2025 CFB Season: Which Quarterbacks Have the Most to Prove This Season?
Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, the site of the 2025 CFB season opener - Source: Unsplash
With Netflix's SEC-featured docuseries smash Any Given Saturday fresh in the mind, attention has perhaps already turned to the 2025 College Football Season. Ohio State heads into the new campaign as the reigning champions and is well-fancied to defend its crown, but the new year's postseason is still some distance away.
If the campaign's opening night needs a stage, it finds one draped in Irish mist: August 23rd, Aviva Stadium, Dublin—the Aer Lingus Classic, a ranked showdown between No. 22 Iowa State and No. 17 Kansas State. Blink, and you’ll miss the opening blow in a season hungry for drama. But while both of the campaigns' opening participants are indeed ranked, online betting sites don't list either of them amongst the contenders to claim the Natty next January.
The outright favorite tag falls firmly at the feet of the Texas Longhorns, with the popular Bovada betting site pricing them as the +550 frontrunner for a first national championship in over two decades. If they are to live up to the billing, then their quarterback, Arch Manning, will have to be at his very best. That puts him under immense pressure, and he isn't the only one who will bear the world on his shoulders in the 2025 College Football Season.
Arch Manning
Every generation, college football serves up a protagonist so steeped in familial myth that his journey becomes appointment viewing. Enter Arch Manning, whose bloodline—nephew to Super Bowl winners Eli and Peyton, legacy to Archie—cast an impossible silhouette over Austin’s skyline. But blood doesn’t tally touchdowns.
The reality: Manning earned only two starts last season, finished with 939 passing yards and 9 touchdowns, and now stands beneath the archangel wings of a Longhorn program ranked No. 1. The context—Texas’ leap into the SEC, the swirling Heisman odds, and the specter of the expanded College Football Playoff—elevate both hope and pressure to volcanic levels.
Spring reviews, replete with close analysis from coaches and fellow quarterbacks alike, identify the crossroads for Manning. His arm talent is undisputed: a crisp release, escapability, and just a glimmer of the improvisational genius that made his uncles NFL legends.
But can poise and vision keep pace with expectation? To survive the SEC’s labyrinth of blitzes and coverage rotations—against Georgia’s stingy secondary or Bama’s adrenaline-fueled front—Manning must turn flashes into full-length performances. Failure to do so could make the weight of the Manning name even heavier on his young shoulders.
Nico Iamaleava
Around Westwood, Nico Iamaleava’s arrival felt almost cinematic. The Tennessee transfer, fresh from a high-drama NIL clash and a season of tantalizing—but inconsistent—moments, now inherits an untested UCLA squad bracing for the Big Ten’s storm. His resume is promising: 2,616 yards and 19 touchdowns in 2024, laced with highlight-reel throws that defy geometry, and yet occasionally undermined by decision-making lapses that stall drives and feed the opposition.
But the Bruins’ fate likely pivots on Iamaleava’s capacity to connect talent and trust. The Big Ten offers not mercy but mandarins—grizzled Wisconsin linebackers, Penn State’s disguised looks, and the ice-cold calculation of playoff implications in late November snow. For the Bruins to ascend from curiosity to contender, Iamaleava must orchestrate drives that blend flair with discipline, turning single-series promise into full-game assertion. If he delivers, UCLA’s gamble evolves from a transfer headline into the cornerstone of a new chapter in LA football.
Carson Beck
Carson Beck rolled the dice this spring—departing Georgia, elbow surgically mended, with a $3 million NIL contract and a burning ambition to revive The U. His 2024 stat line almost demands respect: 3,485 yards, 28 touchdowns. But deep dives—play-by-play, throw-by-throw—found an Achilles' heel in twelve drive-killing interceptions, a few coming in moments when the Bulldogs desperately needed steadiness, not spectacle.
Beck’s new chapter in Miami is less about reinvention than redemption. His challenge? To walk the razor’s edge, retaining the gunslinger’s mentality while developing the situational judgment that separates Saturday aces from Sunday pros. The Hurricanes possess world-class receivers, rapid-fire packages, and perhaps the most robust offensive scheme he’s ever played in. But the ghosts of Miami’s recent mediocrity hover.
Is Beck the man to exorcise them and deliver a College Football Playoff berth for the first time since it mattered? Or do his lapses in judgment linger, feeding Miami’s endless cycle of hope and heartbreak?
Drew Allar
Drew Allar’s tenure in Happy Valley echoes with the frustration of near-misses. A solid 2024 consisting of 2,894 yards and 21 touchdowns hints at potential, but the statistics paint a curious portrait—commanding against lesser opponents but shrinking on the biggest stages. His struggles against Ohio State and Notre Dame in particular left Penn State’s fanbase asking an uncomfortable question: Is this Allar’s ceiling, or can he finally unlock the rare air reserved for elite college quarterbacks?
Penn State, armed with a formidable defense and explosive weapons at wideout, sits perched at the brink. For Allar, 2025 is an audition not just for the NFL, but for a place in Nittany Lion folklore. Does he have the processing speed, the twitch muscle memory, the cold-eyed audacity to thread windows when the game’s on the line? Or is his fate that of the nearly man—consistently competent, yet always a drive short against the nation’s elite?