Behind the Steel Curtain
The Steelers need to find their QB of the future in the 2026 draft. Which college QBs should Steelers fans be watching this fall?
If you clicked on this article, there’s a chance you’re one of three types of people:
A) You’re a college football enthusiast and/or an NFL draft sicko. Welcome, my brothers and sisters, you are my kind of people.
B) You’re looking down the barrel of this 2025 season, wracked with anxiety about whether there will even be any good quarterbacks available for the Steelers in the draft, let alone if they will have the necessary pick to secure them. Unfortunately, I also count myself among you. We’ll get through this together.
C) You think it’s dumb to talk about the 2026 Draft just one month after the 2025 Draft. I disagree, but I get it, and hope I can provide you with some info and observations you’ll be able to use over the next 11 months.
Regardless of which type you are, there is no underselling how important next year’s draft in Pittsburgh will be for the home team. Finding a player that can stabilize the quarterback room will not only impact the next several years for the organization, but it will also impact the legacies of everyone from decision makers like Mike Tomlin and Omar Khan, to players still searching for a playoff victory like T.J. Watt and Minkah Fitzpatrick.
That’s why I plan to follow along with the college football season and provide you with updated temperature reads on which quarterbacks are trending towards being first-round picks. With the college football season roughly 94 days away, the next several weeks seem like the perfect time to start familiarizing ourselves with the quarterbacks who could declare for the draft in 2026.
But, as a lifelong sports fan, I know how easy it is for biases against certain players — or more often, schools/teams — to cloud our judgment when it comes to talent evaluation. If the NFL Draft has taught us anything over the years, it’s that projecting quarterback success isn’t an exact science.
Entering their final year of college ball, neither Joe Burrow nor Jayden Daniels were considered a player who would hear their name called early on Night 1 of the draft. The same could be said of this year’s first overall pick, Cam Ward. After his 2023 season at Washington State University, Ward was advised he would not be considered a Day 1 prospect in the 2024 draft, so he made the wise decision to head back for one last year of school.
Meanwhile, Trevor Lawrence was considered a generational, can’t-miss type of player, yet he hasn’t fully lived up to the potential we all envisioned for him so far. Caleb Williams didn’t have quite the same hype as Lawrence, but his debut season was bumpier than many anticipated.
That’s why I wanted to find a way to present these players to you blind, at least initially, for this...
