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The 2018 NFL Draft is still over six months away, and we still have an important chunk of the college football season left to play. That being said, it is never too soon to take a look at how NFL talent evaluators view positions in the draft.
The quarterback class is getting a ton of hype, and this week, Albert Breer spoke with eight NFL talent evaluators to put together rankings on the position. Each person gave their top five quarterbacks, with first place getting five points and fifth place getting one point. Breer combined them to come up with a consensus ranking.
Three quarterbacks appeared on all eight ballots. That group included Sam Darnold, Josh Rosen, and Josh Allen, who also happened to be the top three on Breer’s rankings. They were followed by Luke Falk and Mason Rudolph to round out the top five.
The wild card in the rankings was Ryan Finley of North Carolina State. He got one fifth place vote, in part because some of the evaluators admitted they needed to do more research on him. Breer described as having, “a shot to be this year’s Mitchell Trubisky,” who comes out of nowhere to climb the board.
The 49ers made their big change at quarterback on Sunday, benching Brian Hoyer and moving C.J. Beathard into the starting lineup. That doesn’t mean much of anything at this point, but if Beathard remains in the starting lineup the rest of the season, we’ll have a much firmer grasp on what Beathard is all about. It remains to be seen how much more we’ll need to know, but at least the 49ers are giving him a chance to start to prove whether or not he is a building block, or not.