Who Are Your Five Best College Quarterbacks of All-Time?

I absolutely love sports hypotheticals which will vary wildly and make people upset for absolutely no reason. Engaging in discussion on such topics is one of my favorite things to do. This is a great one. You'll get everybody riled up with anything like this — especially with everyone at home with nothing to do — but then you throw in the passionate absurdity of college football and it's going to be great.

This list was actually tougher to narrow down than I thought, though. In making my list, I left off several guys who just seem like their names belong on that list in my mind — Johnny Manziel, Cam Newton, Deshaun Watson.

Here's the list I came up with:

The first three were pretty easy for me. Tebow and Young are the two best college quarterbacks I've watched play in my lifetime and obviously Manning is right up there in the conversation for the No. 1 spot, despite being robbed of the 1997 Heisman. Tebow edges out Manning for me just because the things I saw Tebow do are things that had not been done in college football before and have been hardly replicated since. There have been guys who ultimately achieved similarly to Tebow, but nobody has changed the game the way he did. He was transcendent.

And then you have the greatest Tennessee Volunteer to ever live. Just look at these numbers. It doesn't get any more consistent than that. I generally lean more towards recency in things like this because sports are always evolving and almost every player today is better than many of the best players just a short time ago, but Peyton Manning is one of the greatest to ever do it.

Vince Young was just a monster. He won the greatest college football game ever played and had won a bunch more leading up to that. He was never a particularly prolific passer, but he threw for more than 3,000 yards and rushed for over 1,000 in 2005, something only done by a handful of players since.

Ryan Leaf is probably the most questionable on my list, but he was right there with Manning during their college careers. Their 1997 seasons were nearly identical and they were both Heisman finalists alongside Charles Woodson and Randy Moss. I probably should have put Leaf at No. 5, because if I was to replace somebody with one of the players I had just outside the top five, I would replace him instead of Joe Burrow. But ultimately, I think Leaf is deserving of being on the list.

Which brings us to the most recent guy on the list, Big Dick Joe. I didn't put Newton or Manziel on this list because their success was only for a year or two, so I suppose it's sort of contradictory to have Burrow on there. But we have never seen a season like what we saw from Burrow in 2019. He totaled 5,671 passing yards with 60 touchdowns and just six interceptions. And oh yeah, he led his team to a 15-0 record and national championship.

The single greatest season by a quarterback in college football history gets you on the list.

So who's on your list?