NFL scouts favor Drew Mestemaker as first QB taken in draft - ESPN

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 from the August QB1 poll.

In a poll of 25 NFL scouts and executives asked who will be the first quarterback selected in the 2027 NFL draft, Oklahoma State's Drew Mestemaker received 17 votes — the most in the poll's three years.

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