Half of the starting quarterbacks in the NFL Playoffs came through the Rivals Camp Series. Rivals national recruiting director Adam Gorney offers his thoughts and memories of the seven QBs who camped with us over the years.
RUMOR MILL: Latest buzz from Navy National Combine registration
CLASS OF 2025 RANKINGS: Rivals250 | Team | Position | State
CLASS OF 2026 RANKINGS: Rivals250 | Team | Position | State
CLASS OF 2027 RANKINGS: Top 100
TRANSFER PORTAL: Full coverage | Player ranking | Team ranking | Transfer search | Transfer Tracker
On this entire list, we probably saw Daniels the most in high school whether in games and he was a regular on the camp and 7-on-7 circuit. The San Bernardino (Calif.) Cajon standout had incredible pop on his passes and he could deliver it all over the field but he was always really lean which gave us some pause on making him a five-star.
His career was going nowhere at Arizona State before he transferred to LSU and won the Heisman Trophy (a lot like Joe Burrow’s renaissance in Baton Rouge). He was the second overall pick and an NFL star with the Washington Commanders.
Hurts was a four-star and he was picked in the second round of the NFL Draft so that is considered a hit in our rankings. He was too low at No. 231 although he was far from a finished product coming out of Channelview, Texas.
The four-star picked Alabama over Texas A&M, Florida, Mississippi State and others, and had a great career with the Crimson Tide before transferring to Oklahoma and finishing with a huge season in Norman.
Looking ahead and seeing all of his unbelievable accomplishments at Louisville and now with the Baltimore Ravens, it looks foolish that we rated Jackson as the No. 17 dual-threat quarterback in the 2015 class after a strong showing at the Rivals Camp Series in Miami. That was a dual-threat class led by Florida State’s Deondre Francois so Jackson’s ranking was clearly a miss.
But the Boynton Beach, Fla., four-star was far from a finished product in high school. He still kind of has that quirky release point and couldn’t sit in the pocket as he loved to get out and create. There were questions about whether that would translate to college and the NFL or if he was just an elite athlete playing quarterback. Jackson has obviously proved the doubters wrong.
No one could have predicted what Love has become when he was at Bakersfield (Calif.) Liberty. No one. And I stand by that.
Love was a string bean in high school and while he did throw a nice ball at the Rivals Camp Series in Los Angeles, he didn’t wow us like we had to move him up to four-star status or beyond. The two-star also had no Power Five offers and went to Utah State where he put up big numbers early in his career but then had a bad last year.
Still, Love ended up as a first-round pick and it was a genius move by the Green Bay Packers to look past all the interceptions in his final year at Utah State because he’s become one of the best quarterbacks in the game. He is 219 pounds now and in our defense he was 6-foot-2 and 175 in high school.
When Mahomes was coming out of Whitehouse, Texas, in the 2014 class, the three-star quarterback was far – far! – from the quarterback we see today as one of the best ever and a three-time Super Bowl champion.
Mahomes had some physical tools but he was just raw and nowhere near as developed as he is today with the Kansas City Chiefs. He probably would have ended up at Rice, too, if not for another quarterback backing off his Texas Tech pledge and then-coach Kliff Kingsbury taking a shot on him.
During his time at Auburn, his career was floundering and it looked like his five-star ranking was going to be a miss but one could argue that was mismanagement and ineptitude on the coaching staff’s part. Nix has proven time and again that he’s an elite player – and Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton now looks like even more of a genius for picking him in the first round.
What we loved about Nix and why he was the top pro-style quarterback in the 2019 class was because he was a coach’s son, a gym rat, a big-time competitor and then he backed that up with elite playmaking on the field. After transferring to Oregon, Nix showed all those assets and played his way into a first-round draft position.
So much focus was on Bryce Young and DJ Uiagalelei in California for the 2020 class as those two battled it out for five-star status but lurking in the shadows was Stroud. He didn’t do many camps or play a lot of 7-on-7 so he slid under the radar a little bit especially early in his career.
At the Rivals Camp Series in Los Angeles, Stroud had a big-time arm and was really fluid. When I saw him in his senior season he did everything for his Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., team and I always wondered if he would have been in the five-star discussion more if he had more elite playmakers around him.
Ohio State did not offer until late in the recruiting process and he still picked the Buckeyes over Georgia, Michigan, Oregon and a late charge from USC.
