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 | Week 12.

1. Jaxson Dart | Ole Miss

On paper, Dart makes a compelling case for a trip to New York: He leads the nation in total offense, yards per attempt and pass efficiency, and ranks 3rd in Total QBR. He’s also tied for the national lead in overall PFF grade, to the extent that you can find a Heisman voter who cares about PFF grades. (Good luck with that.) He’s only had 1 bad game, in the Rebels’ overtime loss at LSU in Week 7. In the “Heisman Moment” column, though, his window may have already closed. Dart’s past 2 games were among the most memorable of his career for very different reasons — he broke the bank statistically against Arkansas, then limped through a landmark upset over Georgia on a bad ankle, which is the kind of thing that could endear him to less analytically-minded voters. Still, the Heisman betting market continues to relegate him to the 2nd or 3rd tier of candidates, well behind the clique that’s on track to get invited to the ceremony.

Is there enough time left for an 11th-hour surge? Ole Miss closes the regular season with a couple of prime stat-padding opportunities against the SEC’s 2 worst statistical defenses, Florida and Mississippi State, both scheduled for national TV slots on ABC. But it will take something like another Arkansas-level bonanza to move the needle in either game, and Dart’s chances of getting another shot against a marquee opponent in the SEC Championship Game are slim, to say the least. (If you want to explore the various tiebreaker scenarios, I recommend the SEC Tiebreaker Calculator, although fair warning if you’re trying to work out Ole Miss’ path to Atlanta, specifically, you’re probably going to be at it for a while.) It might help if the Rebels can say definitively before Heisman votes are due that they’re going to the Playoff, a prestige point for the program. Either way, Dart’s campaign seems bound to come down on the wrong side of the bubble.
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Last week: 1⬌

2. Jalen Milroe | Alabama

They’re 1a. and 1b. in this space, but Milroe is a better bet than Dart to make Heisman waves for several reasons. (Beyond the gut-level fact that the quarterback from Alabama is inherently more Heisman-coded than the quarterback from Ole Miss.) For one thing, although Milroe has been less consistent, his highs have been higher, with a couple of epic big-game performances in Bama’s wins over Georgia and LSU. His breakaway touchdown runs in those games give him a clear edge over Dart in the viral highlight department. And, most important, he’s still due to have another big stage to make his closing statement: If the Tide win their next 2 games against Oklahoma and Auburn, they will punch their ticket to Atlanta via the conference’s convoluted tiebreaker process any way you slice it.

If we’re talking Playoff, there is some simmering angst over the possibility that it might be better for a team with two losses not to qualify for the conference championship game rather than risk suffering a third. We’ll find out what the CFP committee makes of that question when the time comes. But for his part, the brighter the lights, the better Milroe has tended to look. One last turn in the national gaze could be all he needs to surge to the front of the pack.
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Last week: 2⬌

3. Carson Beck | Georgia

We can safely rule Beck out of the Heisman chase, but after Georgia’s season-saving 31-17 win over Tennessee, everything else remains on the table. Coming off the worst outing of his career at Ole Miss, Beck was at his best against the Vols, accounting for 379 yards, 3 total touchdowns, and a career-high 98.0 QBR rating. In the process, he helped reinforce UGA as a virtual lock for the Playoff — the Dawgs have a 94.5% chance of making the cut, per ESPN’s Football Power Index, best in the conference — and its status as the team no one wants to face with the season on the line. After falling behind 10-0 in the first quarter, the Dawgs scored on 5 of their last 6 full offensive possessions, outscoring Tennessee 31-7 in the process.

Did a light come on? Or was he just enjoying ideal conditions? For most of his tenure as a starter, Beck has been among the best-protected quarterbacks in America, facing the lowest pressure rate among SEC starters each of the past 2 seasons. But there have been cracks in the facade this year, especially in the loss to Ole Miss, where he was sacked five times and spent most of the game under duress. Against Tennessee, his protection held, allowing just five pressures and no sacks on 42 drop-backs; Beck responded by looking sharp to all areas of the field and (for one week, at least) putting his midseason interception spree in the rearview. If it was overdue, it was also just in time to give the Bulldogs a glimpse of a team that can still win big.
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Last week: 4⬆

4. Quinn Ewers | Texas

Steve Sarkisian’s offense is a marvel of efficiency in many ways, but Ewers’ inability to consistently complete passes downfield has become a glaring limitation. He was 1-for-6 on attempts of 20+ air yards in Saturday’s 20-10 win over Arkansas — the lone completion going for exactly 20 yards — and now stands at 9-for-28 for the season in 8 starts. No other SEC starter has attempted fewer downfield passes as a percentage of his overall attempts, and Ewers’ average depth of target (6.7 yards) ranks among the lowest in the entire FBS.

That’s difficult to square with his former reputation as a willing gunslinger in his underclassman years, and with the obvious arm talent that made him a prized prospect in the first place. No, he doesn’t have Xavier Worthy’s world-class speed at his disposal anymore, but Texas is hardly bereft of big-play options at receiver. In fact, that was one of the aspects of Arch Manning‘s game that made his September cameo so compelling: He was 8-for-16 on passes of 20+ air yards in a little over 2 1/2 games, averaging 20.4 yards per attempt with 4 touchdowns. (Ewers’ downfield attempts have averaged 9.7 yards with 5 touchdowns.) Chalk it up to subpar competition, but at some point down the line the Longhorns are going to need some downfield juice against a real opponent to advance in the postseason. If there’s a lingering controversy despite Ewers’ stellar record as a starter, that’s the reason.
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Last week: 3⬇

5. Diego Pavia | Vanderbilt

Diego Mania has cooled a bit with Vandy dropping 2 of its past 3 games followed by an open date in Week 12. This weekend’s trip to Baton Rouge is an opportunity to make another statement, especially with his legs: LSU’s defense has been repeatedly flamed by athletic quarterbacks this season, giving up a combined 335 yards and 9 touchdowns rushing to Jalen Milroe, South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers and Texas A&M’s Marcel Reed. (To their credit, they’ve also contained both Jaxson Dart and Arkansas’ Taylen Green, although Green’s mobility was limited by a knee injury in that game.) Pavia is more rugged than explosive as a runner, but he gets the job done. Excluding sacks, he leads SEC quarterbacks this season with 718 yards on the ground on 4.5 per carry, per PFF, with nearly 80% of that total coming after contact.
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Last week: 7⬆

6. Marcel Reed | Texas A&M

Reed took every meaningful snap the past 2 weeks against South Carolina and New Mexico State, apparently cementing his grip on the job in the wake of his season-saving performance off the bench against LSU in Week 9. Barring another dramatic turn of events over the next couple weeks, the writing is on the wall for Conner Weigman, who has had his moments as an Aggie but never quite lived up to the 5-star recruiting hype due to a combination of injuries and inconsistency. If Weigman is bound for the portal, he’ll go out having never started more than 4 consecutive games at any point in his A&M tenure.
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Last week: 8⬆

7. LaNorris Sellers | South Carolina

I admit, as recently as a few weeks ago I had my doubts whether Sellers was going to stick as Carolina’s starter beyond this season. Now the Gamecocks are on a 4-game winning streak and their big, emerging redshirt freshman QB is a big, emerging reason. Sellers’ star has been on the rise for a few weeks, and his 353-yard, 5-touchdown effort in a 34-30 win over Missouri had all the makings of a full-fledged breakthrough. Besides the raw stats, he also turned in season highs for passer rating (217.2) and QBR (86.2) while leading not one but two go-ahead touchdown drives in the fourth quarter. The kid is officially a keeper.
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Last week: 11⬆

8. Nico Iamaleava | Tennessee

Iamaleava has plenty of time to live up to the hype, but he does not yet have the juice against top-shelf competition. He was overmatched in Tennessee’s loss at Georgia, averaging 5.1 yards per attempt with 5 sacks and a long completion of 17 yards. If the Playoff started today, the Vols would be the last team out of the bracket based on the CFP committee’s updated rankings, and with the assorted tiebreaker scenarios aligned against them they’re unlikely to get a chance to play their way back into the field in the SEC title game. (Although, again, depending on how the chips fall, it’s still possible Tennessee could sneak in ahead of the loser of that game.) But even if they do make the cut, is anyone confident at this point of Iamaleava leading them past a Playoff-caliber opponent on the road?
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Last week: 5⬇

9. Garrett Nussmeier | LSU

A month ago, you could have made the case that Nussmeier was the SEC’s most bankable starter over the course of a 6-game winning streak. Not so much these days. Since his midseason peak, Nussmeier’s stock has plummeted along with his team’s, bottoming out Saturday in a 27-16 loss at Florida — LSU’s 3rd straight loss in deflating fashion. At halftime of their Week 9 trip to Texas A&M, the Tigers led 17-7; in 10 quarters since, they’ve scored a grand total of 3 touchdowns, 1 of them coming in a nearly empty Tiger Stadium in the dying seconds of a 42-13 beatdown at the hands of Alabama.

The collapse has been too comprehensive to pin solely or even mainly on the quarterback, who has accounted for an untenable 78% of the team’s total offense in the losing streak while averaging 50 drop-backs per game. He’s been beaten to a pulp the past 2 weeks behind a banged-up offensive line. (Injured guard Garrett Dellinger has been sorely missed, out of sympathy for his fledgling replacement I’ll leave it at that.) But it’s also becoming clearer that Nussmeier is not quite the type of talent who can make the Tigers’ other problems look smaller, either. A few weeks back, there was some minor buzz about him emerging as a first-round sleeper in 2025. It’s probably time to put that line in the freezer until 2026.

Assuming he’s back in Baton Rouge for his final season of eligibility, the long-term outlook can still go either way. Ideally, LSU would love for Nussmeier to make a dramatic 5th-year leap a la Joe Burrow and Jayden Daniels, thereby validating the scouts, taking the heat off Brian Kelly, and allowing massively hyped freshman Bryce Underwood to marinate in his first year on campus. Realistically, the arrow right now is pointing the other way. Unless Nussmeier delivers a sneak preview of the optimistic timeline over LSU’s final 3 games, it’s more likely he goes into the new year looking over his shoulder.
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Last week: 6⬇

10. Brady Cook | Missouri

Returning from injury, Cook played arguably his best game of the season against South Carolina in a losing effort, which I found weirdly fitting: The rankings have never known quite what to do with him, but it’s usually because his career has consisted of so many middle-of-the-road outings in Mizzou wins. He will not be the guy who takes the Tigers to the Playoff for the first time — always a long shot, if we’re keeping it real — but he can still go out as the guy who presided over back-to-back 10-win seasons, which should earn him a fond place in school history.
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Last week: 10⬌

11. Taylen Green | Arkansas

Green is not having a great year statistically: He ranks 10th among SEC starters in efficiency, 12th in QBR, and 7 of his 11 touchdown passes came against Mississippi State and Arkansas-Pine Bluff. Just don’t tell that to the film eaters at PFF, where his overall grade for the season (88.1) ranks 4th in the conference and 17th nationally among quarterbacks with at least 100 drop-backs. Make of that what you will — as always, a reminder to take PFF grades with a grain of salt — but it absolutely tracks with Green’s boom-or-bust profile that he looks more impressive in real time than he does on paper.
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Last week: 9⬇

12. DJ Lagway | Florida

Lagway is predictably raw in most respects, but he remains a dramatic upgrade over the injured Graham Mertz when it comes to pushing the ball downfield. In Florida’s win over LSU, he was 3-for-4 on passes of 20+ air yards, improving his line to 16-for-24 with 5 touchdowns for the year. (For context, Mertz was 4-for-11 before his injury.) In fact, Lagway’s completion percentage on downfield attempts (66.7%, best in the FBS) is higher than his completion percentage on attempts of less than 20 air yards (54.6%), a wild and telling gap. Once he figures out what he’s doing when he’s not chucking it deep, kid’s going to be special.
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Last week: 12⬌

13. Payton Thorne | Auburn

Thorne threw 5 touchdowns in a 48-14 blowout of UL-Monroe, a godsend for an offense suffering through a miserable season in SEC play. As a team, 15 of Auburn’s 24 touchdown passes came in nonconference dates against ULM, New Mexico and Alabama A&M.
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Last week: 14⬆

14. Michael Van Buren Jr. | Mississippi State

For a guy who was slated for a redshirt, Van Buren has been consistently cromulent in a bleak situation since taking over for an injured Blake Shapen. To really qualify as a success, though, he needs to cap his freshman campaign by breaking into the win column over the next 2 weeks against Missouri or (State fans can only dare to dream) Ole Miss.
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Last week: 13⬇

15. Brock Vandagriff | Kentucky

Normally a routine blowout over the likes of Murray State wouldn’t even register here — Murray State came into the weekend ranked dead last in the FCS in scoring defense — but given the depths of Vandagriff’s struggles this season, the mere fact that coaches turned down the opportunity to allow true freshman Cutter Boley to audition for his job was a statement in itself. As it stands, Vandagriff remains the starter for this weekend’s trip to Texas, which moves him one step closer to going wire-to-wire as QB1 and entering the offseason as the unquestioned incumbent. He’s in for a wide-open competition in the spring regardless (assuming he doesn’t portal out), but a reassuring finish against UT and Louisville would go a long way toward shoring up his position.
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Last week: 16⬆

16. Jackson Arnold | Oklahoma

Arnold’s season has been a flop by any standard, but give him this much: After an early string of interceptions got him benched in September, he’s thrown 112 consecutive passes without a pick since returning to the lineup in Week 8. If any Oklahoma fans are looking for reasons to justify giving him a second chance in 2025, start there. (And, uh, ignore the fumbles.)
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Last week: 15⬇

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