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.

1. Jaxson Dart | Ole Miss

Can we get this man some real competition please? Over 4 nonconference games Dart has been lights out on a weekly basis, most recently in a 52-13 massacre over Georgia Southern that officially dropped the curtain on non-con play. As a team, the Rebels lead the nation in total offense, scoring offense and yards per play, having outscored their first 4 opponents by a combined 220 to 22. Individually, Dart leads the nation in total offense, total touchdowns, yards per pass, pass efficiency and overall PFF grade; he ranks No. 2 in completion percentage, No. 4 in raw QBR (unadjusted for schedule), No. 6 in Total QBR (adjusted for schedule) and 7th in EPA. His leading receiver, Tre Harris, has a dozen more catches than any other SEC wideout to date and 280 more yards.

https://twitter.com/OleMissFB/status/1837661406545523155/

The Heisman campaign begins in earnest this weekend against Kentucky, which ranks 6th nationally in total defense and has already dislodged one quarterback from the top of the rankings this season in a Week 3 slugfest against Georgia. The Wildcats only allowed 1 touchdown in that game; Ole Miss has scored at least 1 touchdown in 14 of 16 quarters this season.
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(Last week: 2⬆)

2. Quinn Ewers | Texas

Ewers is “questionable” to play in this weekend’s SEC opener against Mississippi State, per Steve Sarkisian, very likely leaving the ball in the hands of Arch Manning for at least 1 more Saturday while Ewers recuperates from a strained oblique. Manning ran hot and cold last week in his first career start, a 51-3 blowout over UL-Monroe, finishing 15-for-29 for 258 yards, 2 TDs, 2 INTs, and a couple of highlight-reel throws amid a barrage of missed connections. (He was 3-for-10 on attempts of 20+ air yards, per PFF.) The question is academic for the trip to Starkville, which is followed by an open date in Week 6. That leaves plenty of time for Ewers to get right for Oklahoma on Oct. 12, by which time he should be well-rested and ready to put any lingering suspicion that his status as QB1 is in doubt to bed.
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(Last week: 1⬇)

3. Jalen Milroe | Alabama

It’s Georgia week for the Crimson Tide, which arrives with all the usual implications for the conference standings, the Playoff pecking order, and, for Milroe, his nascent Heisman campaign. Last year’s 27-24 upset over the Dawgs in the SEC Championship Game was a career-defining performance at this level. It was his unquestionably his biggest win to date as a starter; it was also the moment he graduated from the “talented but erratic” phase of his career to the “proven commodity” phase, where Heisman buzz comes with the territory regardless of the numbers. Milroe’s stat line in that game was just OK (13-for-23, 192 yards, 2 TDs, 75.8 QBR), but in context he was ice-cold: 11 of his 13 completions went for first downs; he was a perfect 4-for-4 on a crucial 75-yard touchdown drive in the fourth quarter; and he sealed the deal with a pair of first-down runs on Bama’s final possession. Above all, he avoided the big mistake, putting to bed his reputation as a turnover machine. Non-Playoff wins don’t get much bigger.

This time, Milroe is the established part of an offense with a new coordinator and a largely new surrounding cast at the skill positions. The Tide’s leading rusher, leading receiver, and best o-lineman from last year’s win all moved on. Through 3 games, he’s looked the part, averaging 11.3 yards per attempt with 12 total touchdowns, zero interceptions, and a sky-high 213.4 efficiency rating. Now comes the real test, especially after last year’s semifinal loss to Michigan took some of the wind out of Milroe’s sails entering the offseason.

If a sustained Heisman run is in the cards, this is the week it gets off the ground.
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(Last week: 3⬌)

4. Carson Beck | Georgia

Meanwhile, losing to Bama last December had the opposite effect on Beck’s reputation, relegating him to “can he win the big one?” purgatory until further notice. Beck was 21-for-29 for 243 yards against the Tide, but didn’t throw for a touchdown, didn’t make much of a dent downfield (1-for-5 on attempts of 20+ air yards), and generally looked nondescript until mustering up a couple of late, futile TD drives in the fourth quarter. His most memorable play of the day was the game’s only turnover, a botched exchange with a would-be ball carrier late in the third, which put Bama in the driver’s seat; a chip-shot field goal extended the Tide’s lead to 10 points, and eventually proved to be the winning margin. Just as Beck seemed to be ascending to the Heisman tier, he looked like just a guy.

Beck isn’t going to generate viral highlights or big numbers in the raw counting categories; his case begins and ends with whether he lives up to his team’s championship-or-bust mandate. He just barely cleared that bar his last time out, in a come-from-behind 13-12 win at Kentucky in Week 3 that no one was quite sure how to process. Deliver win in Tuscaloosa — where the only opposing QBs to win in the past 15 years are Cam Newton (2010), Johnny Manziel (2012), Joe Burrow (2019) and Quinn Ewers (2023) — and any lingering doubts about Beck’s big-game prowess will be memory holed in short order. (Or at least, you know, until the next one.) Otherwise, the empty line on his résumé where the big wins go risks looking a little bit emptier.
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(Last week: 4⬌)

5. Brady Cook | Missouri

Mizzou is off this week, so in Cook’s place I’m going to stray a little bit to talk about a quarterback well outside the SEC footprint: UNLV’s Matthew Sluka. (UNLV’s head coach is former Missouri coach Barry Odom, if you’re looking for a Mizzou connection.) Sluka, a 5th-year senior, was one of the more intriguing options in the portal last winter coming off an obscure but highly decorated career at Holy Cross, where he was a 2-time finalist for the Walter Payton Award, the FCS equivalent of the Heisman. He was off to a great start at UNLV, overseeing a 3-0 record and a pair of upsets over Big 12 opponents Houston and Kansas. The Runnin’ Rebels are the top-ranked G5 team in the updated Coaches’ poll, No. 2 in the AP poll, and very plausible contenders for the automatic Playoff slot reserved for the highest-ranked G5 conference champion. UNLV! Playoff contender! What a country!

Late Tuesday night, he threw the entire sport a curveball when he announced his intention to redshirt the rest of the season “based on certain representations that were made … which were not upheld.”

You don’t have to read too hard between the lines there to draw the obvious conclusion: UNLV promised Sluka an undisclosed sum in NIL loot, Sluka feels like that promise hasn’t been and won’t be kept, and he has no intention of playing for chump change. Welcome to college football in 2024.

It stinks, to be clear. I hate writing about this stuff. Obviously, everyone in the sport is making it up on the fly as their ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly. They have no other choice, because the people in charge of the sport at every level refused to adapt when they had the chance, and have largely gone right on refusing even as the ground continues to shift beneath their feet. Rather than acknowledge reality — that there is simply too much money coursing through big-time college sports to continue to insist that athletes are “amateurs” who aren’t entitled to their fair share — they doubled down, attempted to defend the status quo in the courts, and got their hats handed to them at every turn.

Instead of something like a gradual, orderly transition to the NIL/free transfer era, suddenly they found themselves exposed without so much as a fig leaf of a plan as every big decision got made for them. Amateurism died a slow, inevitable death, and the NCAA is no closer to getting a grip on the ensuing chaos than it was when the process began. They’re still pleading with Congress — the currently existing Congress of the United States — to save them from ever having to utter the words “employee” or “union.”

So, here we are in the meantime, processing the fact that a rising star has abruptly bowed out in the middle of a promising season because the deal he agreed to apparently vanished into thin air. That this is just a thing that can happen now, and will go on happening indefinitely until there is some kind of process to ensure these contracts are tethered to reality. That means legal recognition for schools to pay players directly, rather than through an opaque and completely unregulated system of middlemen under the guise of “NIL.” And that means collective bargaining through the equivalent of a players union, which is the reason you never see this kind of janky free-for-all over contracts in the pros.

Which, let’s face it, is exactly what big-time college athletes are now in every meaningful respect: Pros. The sooner the people who run the sport concede to treating them like it, the sooner they can restore some semblance of sanity, and the sooner the rest of us can go back to never having to think about contracts and labor laws ever again.
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(Last week: 5⬌)

6. Garrett Nussmeier | LSU

Nussmeier delivered his best game as a starter Saturday against UCLA, finishing 32-for-44 for 352 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 34-17 win in Baton Rouge. He wasn’t picked, wasn’t sacked and uncorked a couple of beauties that are going straight on the draft reel.

https://twitter.com/LSUfootball/status/1837591644461273224/

Nussmeier’s best work against the Bruins came after halftime, on a couple of long, time-consuming touchdown drives covering 96 and 92 yards, respectively, as LSU pulled away in a game that was tied 17-17 at the half. Nussmeier accounted for 140 of those yards on 10-of-15 passing, capped by his third TD pass (a short dump-off that freshman RB Caden Durham took the distance) to seal the deal. Playing against type, the Tigers dominated time of possession in the second half, converting 7-of-9 third downs, holding the ball for nearly 20 minutes, and limiting UCLA’s offense to just 22 snaps.
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(Last week: 7⬆)>

7. Nico Iamaleava | Tennessee

Iamaleava is a huge talent, clearly, but his life as QB1 has been made vastly easier by the fact that Tennessee has yet to really need him to be. In his 5 career starts, the Vols have averaged nearly 300 yards rushing, forced 10 takeaways on defense, and allowed a grand total of 28 points. Half of that total came in Saturday’s 25-15 win at Oklahoma, when the Sooners tacked on a couple of late, futile touchdowns in the fourth quarter; prior to that, Tennessee’s defense hadn’t allowed a TD in 19 consecutive quarters dating to last year. In that context, the glimpses of Iamaleava’s potential have tended to count for a lot more than the growing pains.

Oh, we’d all love to see him rip it more, even as the ripping remains a work in progress. Excluding his lone touchdown against OU, Iamaleava was just 2-for-9 on attempts of 10+ air yards, on 20 attempts total. For a 20-year-old sophomore making his first career road start opposite a Brent Venables defense, that’s just fine. (Two lost fumbles in his own territory, not so much, although again the defense immediately bailed him out on both occasions.) The kid has the juice. We’ll find out just how much when his team actually needs it.
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(Last week: 6⬇)

8. Diego Pavia | Vanderbilt

All 3 of Vandy’s games against FBS opponents this season have been decided on essentially the last play, either in the dying seconds of regulation or in overtime. Whether  that means anything in the Commodores’ ongoing quest for an SEC win, I have no idea, but as long as Pavia is in the fold, the journey is going to be a lot more interesting than usual. He’s currently accounting for 70.6% of the team’s total offense.
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(Last week: 11⬆)

9. Marcel Reed | Texas A&M

Last week, Mike Elko said the name at the top of the depth chart is “probably going to be a game-time decision for the rest of the season” between Reed and Conner Weigman, because “that’s just how we handle things.” Make of that what you will. This week, at least, the distinction belongs to Reed, who went the distance Saturday in a 26-20 win over Bowling Green — fine, hardly a gavel-banger. A&M’s output against BGSU was slightly less alarming when you adjust for consistently bad field position, with Reed personally accounting for 264 total yards and two touchdowns passing without a turnover. Whether that continues to inspire confidence as the Aggies resume SEC play, we’ll just have to find out.
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(Last week: 8⬇)

10. Taylen Green | Arkansas

Green was a basket case Saturday in a 24-14 win at Auburn, finishing 12-for-27 with 2 interceptions and a fumble. Still, he was spared the hair shirt for 3 reasons: 1) The Razorbacks managed to win a game they had to have to keep their heads above water in conference play; 2) Green’s Auburn counterparts were worse, combing to throw 4 picks on the day; and 3) He continued to show flashes of his enormous upside.

At his best, Green is a freakish specimen who looks and moves like prime Colin Kaepernick. The rest of the time, he looks like he’s in a movie where the plot is that he forgets everything when he goes to bed and has to relearn the game from scratch every time out.
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(Last week: 9⬇)

11. LaNorris Sellers | South Carolina

There is no controversy in Carolina, where backup Robby Ashford just accounted for 376 total yards and 3 touchdowns in a 50-7 romp over Akron while Sellers nursed a sore ankle. If you need a reminder as to why, go back and watch the second half of the Gamecocks’ 36-33 loss to LSU in Week 3; they led that one at the the half, 24-16, but effectively abandoned the concept of the forward pass after Ashford replaced a gimpy Sellers at halftime. That was consistent with Ashford’s one-dimensional track record at Auburn, where he was relegated to a “change of pace” role behind Payton Thorne. A veteran insurance policy is nice to have in a pinch — or when it’s time to run wild against the dregs of the MAC — but there’s little doubt when SEC play resumes against Ole Miss in Week 6 that Sellers’ arm is the one that gives them a chance.
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(Last week: 12⬆)

12. Graham Mertz and DJ Lagway | Florida

This space (like most spaces) has been tough on Mertz, calling on multiple occasions for him to be benched outright in favor of Lagway. So credit where it’s due: Mertz was in full command at Mississippi State, finishing 19-for-21 for 201 yards and throwing 3 TDs to 3 different receivers in a badly needed, 45-28 win in Starkville that snapped a seven-game losing streak vs. FBS opponents dating back to last year. His 218.0 passer rating and 95.1 QBR both represented his best numbers as a Gator.

Granted, that probably says a lot more about the state of state of Mississippi State’s defense than it does about Mertz, who is who he is after 46 career starts. Lagway, rotating in every third series, was 7-for-7 passing for 76 yards off the bench and oversaw a couple of extended touchdown drives covering 91 and 93 yards, respectively; the Bulldogs are quite bad. We’ll see how long the rotation holds up against a brutal schedule on the other side of an open date. In the meantime, the Gators are due for a momentary reprieve from the angst.
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(Last week: 15⬆)

13. Brock Vandagriff | Kentucky

Vandagriff turned in a routine stat line (17-for-24, 237 yards, 0 TDs, 0 INTs) in a routine, 41-6 win over Ohio, both reassuring signs after Kentucky failed to crack the end zone in either of its previous 2 games against South Carolina and Georgia. Encouragingly, he did most of his damage against the Bobcats downfield, going 8-for-12 for 177 yards on attempts of 10+ yards; his average depth of target, 12.1 yards, tied for the highest in the SEC in Week 4. Against Carolina and UGA, he was a combined 4-for-11 on attempts of 10+ air yards with an ADOT of 9.7 yards and a pick-6.

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(Last week: 16⬆)

14. Michael Hawkins Jr. | Oklahoma

If you had Week 4 in the “How long will it take Jackson Arnold to play his way out of a job?” office pool, come on down: Arnold is officially out this week following a debacle of a performance against Tennessee; Hawkins, a true freshman who came off the bench in the first half against the Vols and finished the game, is in. His his first career start comes this weekend at Auburn.

Given how much Oklahoma has invested in Arnold as the rising face of the program, his failure to make it out of the first half of his first SEC start was shocking in an abstract sort of way. In real time, it was hardly a choice at all. It was a no-brainer: By halftime, Arnold had thrown a ghastly interception, lost 2 fumbles and managed to put just 3 points on the board. The second quarter, in particular, was a nightmare: OU’s 5 possessions yielded 2 fumbles, 2 3-and-outs and a safety, all in 3 plays or less. The Sooners ran a grand total of 9 plays in the quarter for minus-22 yards, by the end of which Arnold had given way to Hawkins and the home crowd had given up any hope of mustering enough offense in the second half to rally from a 19-3 deficit. His 1.3 QBR rating (out of a possible 100) is the worst by an SEC quarterback in the QBR database since 2005, coming in a tick below Brock Vandagriff’s 1.4 against South Carolina in Week 2.

Enter the freshman. As a recruit, Hawkins was a borderline 3/4-star who enrolled in January with the expectation he’d be sitting for at least 2 years before getting his shot, pending Arnold’s health. An outright benching was not on the timeline, but here he is.

Hawkins did lead a couple of late, ultimately meaningless touchdown drives against Tennessee in the fourth quarter, covering 68 and 76 yards, to make the final score look halfway respectable. And he surely won over some segment of the fan base on the second one, going airborne to set up a score that put Oklahoma within a 2-point conversion of being within an onside kick of making things interesting in the closing minute. (Both the subsequent 2-point conversion and onside kick failed.)

The official policy of the Rankings re: lipstick-on-a-pig drives in garbage time is to tread lightly. Hawkins outplayed Arnold, but only after the game was effectively out of reach; he was cromulent when kept clean, but defaulted to scramble mode ASAP when he wasn’t, which was most of the time. Standard freshman stuff. We’ll see how it goes. As of this writing, I assume OU boosters are resigning themselves to cutting a very large check in a few months to the best available option in the portal.
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(Last week: n/a)

15. Payton Thorne or Hank Brown | Auburn

Ah, speaking of the portal. Hugh Freeze infamously declined to pursue a big-ticket transfer last winter to replace Thorne, even admitting in an interview earlier this year that he “couldn’t bring myself” to making the seven-figure commitment required these days to land a starting-caliber quarterback. Instead, he’s paying on the field and in the media as the season threatens to unravel.

The incumbent, Thorne, got the hook earlier this month after throwing 4 interceptions in a 21-14 loss to Cal-Berkeley in Week 2. The understudy, Brown, made a good first impression, throwing 4 TDs in a tune-up win over New Mexico in Week 3, but melted down in Saturday’s SEC opener against Arkansas, serving up 3 INTs in the first half. (All 3 of them coming from a clean pocket.)

Brown joined Jackson Arnold in the single-digit QBR Club, turning in a 9.5 in a little less than 2 quarters’ worth of work. Thorne finished the game against the Razorbacks, throwing 2 touchdown passes in the second half — as well as another INT that was not his fault — but never touched the ball with a chance to take the lead, and at no point made the home crowd forget why he’d been benched in the first place.

Freeze said this week (among other things) that “it’s going to be a battle” to determine QB1 against Oklahoma, apparently leaving open the possibility that Brown might return to the top line despite suffering the more recent crack-up. True freshman Walker “Don’t Call Me Walter” White is also available for “building toward the future” duty, before people start wondering why the QB of the future remains buried behind the visibly struggling QBs of the present. With the Sooners up and road trips to Georgia and Missouri on deck, Freeze needs as many options at his disposal as he can get.
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(Last week: n/a, 13⬇)

16. Michael Van Buren Jr. | Mississippi State

Van Buren mopped up against Florida in place of Blake Shapen, who announced Sunday that he’s out for the season with a shoulder injury. With respect to Shapen’s health, that’s not exactly devastating news for the rest of the season: Mississippi State is certain to be a decided underdog in every conference game regardless of who’s taking the snaps, and Van Buren, a 4-star prospect from Baltimore, has a chance to settle into the job for the foreseeable future. At the rate the Bulldogs’ season is going, letting him take his lumps in a classic Year Zero situation would have made sense even if Shapen was still available.
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(Last week: n/a)

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