, and finished with his best rating in terms of Total QBR (95.7) since posting a 96.0 rating last year’s historic upset over Alabama.
Just like that, he’s ascending the leaderboards. For the season, Pavia ranks 6th nationally in Total QBR, 5th in EPA, 4th in passer rating, 3rd in passing success rate, 2nd in overall PFF grade, tied for 2nd in total touchdowns, and No. 1 in total yards. He’s accounted for 76.5% of Vanderbilt’s total offense in SEC play, the highest individual share in the conference.
The ‘Dores probably still need to beat Kentucky and Tennessee and sew up a Playoff bid to keep his dark-horse campaign alive. But that is well within the realm of possibility. And for all of the more compelling things about him, the numbers are only getting harder to dismiss. At the very least, any voters looking for an excuse to leave him off their ballots are going to have to come up with another one.
Last week: 2⬆
2. Ty Simpson, Alabama
Simpson puts impressive plays on tape nearly every time out, but like a great jazz musician it’s the throws he doesn’t make that really set him apart: With 1interception in 296 attempts, he’s on pace for the lowest interception rate (0.34%) in SEC history. Through 9 games, Simpson has already attempted more passes than the current record holder, South Carolina’s Connor Shaw, who threw a single pick in 284 attempts (0.35%) in 2013. Per sports-reference.com, no major-conference quarterback has ever thrown 20+ touchdowns in a season with a lower INT rate.
Of course, sustaining that ratio throughout what Bama expects to be an extended postseason run is another story — the Tide could play up to 6 more games, which comes out to something like 200 attempts, any one of which could be the one that knocks him off the record pace. Then again, when the Heisman contender promised after the first pick to never throw another one, maybe he meant it.
Last week: 1⬇
3. Gunner Stockton, Georgia
Just when they resigned to a weekly diet of shootouts and comebacks, the Bulldogs delivered arguably their first vintage performance of the season, a 41-21 beatdown at Mississippi State in which they piled up 300 yards rushing and generally did whatever they pleased against an outmanned MSU defense. After spotting the Bulldogs a 7-point lead to open the game (a pattern I’m beginning to think of as akin to a baseball hitter habitually taking the first strike), Georgia ripped off 38 straight points, including 5 consecutive touchdown drives in the 2nd and 3rd quarters. Stockton’s right arm was responsible for 3 of those scores, including a season-long 64-yard strike. That marked his 3rd consecutive game with multiple TD passes and his 5th with a QBR rating over 90.0, tied with Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza for the most of any FBS quarterback.
Last week: 3⬌
4. Marcel Reed, Texas A&M
In a remarkable coincidence, the 4 guys beginning to separate from the pack in the Heisman race according to the betting markets just so happen to be the starting quarterbacks for the top 4 teams in every poll. Incredible how that lines up. For Reed’s part, at least, his face-of-the-program status is doing more work right now than his production. Among SEC starters, he ranks 5th in efficiency; 6th in both Total QBR and EPA; 7th in passing success rate; and 11th in overall PFF grading. If they were really serious about the “most outstanding” part, voters determined to rep the Aggies on their ballot would be considering SEC sack leader Cashius Howell instead.
At any rate, Reed is doing everything his very balanced team needs him to do, and improving as the season unfolds. He has especially thrived on the road. Most young quarterbacks are just trying to survive in hostile territory, but Reed has been at his best: A&M’s 4 road trips this season at Notre Dame, Arkansas, LSU and Missouri are his highest-rated games according to Total QBR, yielding at least 250 total yards and multiple touchdown passes in all 4. His rating in Saturday’s 38-17 win at Mizzou was a stellar 90.1 — the best by an opposing quarterback against the Tigers since the guy Reed replaced as QB1, Conner Weigman, posted a 94.1 in an even more lopsided win last year in College Station.
Last week: 4⬌
5. Trinidad Chambliss, Ole Miss
Ole Miss can effectively sew up a Playoff berth this weekend against Florida, a sentence which might trigger some minor PTSD from last year’s choke job in Gainesville that cost the Rebels a slot that seemed like a foregone conclusion. That upset looked less shocking in retrospect, considering that a) it came in the Swamp; b) the Gators were coming off a catalyzing upset over LSU the previous week; and c) Ole Miss failed to score on any of its three trips inside the red zone. This time around, losing to the current zombie corpse version of Florida in Oxford would be inexcusable from any angle. • Last week: 5⬌
6. Joey Aguilar, Tennessee
No quarterback in America takes better advantage of play-action than Aguilar. Per PFF, he’s the only FBS quarterback with at least 100 drop-backs who has employed play-action on more than 50% of them, resulting in more completions (153), yards (1,770), touchdowns (13) and what PFF graders log as “big-time throws” (12) than any other Power 4 passer on play-action reps. His completion percentage jumps by 16.4 points on play-action attempts vs. straight drop-backs, the widest gap in the country; his average yards per attempt improves by 4.9 yards, which ranks 3rd. In his defense, he has also had more passes dropped (19) on straight drop-backs than any other quarterback, which goes some ways to making sense of those margins.
Last week: 6⬌
7. Taylen Green, Arkansas
The Davey O’Brien Award sent out ballots this week for voters to select 16 semifinalists for the nation’s best quarterback. Green, who ranks in the top 5 nationally in Total QBR, EPA, overall PFF grade and total offense — and whose team is averaging more points per game in SEC play than Playoff contenders Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Texas and Vanderbilt — wasn’t listed among the several dozen candidates. Not even an option! Arkansas’ defense is so bad, it’s rendered its prolific quarterback completely invisible.
Last week: 7⬌
8. Arch Manning, Texas
Manning made a brief cameo in last year’s 30-15 loss against Georgia in the regular season, coming on briefly at the end of the first half for a couple of doomed possessions that ended in a punt and a fumble, respectively. He was memorably caught in the aftermath sitting on the sideline alongside starter Quinn Ewers, both of them wondering what happened and how to get the ball out of their hand quicker. It worked against the ‘Dores, thanks in part to a sloppy tackling-in-space effort by the Vandy defense. With the Longhorns’ Playoff hopes hanging by a thread in Athens, the margin for error will be considerably slimmer.
Last week: 8⬌
9. John Mateer, Oklahoma
Mateer’s downfield accuracy has plummeted since returning from the hand injury that briefly sidelined him in late September, although in fairness that likely has less to do with anything going on hand-wise than with the uptick in the strength of schedule. A open date ahead of this weekend’s must-win trip to Alabama arrived at the right time to move past any lingering stiffness. The Sooners desperately need the guy briefly looked like a Heisman candidate back in September to make his triumphant return before the window closes on their dwindling Playoff chances.
Last week: 9⬌
10. LaNorris Sellers, South Carolina
It was about this point on the calendar last year that Sellers achieved liftoff, making the leap from marginal starter to rising star over the course of a 6-game winning streak to end the regular season. This year, the Gamecocks are limping into the closing stretch with a 1-6 record in SEC play, the most anemic offense in a league full of anemic offenses, and less than zero momentum ahead of this weekend’s trip to Texas A&M. Yes, negative momentum. The offensive coordinator and o-line coach have already been forced to walk the plank, amid speculation that Shane Beamer might be on the first available flight to Virginia Tech at year’s end. Lots of eyes are still on the massively talented and equally frustrating Sellers, who is being sized up as both a potential draft pick and a potential target in the portal. But he’s running out of time to turn this season into anything other than a total loss.
Last week: 11⬆
11. Garrett Nussmeier, LSU
I was groping for the right word for Nussmeier’s performance against Alabama, and keep coming back to “inert” — dormant; not being in a state of use, activity, or employment.
I mean, he was out there. He was busily engaged in quarterback stuff, or appeared to be. On paper, he actually finished 18-for-21 passing, good for the best completion percentage of the season (85.7%) vs. an SEC defense. If you didn’t see it, that might sound impressive. If you did, you know it was anything but. It was more like watching a glitchy simulation unfold on an old video game that keeps dialing up the same busted screen play no matter how many times it gets snuffed out.
Of those 18 completions, 11 came on attempts behind the line of the scrimmage, per PFF, all but 1 of them screens. Nussmeier’s average depth of target on all attempts was a grim 2.9 yards, well below his already conservative ADOT of 7.3 yards for the season. He managed just 6.7 yards per completion. (Not per attempt, per completion.) He converted 1 3rd down, on the game’s opening series. His lone attempt of 20+ air yards fell incomplete. Alabama kept dropping 8 men into coverage, making little effort to bring pressure; he kept dutifully checking down. The 6 series he was in the game yielded 6 points.
Nussmeier’s final series before being sent to the bench was a microcosm of his season. Trailing 17-3 at halftime, LSU opened the 2nd half with its best drive of the night, moving the ball inside the Bama 10-yard line with the help of a facemask penalty against the Tide. It unraveled quickly. Facing 3rd-and-goal at the 8-yard line, the Tigers were flagged for delay of game. Before they could regroup, they were forced to call a timeout to avoid a second delay of game. Now facing 3rd-and-goal from the 13, with Alabama rushing just 3 and plenty of space to maneuver in the pocket, Nussmeier panicked, spun obliviously into a sack, and completed the sequence of purely self-inflicted errors that turned 1st-and-goal into a 44-yard field-goal attempt.
If that wasn’t literally the end of Nussmeier’s tenure, it certainly felt like it in spirit: The final rung on his career arc from gunslinging underclassman to tentative Heisman candidate to struggling scapegoat whose confidence is so shot he’s barely capable of throwing beyond the sticks. After getting visibly chewed out by interim head coach Frank Wilson, he spent the rest of the night on the bench, watching understudy Michael Van Buren Jr. operate the offense in fits and starts over the last quarter-and-a-half to little avail.
Wilson indicated on Monday that Nussmeier will be back in the saddle for this weekend’s trip to Arkansas, but that both quarterbacks will play. (“I don’t think it’s a clear separation where one is behind the other,” Wilson said. “We’ll need both of them.”) Either way, frankly it seems LSU fans are beyond caring, having collectively simmed to the end of this cursed campaign weeks ago. Nussmeier got a lot of credit for sticking it out in Baton Rouge after the hasty departure of the coach who recruited him (Ed Orgeron) and 2 subsequent years biding his time behind Jayden Daniels. He entered the year poised to become the first LSU QB to throw for 3,000 yards twice in a career. But in the end, he has given the locals very little reason to remember he was ever there.
Last week: 10⬇
12. Cutter Boley, Kentucky
Boley has presided over back-to-back conference wins, which at this point in the Rankings makes him look like a beacon of stability. That’s not saying much. Kentucky’s 10-3 win over Auburn in Week 10 was an unwatchable punt-fest that got the opposing head coach fired. Saturday’s 38-7 romp over Florida came at the expense of a listless, lame-duck outfit whose head coach had already been fired, and showed up to the stadium prepared to wave the white flag at the first opportunity. The Wildcats and Gators combined for 8 turnovers, 4 of them coming in rapid succession in a span of 7 plays at the end of the first half. At one point in the 2nd half, the Gators’ backup quarterback led a 14-play, 7-minute drive that resulted in a punt.
Still, for an team that had lost 10 straight in SEC play prior to the past 2, a win is a win, and Boley is slowly emerging as a potential long-term fixture. Kentucky needs 2cmore wins to reach bowl eligibility, 1 of which will come this weekend against Tennessee Tech; the other would have to come against either Vanderbilt or Louisville. Not that anyone in Lexington is moved by the possibility of qualifying for the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl. But in the current market, it would serve as one less reason to pay Mark Stoops $38 million to go away. • Last week: 14⬆
13. Blake Shapen or Kamario Taylor, Mississippi State
Shapen has had his moments this season, including successful 4th-quarter rallies in wins over Arizona State and Arkansas. But he has arguably held the Bulldogs back at the end of several other winnable games — his walk-off interception at Florida within range of a game-winning field goal attempt was particularly egregious — and in Saturday’s blowout loss to Georgia, his limitations were on full display for a national audience. In his 37th career start, Shapen did nothing to threaten UGA downfield or as a runner, and was altogether juiceless after hitting his marks on the scripted opening series. Eventually, he went down hard for the 2nd consecutive week, and this time didn’t return.
With the game out of hand in the 2nd half, State turned to Taylor, a touted local product who has looked the part at every opportunity. The previous week, he’d filled in briefly but admirably in the win at Arkansas, accounting for 2 touchdowns (1 rushing, 1 passing) while Shapen was being evaluated for a concussion. Against Georgia, Taylor supplied an immediate spark, promptly leading a 75-yard touchdown drive on his first series. He went on to account for Mississippi State’s longest run (23 yards) and pass of the afternoon, a 57-yard heave that set up another late touchdown.
Now, as a rule, most of what happens in garbage time is just that: Garbage. For what it’s worth, Jeff Lebby insisted on Monday that Shapen remains the starter — as long as he’s “truly healthy.” But you don’t have to work too hard to read between the lines: With nothing to lose over the next 2 games, the time has come to thank the battered 6th-year vet for his service and pass the baton to the future of the program.
Last week: 13⬌ | n/a
14. Ashton Daniels, Auburn
Either Daniels should have been playing all along, or Hugh Freeze should have been fired a lot sooner. Maybe both! Either way, Auburn’s first game of the post-Freeze era at Vanderbilt was its best offensive outing of the year, by far, yielding season highs for points (38), yards (563) and yards per play (6.9) vs. an SEC opponent. For his part, Daniels personally accounting for 442 of those yards and 4 of the Tigers’ 5 touchdowns — as many as the offense had scored in the previous 5 games combined. He looked like a completely different quarterback than the one who’d presided over a 10-3 loss at Kentucky in Week 10, although the result in Nashville was ultimately the same: A 7-point loss in overtime, this time courtesy of a 2nd-half collapse by the defense.
Normally, it would safe to assume at this point that Auburn fans have seen the last of Jackson Arnold, a 7-figure bust who ends his tenure as QB1 on pace to finish dead last among SEC starters in both Total QBR and pass efficiency for the 2nd year in a row at 2 different schools. A much less lucrative foray in the portal awaits. First, though, coaches have an extra week to decide how they want to handle the rotation in the next game, a Week 13 date against Mercer. Daniels, a senior who has appeared in 3 games in as many weeks, is in a unique situation: A redshirt is still on the table, but only if he skips 1 of the Tigers’ last 2 games to stay under the 4-game threshold. If he sat out against Mercer, he could return to the lineup for the Iron Bowl while still preserving a final year of eligibility (not to mention the pay day that comes with it) in 2026. Freeze was up front about his preference to redshirt Daniels before he was fired, and interim coach DJ Durkin indicated on Monday that there are “ongoing decisions and discussions” about doing just that.
If the Tigers do opt to go to the bullpen, the first option may not be Arnold, but 5-start freshman Deuce Knight, whose redshirt is officially safe with only 1 appearance to date. A stakes-free outing against an FCS tomato can is the perfect opportunity for Knight to get his feet wet and make a good first impression for the incoming coaching staff. If he really is the future, they’ve literally run out of reasons to keep him waiting.
Last week: 15⬆
15. DJ Lagway, Florida
Is Lagway finished as a Gator? It’s hard to imagine a less inspired performance than Saturday’s surrender at Kentucky, a debacle in which he was picked off 3 times in the first half and benched in the second. Or at least, it should be hard, if not for the fact that full-blown meltdowns have been a running theme throughout the season. After serving up 5 interceptions at LSU and being subjected to a public mugging at Miami in consecutive weeks in September, he was already well acquainted with rock bottom. Really, the only way it could have been worse this time is if they’d left him in the game.
Three interceptions against the Wildcats brought Lagway’s season total an even dozen, the most of any FBS passer this season. His 4.5% INT rate is the highest for a qualifying SEC passer since another underachieving Gator QB, Jeff Driskel, finished at 4.7% in an injury-shortened campaign in 2014.
Interim head coach Billy Gonzales told reporters on Monday that he expects Lagway to start this weekend at Ole Miss, comparing his latest flop to a slumping MLB pitcher. If only he had 100 games ahead of him to slowly but surely climb out of the hole. Alas, he has just 3, none of them friendly to a struggling young quarterback. In fact, for a losing team that appears to have given up on the season, the home crowd at The Swamp might be more hostile to their own side when Tennessee and Florida State come to town in Weeks 13-14 than the Gators are likely to encounter in Oxford.
The inevitable transfer rumors that have followed his decline are a bitter pill for a player with Lagway’s obvious gifts, which were on full display in 2024 as he helped steer the Gators out of a skid in November. His regression in Year 2 has been palpable enough that pulling off another late-season u-turn seems out of the question. (It doesn’t help that his 2 best receivers are on the shelf due to injuries.) At best, he has one last ambush in him before the next administration arrives in a few weeks with its own plans. The odds that Lagway is part of them are looking slimmer by the week.
Last week: 12⬇
16. Matt Zollers, Missouri
Zollers should be redshirting, not being thrown in the deep end against the No. 3 team in the country. He was every bit the bug-eyed freshman in Mizzou’s loss to Texas A&M, finishing a dismal 7-for-22 passing for 77 yards and fumbling twice on strip sacks. He did connect on a couple of downfield attempts to fellow freshman/emerging dude Donovan Olugbode, who accounted for 74 of those 77 yards; when targeting anyone else, Zollers was 0-for-8 on attempts beyond the line of scrimmage. The silver lining: At least with the Playoff definitively off the table, there’s no urgency to rush Beau Pribula back from his injured ankle.
Last week: 16⬌
Matt Hinton, author of 'Monday Down South' and our resident QB guru, has previously written for Dr. Saturday, CBS and Grantland.
