The 2027 NFL Draft is still a full college season away, and the quarterback class already projects as a strength. PFN analyst Ian Cummings rolled out his first top five of the cycle on the Hot List, and the top of the board carries real franchise-quarterback weight, with Oregon’s Dante Moore at No. 1 and Texas’ Arch Manning at No. 2.
Dante Moore and Arch Manning Headline the 2027 QB Class
Moore earned the top spot on the strength of a breakout 2025 and a ceiling Cummings pegged to a recent top-five pick. The Oregon passer threw for 3,565 yards with 30 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, then turned down a likely high selection in the 2026 NFL Draft to return to Eugene. PFN’s QB Impact metric graded him at 85.9, and his two-minute work stood out, including a 0.71 EPA per dropback in those situations.
“He’s kind of in the mold of CJ Stroud,” Cummings said, projecting Moore at his best as “an in-structure operator, but also an out-of-structure creator and elevator of an NFL offense.”
Manning slots in right behind him, and the gap is narrowing. The Texas quarterback completed his first full season as a starter in 2025, throwing for 3,163 yards and 26 touchdowns across 13 starts, and he returns in 2026 as a Heisman favorite. What moved Cummings was the trajectory: by PFN’s measure, Manning’s average game-to-game QB Impact climbed 5.5 points from the first seven weeks of the season to the second seven.
“That late-season improvement, almost unheard of,” Cummings said, before identifying the next step. He still “has room to go from a good to a great to an elite processor.”
Drew Mestemaker and the Depth Behind the Top Two
The class does not thin out at No. 3. Drew Mestemaker actually posted the highest QB Impact score of the group, an 86.2, after leading the FBS with 4,379 passing yards at North Texas. That he lands third rather than first underscores how Cummings weighs projection over raw production.
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The former walk-on and high school safety, now at Oklahoma State, “emerged in such a volcanic way last year,” Cummings said, though the evaluation comes with a mechanical caveat. The “lower arm slot can induce some mechanical volatility,” he noted, and the footwork can turn “toesy and uncontrolled.” Smooth those out, and Cummings sees “impact starter potential at the NFL level.”
Notre Dame’s CJ Carr, fourth on the board, offers a steadier profile. Cummings praised a redshirt freshman who “can operate in structure, but can also go off into the flats” and “operate on the move,” a “situational malleability” that helped Carr post 24 touchdowns against 6 interceptions in 2025.
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Minnesota’s Drake Lindsey rounds out the five. The 6-foot-5 redshirt freshman started all 13 games for the Gophers, and Cummings is buying the tools, citing “a really compelling blend of arm talent and natural processing ability where he can layer over the middle of the field and anticipate windows.” The comp is ambitious: he “could draw some echoes to Big Ben.”
None of this is settled. Cummings was quick to add that a full season of college football tends to reshuffle these boards before they matter. But the early read is encouraging for a league always hunting for passers. The 2027 class has a top two worth building around and enough behind them to keep the picture interesting deep into the fall.
