The Athletic Ranks All Starting Quarterbacks Ahead of the 2026 Season
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Recently, The Athletic ranked all starting quarterbacks in the FBS and grouped them into tiers. They also included a feature where you can sort the quarterbacks by conference, showing who they believe to be the best and worst quarterbacks in each conference. The only tier 1 Quarterbacks the conference had were Julian Sayin from Ohio State and Dante Moore from Oregon.
Rutgers found their quarterback listed in tier 7, at the bottom of the conference, joined by just behind Jeremy Hecklinski of Iowa and just ahead of Purdue’s Ryan Brown. The interesting thing is, The Athletic listed transfer quarterback Dylan Lonergan as Rutgers’ starter next season despite there being an ongoing quarterback battle between him and AJ Surace.
The Athletic described how they selected starting quarterbacks for the list from schools that haven’t named theirs yet.
“For teams that haven’t officially named a starter because they’re still engaged in a quarterback battle, we ranked who we project to start based on information gathered to this point,“ said writers Antonio Morales and Sam Kahn Jr.
They did not specify the information they have gathered about Rutgers, and head coach Greg Schiano is notorious for keeping decisions like this close to the chest without giving the media much information, but it still begs the question of what they know and why they decided to name Lonergan in the first place. It could be because Lonergan has more playing experience, so they just went with the guy who has a longer track record. Where they ranked Lonergan is not an encouraging sign, being placed as the second-lowest quarterback in the conference and the No. 107 overall quarterback in the FBS, but it remains to be seen whether or not their projection will come true.
The Full Big Ten list is as follows
Tier 1
No.2 Dante Moore- Oregon
No.5 Julian Sayin- Ohio State
Tier 2
No.9 Jayden Maiava- USC
No. 12 Josh Hoover- Indiana
Tier 3
No.20 Demond Williams Jr.- Washington
No.21 Malik Washington- Maryland
No. 24 Rocco Becht- Penn State
No. 25 Nico Iamaleava- UCLA
No. 29 Drake Lindsey- Minnesota
Tier 4
No. 31 Bryce Underwood- Michigan
No. 36 Colton Joseph- Wisconsin
No. 39 Anthony Colandrea- Nebraska
No. 41 Katin Houser- Illinois
Tier 6
No. 69 Alessio Milivojevic- Michigan State
No. 70 Aidan Chiles- Northwestern
Tier 7
No. 106 Jeremy Hecklinski- Iowa
No. 107 Dylan Lonergan- Rutgers
No. 111 Ryan Browne- Purdue
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