Everyone is entitled to an opinion. At this point, in the circles that I care to operate within, an “opinion” is some sort of preseason college football ranking that we’ll ultimately change the second that actual games are being played.
So naturally, there are a few preseason opinions on SEC quarterbacks, and more specifically, there are a few preseason opinions about a certain Marcel Reed.
Stunning, I know. The Texas A&M signal-caller didn’t earn preseason All-SEC honors last month, though that wasn’t necessarily stunning considering that roughly half the conference returns a starting quarterback, including five of the teams that won at least 10 games last year.
Discourse was inevitable. Perhaps I admittedly didn’t forecast just how great the discourse would be about Reed.
If you choose to rank SEC quarterbacks, you’re sure to get plenty of comments on both sides of the argument as it relates to Reed. How do I know? Well, once upon a time, I ranked SEC quarterbacks here for TexAgs. I’ve also got those rankings as my pinned tweet, just so that people with opinions can continue to yell at me.
People yelled at me about Reed. A lot. After all, I did make the bold decision of ranking him — wait for it — No. 6 among the 16 SEC quarterbacks.
On Twitter/X and Instagram, I got no shortage of comments on Reed. I’ll paraphrase them so you don’t have to sort through all of them. Some couldn’t believe I ranked Reed as high as No. 6, while others couldn’t believe that I only had Reed at No. 6.
As I saw my fellow college football media members with opinions sort through the same exercise, I realized that the Reed discourse wasn’t just limited to TexAgs.
Well, check that. Josh Pate did reveal a certain incoming phone call from Billy Liucci following the release of his rankings, which had Reed tabbed as the No. 8 quarterback in the SEC.
(Josh also made sure to title his 2026 SEC Quarterback Rankings the “DJ Lagway Memorial Preseason SEC QB Rankings” to acknowledge last year’s whiff of ranking the former Florida quarterback as the conference’s top signal-caller entering 2025, so take that with a grain of salt.)
Needless to say, Pate got more “how could you rank Reed that low?” comments than I did. It’s also worth mentioning that he had comments still claiming that Reed was too high at No. 8.
Welcome to the discourse.
It actually doesn’t feel like there’s a ton of media discourse on Reed. At least there’s not in the places where I respect the people providing the opinions. Here are a few of those rankings of Reed:
To recap, all the people who have put out rankings that I trust/respect have a consensus opinion on Reed. That is, he’s not quite good enough to be one of the three preseason All-SEC quarterbacks, yet he’s worthy of being considered a top-half quarterback in the league.
The discourse is in the comments, as is often the case. Where I land on the Reed discourse is that if you tell me that I underrated him, I can push back, and if you tell me that I overrated him, I can also push back.
If you think he’s underrated by having him at No. 6 in the SEC, your argument likely is rooted in the ever-polarizing “quarterback wins” department. Are wins all that matter? In actual football, yes. In ranking quarterbacks, no.
It’s true that Reed is the only quarterback in the SEC who can claim that he started every game for the program’s best regular season of the 21st century (remember that Trinidad Chambliss wasn’t QB1 from the jump at Ole Miss). That’s not nothing.
What’s also true is that if “quarterback wins” are the only metric that’s considered, it pretends that everyone has the same surroundings, which we know isn’t the case. Look no further than LaNorris Sellers, who entered last year as a preseason All-SEC quarterback after a banner finish to 2024, but in 2025, he didn’t have the benefit of offensive line continuity, a first-round pass-catcher or a competent play-caller, all of which were things that Reed had working in his favor.
Reed racked up 11 wins despite those consistency issues, which Mike Elko addressed repeatedly this offseason.
For the “Reed is underrated” crowd, would we agree that turnovers are pretty important? Reed would be the first to admit that he needs to cut down on the 12 interceptions, or the fact that 11 of those came when he wasn’t blitzed. According to PFF, he also had 11 turnover-worthy plays when throwing in the intermediate range (10-19 yards), which was the most among Power Conference quarterbacks.
Obviously, that proved costly down the stretch when he had 11 turnover-worthy plays in A&M’s final three FBS games of a season that ended with the program’s first College Football Playoff berth.
Some would argue that it’s insane to rank Reed behind someone like Byrum Brown, who has yet to take a snap in the SEC. They’d say that Brown’s stats at South Florida, where he became the 12th player in FBS history to rack up 3,000 passing yards and 1,000 rushing yards in the same season, don’t carry as much weight because they happened at the Group of 5 level. They’ll ignore the fact that Brown is entering Year 4 with Alex Golesh and that he has more game reps in his offense than any returning SEC quarterback.
In a previous era of the sport, I’d side with that “he hasn’t done it in the SEC” argument. In this era of the sport, I’d remind folks that Diego Pavia went from New Mexico State to Vanderbilt in 2024 and became the first quarterback to earn All-SEC honors after he spent the previous year at a Group of 5 school.
Last year, Chambliss transferred directly from a Division II school and not only earned All-SEC honors, but he also finished eighth in the Heisman Trophy voting. We watched John Mateer go from playing a Mountain West schedule at Washington State to becoming an early-season Heisman favorite until a hand injury changed the trajectory of his season.
That injury was also why I ranked Mateer behind Reed. I only saw a month of Mateer looking like that elite signal-caller, whereas Reed was firmly in the Heisman conversation until that aforementioned rough stretch that began in November.
That part has been completely ignored by the “Reed is overrated” crowd. They’ll tell you that he just had success against a favorable schedule. They’ll ignore the fact that Reed went into hostile road atmospheres against respected, elite defensive minds like Marcus Freeman and Blake Baker, and he put up monster numbers in shoot-out victories.
Actually, let me backtrack. LSU was not a “shoot-out” victory. It was a “shoo-out” victory in which Reed and the Aggies were able to “shoo-out” the LSU crowd in the second half, which ultimately resulted in the end of the Brian Kelly era in Baton Rouge.
Against Notre Dame, Reed outplayed 2026 preseason Heisman favorite CJ Carr and put up nearly 400 yards of offense even though he was pressured 17 times, including on the game-winning touchdown pass to Nate Boerkircher with 13 seconds left. You won’t find a single ranking that has Reed ahead of Carr because they had different finishes to the season.
Reed, of course, had a more challenging path to navigate down the stretch than Carr. We saw that play out in the Texas game, where a hobbled Reed wasn’t as crisp as an improved Arch Manning.
How you finish matters, though. In Reed’s case, it feels like it’s the entire argument for those who don’t think he’s one of the SEC’s better returning quarterbacks. We could debate whether Julian Sayin is being held to the same standard in the national quarterback rankings, but that’s a different discussion for a different time.
Like Sayin, Reed has a new play-caller. Unlike the rest of the SEC, Reed has a first-time play-caller.
Holmon Wiggins is the SEC’s lone first-time offensive play-caller in 2026. That well-documented element could be something that factored into Reed’s various preseason rankings. There are media members like Pate who base rankings on total season expectations. My rankings are based on who I’d pick in a schoolyard draft to win a game played tomorrow.
Chambliss is still my leader in that clubhouse. Where he and Gunner Stockton — the guy who trailed only Fernando Mendoza in NFL QB rating when pressured in 2025 — excelled more than guys like Manning and Reed were being guys you could trust when the bullets were flying. It’s not crazy to think that changes this year as both guys enter their second full season as SEC starters.
What shouldn’t be up for debate is that Reed, like so many other returning quarterbacks, has All-SEC upside. For all we know, he’s got New York upside. At this time last year, nobody would’ve outlined that as the expectation for guys like Pavia or Mendoza, yet those veterans took their game to the next level in historic ways.
We can ask questions about Reed’s game heading into 2026. It’s fair to say that the strengths and weaknesses are a bit more pronounced than some other returning signal-callers. That can be used to his benefit.
Players can develop, and dare I say, opinions can, too.
