Fornelli Pours Some Cold Water on the Drew Mestemaker Hype Train

Every team is undefeated in the offseason, which means hype trains can get moving pretty steadily by August.

That’s been the case in Stillwater, with more and more people talking about the potential of high-powered offense returning to Oklahoma State by way of new coach Eric Morris and quarterback Drew Mestemaker. But not everyone is ready to anoint Mestemaker as the next big thing just quite yet.

The Cover 3 Podcast’s Tom Fornelli went on the Brandon Walker College Football Show last week, and they did a segment on transfer quarterbacks.

The segment would pin two transfer QBs against each other, and Mestemaker was first mentioned in response to a tandem he wasn’t a part of.

Walker asked Fornelli who he’d take between Penn State’s Rocco Becht and Auburn’s Byrum Brown in a question about two veterans following their head coach to a new destination, and Fornelli had this to say:

“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 article Fornelli was mentioning came out late last month and included Mestemaker in the top tier of college quarterbacks alongside Trinidad Chambliss (Ole Miss), Dante Moore (Oregon), CJ Carr (Notre Dame), Darian Mensah (Miami), Julian Sayin (Ohio State), Arch Manning (Texas) and Sam Leavitt (LSU). For what it’s worth, Brown and Becht were down in Tier 3.

As for the Mestemaker-Brown stat comparisons, have a look:

Later in the segment came a pairing that actually included Mestemaker, with Walker asking Fornelli who he’d take between the Cowboys’ new QB 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.”

Some OSU fans will immediately jump to Mestemaker’s defense, but I think it’s fair to say you’d rather there be an argument of whether your quarterback is in the top tier in the sport than the issue OSU had last year of literally having a wide receiver start games at quarterback.

My defense in the Mestemaker vs. Brown debate would be that there were plenty of statistics where Mestemaker was better, and he was a redshirt freshman who didn’t play the position in high school, while Brown was in his fourth year at South Florida. One would think Mestemaker has more room to grow than Brown.

Regardless of whether Fornelli is right about Mestemaker or not, the Cowboys’ quarterback being in these types of discussions has OSU lightyears ahead of how things have felt the past few seasons. It’s safe to say no OSU quarterback has had this much said about him nationally before a season than at least Mason Rudolph in 2017.