COLUMBIA, Mo. — Chew on some crackers, swig some water. It’s time for a blind quarterback tasting.
The names of these two quarterbacks will be revealed shortly, and if you watched ESPN’s “College GameDay” on Saturday, you might have seen this exercise already. But try to set aside quarterback names for half a minute and sample these stats from the first bit of the college football season.
Quarterback A has completed 71 of his 113 passes so far, which comes out to a 62.8% completion percentage. He has thrown for 763 passing yards (190.8 per game), six touchdowns and two interceptions. On the ground, he has picked up 69 rushing yards but no touchdowns.
Quarterback B has completed 110 of his 145 passes, good for a 75.9% completion percentage that leads his conference. He has thrown for 1,203 yards (240.6 per game), nine touchdowns and three interceptions. He has picked up 121 yards on the ground and scored with his legs three times.
In fairness, Quarterback B has played one more game than Quarterback A. But here’s how those schedules have looked:
Quarterback A has gone up against: a bottom-tier Mountain West school, a bottom-tier Conference-USA school, an FCS school known pretty much only for basketball and the nation’s No. 2-ranked team.
(This is where the illusion of blind evaluation fully falls apart.)
Quarterback B has faced: a regional FCS program, an inconsistent Big 12 team, a half-decent Sun Belt school, a strangely sliding Southeastern Conference team, and a Mid-American Conference program that is probably the worst in the FBS.
The question: Which quarterback would you rather have, right now and for the rest of the 2025 season?
If you were Penn State, you (sort of) had a choice between them. In case you hadn’t caught on by now, Quarterback A is Drew Allar, the Nittany Lions’ third-year starter.
After ending Penn State’s time in the College Football Playoff last season with one of the sport’s more ill-timed interceptions, he’s been quite uninspiring — and threw a pick in double overtime to seal a loss to Oregon over the weekend.
Quarterback B is Beau Pribula, Missouri’s starter who backed up Allar for two years before transferring just before Penn State’s CFP run when it became evident Allar was going to stick around for 2025.
Pribula hasn’t been perfect for the undefeated and 19th-ranked Tigers, but he’s been fairly good through his first five games of the season. He’s also been good enough to have fans of the Nittany Lions wondering if they’re stuck with the short straw of that program’s quarterback split, which is an odd but undeniable endorsement of what Pribula has shown as a starter.
Pribula’s rushing ability has been about what it was expected to be when he transferred to Mizzou. After coming in a handful of times per game to run the ball when he was with Penn State, he’s been a savvy and agile rusher when needed for the Tigers, too. That included a 72-yard outing in MU’s SEC opener against South Carolina.
Still, Missouri seemed to have been a little bit cautious with asking Pribula to run — perhaps informed by the contact previous starter Brady Cook took on his running escapades.
In games like Saturday’s blah beatdown of Massachusetts, Pribula was more confined to the pocket than he ordinarily might be. That helped mitigate the risk of something happening to him on a rollout or true run, and an emphasis on short passing work helped him complete enough passes to set a school record for consecutive completions.
Pribula leads the SEC in completion percentage on short throws, defined as those past the line of scrimmage but less than 10 yards downfield, with a 92.4% mark. Only three of the league’s QBs are above 80% in that metric, so Pribula has clearly stood out there.
“He does a really good job with his accuracy,” MU coach Eli Drinkwitz said.
It’s not just the short stuff, though.
Pribula has an SEC-best 58.1% completion percentage for dropbacks in which he’s pressured, according to Pro Football Focus. Only seven of the conference’s quarterbacks are even completing more than half their pressured passes, and only Pribula and Oklahoma’s John Mateer have completed 18 or more passes under duress.
And while the eye test has suggested Pribula, like most quarterbacks, is best when he’s able to funnel the ball to his first read, he’s still leading the SEC in completion percentage on throws that come 2.5 seconds or later after the snap.
One area where there’s room for improvement by Pribula is his pocket presence and ability to avoid pressure. The Tigers’ offensive line has been mediocre this far this season — more on that to come later this week as the Post-Dispatch takes bigger-picture looks at MU during its first bye — which requires Pribula to be alert to potential pressures.
He’s been sacked 12 times this season and has been at fault for five of those, according to a PFF algorithm that splits and assigns responsibility for pressures between a quarterback and his linemen. That’s not a perfect science, and both often share some blame for a sack taking place.
Against UMass, for example, Pribula overreacted to some pressures by trying to step up in the pocket instead of escaping to the side, which led to a couple of avoidable sacks.
“Our pocket climbing is an issue right now,” Drinkwitz said. “The pick was a tipped ball because (Pribula) climbed too far in the pocket. That kind of happened to us with two other sacks, too, instead of just throwing the ball away. So there’s still some maturing and growing in pocket understanding.”
According to PFF’s metric, Pribula has been responsible for the second-highest amount of his own pressures among SEC quarterbacks, tied with Taylen Green, responsible for 25% of them. Mateer, for example, has been the best at feeling out and avoiding pressure with an assigned responsibility rate of only 2.9%.
All in all, it’s been enough for Mizzou to start 5-0, Pribula to look better than his old colleague/competitor at Penn State, and clear strengths and weaknesses to emerge. Not too bad, not too surprising for a first-year starter five games into his tenure.
“Every snap at quarterback is an opportunity to learn,” Drinkwitz said, “and I think he’s doing a really good job of managing the game.”
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Eli Hoff | Post-Dispatch
Mizzou athletics beat writer
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