5 college football teams who have raised their QB ceiling for 2024
By John Buhler
One of the best ways to improve your college football team is to land somebody excellent in the transfer portal at the quarterback position. It may not be a panacea to what ails some bad football programs, but the right player coming in can change the tone of the locker room just a bit. A few more wins here and there can take a team from a total afterthought into being one worthy of monitoring.
Although there are other ways to improve a team's quarterback situation besides landing a guy in the portal, odds are, a true freshman coming in out of high school is not going to change the game right away. While perhaps the best way is to recruit a kid out of high school and develop him, not every team has that luxury. Recruiting is the name of the game, but view the transfer portal like NFL free agency.
Right now, we are going to take a look at five college football programs that made a huge upgrade at the quarterback position, the type that can take a bad team to good, a good team to great, and a great team to being a serious contender to make, and maybe even win, the College Football Playoff. Continuity may be what gets other teams over the top, but these five teams just might have their guy.
Here are five programs who absolutely raised their quarterback room's ceiling for the 2024 season.
5. Former USC QB Malachi Nelson to Boise State
This one caught everyone completely off-guard. Malachi Nelson was every bit the blue-chip prospect coming out of Los Alamitos in 2023. He spent one year as essentially the USC Trojans' third-stringer before transferring to ... Boise State? Yes, Nelson is a full-blown Bronco now, bruh. He committed to play for Spencer Danielson, mostly because of a connection he made with Bush Hamdan previously.
However, Hamdan didn't last as Boise State's offensive coordinator for very long. He opted to replace Liam Coen at Kentucky where he will be tasked with coaching up former Georgia backup Brock Vandagriff. Maybe he is a candidate for this article, to be honest. Despite all that, Nelson is simply too talented to be playing at a Mountain West program, which could be good for their playoff chances.
Historically, Boise State has been one of the better Group of Five programs. Although they have not won the Group of Five since 2014 under Bryan Harsin, the Broncos have the infrastructure to make some noise in what should be one of the better leagues at their level next year. Nelson has the chance to be a real difference-maker, even if Hamdan bailed on him before even calling one play.
Nelson will benefit from going down a level, but it remains to be seen what will become of Boise State.