Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza is going to be the first overall pick, Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson is going to get drafted somewhere, and Carson Beck may very well end up being the third quarterback off the board. In a quarterback stack built from 10 evaluators, Mendoza drew every first-place vote, Simpson landed second on every board, and Beck emerged as the name with the widest range, including a chance to squeeze into the tail end of the third round.
The conversation around Beck sharpened after late February, when evaluators were gathered in preparation for the All-Juice Team following the scouting combine. From there, 10 teams were used to build the quarterback stack, and two evaluators saw Beck as a third-round pick. Several others put him a country mile behind LSU's Garrett Nussmeier, which is where one NFC executive pushed back hard.
“100-percent,” the executive said when asked whether Beck belonged ahead of Nussmeier. The same executive said Beck was bigger than Nussmeier, had more success and was a better worker, then added, “I don’t think Beck is great, but Nuss is a wild card in a bad class.”
That tension sits at the center of a quarterback group that scouts see as thin, with possible middle-round dart throws but no clean consensus beyond the top two names. Beck’s case is not that he has taken over the class. It is that in a season defined by uncertainty and the league’s lying season, he has done enough to stay in the mix as the draft approaches and the order finally gets set by the end of Saturday night.