Darian Mensah Solidifies Top Pick Talk, But Miami's Tough Schedule Looms

Back in August, before the college football season, Darian Mensah was one of the quarterbacks history was telling us to pay more attention to . Now, three games into 2026, it seems like folks are starting to take notice.

Because if we're talking strictly about what the 2027 quarterback class has shown so far, Mensah has a legitimate case for QB1. And if we're asking the much bigger question — which player has done the most through three weeks to make a case for No. 1 overall … the Miami QB belongs at the front of that conversation, too.

Yes, even with that incredibly soft schedule.

So far, Mensah has completed 71-of-79 passes (89.9%) for 873 yards, 11 touchdowns, no interceptions and 11.1 yards per attempt. He has yet to have a single, solitary turnover-worthy play, and his EPA per dropback is 0.74. By comparison, Joe Burrow 's EPA/DB was 0.50 in his final college season at LSU ; Jayden Daniels was 0.57, and Kyler Murray was 0.63.

Put another way: these numbers are silly (seriously, Mensah has THREE more touchdown passes than incompletions as we sit here). And they don't just stand out within the 2027 QB class.

Mensah's start is unusual even compared with the best college quarterbacks going back to 2015; his 89.9% completion percentage and 0.74 EPA/DB would both rank first, and his 11.1 YPA would be good for 12th among the 1,822 passers in the data. There's an obvious caveat here: Mensah has thrown 79 passes, while the names above put together full seasons.

That's also why this can't just be a numbers story. Three games don't put Mensah in the same category as Burrow, Daniels or Murray, but they do make this start unusual enough to be taken seriously. More importantly, this didn't come out of nowhere; before Mensah ever took a snap at Miami, there were already reasons to think his resume was pointing toward something bigger.

FRED was already pointing this way

This didn't start with three comically elite box scores. Before the season, I built FRED — the First-Round Readiness Score – as another way to look at the 2027 quarterback class. It used variables that have historically separated first-round quarterbacks, with 50 representing the average first-round resume.

The biggest names of the college football offseason  weren't the quarterbacks the model liked most .

QB

Preseason FRED

My preseason rank

Julian Sayin

55.3

QB4

Jayden Maiava

43.4

QB5

Drew Mestemaker

40.4

QB9

Darian Mensah

39.4

QB6

Brendan Sorsby

35.4

QB3

Trinidad Chambliss

29.7

QB8

Dante Moore

19.2

QB1

Arch Manning

3.2

QB2

Mensah entered the season fourth in the class with a FRED score of 39.4, and as my QB6 and an early second-rounder. Why? Because the tape still had questions the model couldn't answer.

The high-end stuff wasn't hard to find. He could drive deep comebacks on the move, drop throws over trail defenders down the sideline, throw with anticipation and create from different arm angles without needing to set his feet. There were Cam Ward moments — the sudden pocket movement, the off-platform throws, the knack for making something happen in a big spot.

The question was what happened when the play broke down. Mensah could get jittery when his first read wasn't there, sometimes even from a clean pocket. He would also play at a high level for long stretches only to mix in one head-scratching decision. That was the part that needed to change in 2026.

So the preseason question was simple: Can Miami Mensah clean up the little inconsistencies so the tape could catch up with what FRED already liked?

Through three games, the answer has been yes – and that is more important than completing 90% of his throws.

Mensah's answering the football questions, too

Mensah's improved at getting through his reads too.  He went 2-of-2 for 46 yards when getting to his second read in the opener against an overmatched Stanford defense. A week later, he went 3-of-3 for 80 yards on second-read throws … against an overmatched Florida A&M defense. He also went 4-of-7 for 143 yards and three touchdowns on deep throws in Week 1, then 3-of-4 for 126 yards and two more touchdowns the following week.

This is exactly what we were looking for. Former Titans GM Ran Carthon made the same point this week on the "With the First Pick" podcast when I asked him to choose between Mensah and Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss.

"I'd take Darian Mensah over Trinidad," Ran said, pointing to Mensah's ability to process "one to three" through his reads in a Miami system that asks him to handle more NFL-style concepts. His larger point was that athleticism is great, but eventually a quarterback has to sit in the pocket and find answers. Through three weeks — though against lesser competition than Chambliss — Mensah has shown more of that.

That matters because Chambliss has been awesome. It's still September, but he might be the biggest riser in the class. I had him as a Day 2 player over the summer, and he has certainly played his way into the QB1 discussion. He has a big arm. He's a really good athlete. The LSU game gave us meaningful evidence against better competition, and he has improved in the exact area we wanted to see improve: getting deeper into the progression.

But there are still differences between the two.

Mensah has the more conventional NFL build. Chambliss is 5-foot-11, and Ran noted that, fair or not, it will be part of the evaluation. I wrote about this a year ago when Garrett Nussmeier and Cade Klubnik were facing similar questions: Height matters, but it can't become so much of the story that it obscures whether the guy can actually play quarterback. One evaluator put it even more simply at the time: "I want a quarterback that knows where to go with the ball and throws it."

Chambliss is already further along than Nussmeier and Klubnik were at this point. He's playing at a high level, he has an NFL arm and he's a good athlete. The question is how much the size ultimately matters.

That's where Mensah has the edge right now. He's shown more of what that evaluator was talking about, and he brings the size, the arm and the athleticism.

What about the big-time throws?

One number that doesn't immediately match the rest of Mensah's red-hot start is his 4.9% big-time throw rate. But that's pretty much where he was in 2024 at Tulane and 2025 at Duke . Last season he had 28 big-time throws, including 24-on-93 deep attempts, and the summer tape showed the same thing. He can drive the ball outside the numbers, layer throws down the sideline and make difficult passes without needing to set his feet.

What has changed is how little resistance Miami's passing game has faced so far. He simply hasn't had to make many difficult throws, which leads to the biggest question with Mensah right now: his competition.

The schedule problem

Miami opened with Stanford, Florida A&M and Wake Forest . On Saturday, the Hurricanes host Central Michigan . Better competition is coming, but Miami's 2026 schedule will never be confused with Arch Manning's at Texas . ESPN's preseason FPI ranked it 45th nationally and ninth-toughest in the ACC; every SEC team ranked inside the top 20.

That matters because there may not be many times this season when Mensah is forced to play from a muddy pocket, throw into tight windows and make something happen when the play breaks down. So far, it's looked incredibly easy for Mensah, in part because he's playing at a high level, but also because this Hurricanes offense has yet to be really tested.

Ran made that point on the podcast, but he also made the other side of the argument: Mensah is doing exactly what he should be doing against lesser competition. We've seen plenty of highly touted quarterbacks look just average against average opponents. Mensah hasn't.

So yes, the schedule can help explain some of the numbers, but it doesn't explain all of them. Mensah had already started 26 games before arriving in Coral Gables, thrown 52 touchdown passes against 11 interceptions and flashed the physical tools that get NFL teams excited. It's why we talked him up as our consensus "With the First Pick" QB4 during Summer Scouting.

The obvious comparison is Cam Ward, who transferred to Miami for the 2024 season and parlayed that into becoming the No. 1 pick. But Mensah doesn't need to make that sort of transformation. Ward entered his last season needing a major jump – he had a FRED score of just 6.8 ; Mensah entered 2026 with a FRED score of 39.4 and plenty already working in his favor.

What he needed was to become more consistent in several areas, and so far, so good. The Nov. 7 trip to Notre Dame looms as his best chance to show it against an elite defense.

Which means for now, we can only go on what we see. But if Mensah keeps playing like this, the question won't be whether he belongs in the first-round conversation. It'll be whether anyone has done more to put himself in the No. 1 overall conversation.

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_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/draft/news/darian-mensah-making-early-case-no-1-overall-pick-miami-hurricanes/)._