The Drew Mestemaker buzz in Stillwater is real enough that it’s started spilling beyond Oklahoma State circles, but not everybody is ready to buy into the full-on hype.
Tom Fornelli of the Cover 3 Podcast made that clear last week on the Brandon Walker College Football Show during a segment built around transfer quarterbacks. The conversation didn’t even start with Mestemaker, but he wound up at the center of it anyway.
Walker asked Fornelli to choose between Penn State’s Rocco Becht and Auburn’s Byrum Brown, and Fornelli used the moment to explain why he thinks the Mestemaker chatter has gotten ahead of itself.
“I did a blind QB resume comparison online a couple weeks ago in response to The Athletic’s tiers for college football quarterbacks because they had Drew Mestemaker as, like, the top tier - in Tier 1 with the Dante Moores and the Arch Mannings and the Julian Sayins,” Fornelli said. “And listen, I understand that kid put up numbers at North Texas, but like, it’s a different league that he’s playing in now.
“And then I compared the stats because North Texas played in the same league as Byrum Brown did. In fact, they played each other last year, and Byrum Brown played nonconference games against Florida and Boise State and Miami.
Byrum Brown had better stats than Mestemaker did last year in pretty much every category, and yet Mestemaker is the dude we’ve anointed to be the great one because he’s got the NFL prototype size. He’s got the rocket arm.”
The Athletic’s quarterback tiers, released late last month, placed Mestemaker in the top group with Trinidad Chambliss of Ole Miss, Dante Moore of Oregon, CJ Carr of Notre Dame, Darian Mensah of Miami, Julian Sayin of Ohio State, Arch Manning of Texas and Sam Leavitt of LSU. Brown and Becht were both slotted into Tier 3.
Later in the same segment, Walker brought Mestemaker directly into the discussion and asked Fornelli to pick between Oklahoma State’s new quarterback and Miami’s Mensah.
“Oh, Mensah - without question,” Fornelli said. “I mean, listen, I was criticizing Mestemaker earlier because of the way he was ranked in The Athletic’s tiers, which I thought was preposterous.
It’s not because I don’t think he’s good. I do think he’s a very good quarterback.
It’s just to me Darian Mensah has Heisman, No. 1 pick potential. I don’t think that Mestemaker has that.
And then also, the cast around Darian at Miami is significantly better than what Mestemaker is dealing with at Oklahoma State.”
That kind of skepticism will probably draw immediate pushback from some OSU fans, but the bigger picture is hard to miss: people are talking about Oklahoma State’s quarterback in a way they haven’t in a long time. Even if the national buzz overshoots the reality, it still marks a sharp change from the recent seasons when the Cowboys were trying to survive at the position.
And that’s part of why the Mestemaker conversation has gotten so loud. In the debate with Brown, there’s at least a case to make that Mestemaker’s numbers stack up well in certain areas, and he’s doing it as a redshirt freshman who didn’t play quarterback in high school, while Brown is in his fourth year at South Florida. That alone suggests Mestemaker may have more room to grow.
Whatever side you land on in the Mestemaker discussion, the fact that he’s even in it says plenty about where Oklahoma State is right now. It’s a long way from the days when the Cowboys were scrambling at quarterback, including last season’s reality of a wide receiver starting games there. By comparison, this is a very different kind of problem.