photo credit: LSU Athletics / Arkansas Athletics / South Carolina Athletics
In the midst of talkin’ season, it seems Arkansas quarterback Taylen Green is quite the divisive figure.
Even within the Razorbacks’ own fan base, people can’t make up their mind about the second-year transfer from Boise State. The opinions range from believing he should be replaced by backup KJ Jackson to thinking he’s Ryan Mallett and Matt Jones rolled into one, with plenty of variation in between.
There’s very little consensus outside the Natural State, too. National media and analysts can’t even agree on where he falls in the SEC pecking order.
Most — like CBS Sports and The Athletic — have him somewhere in the middle, if not just inside the top half, of the league. According to Brad Crawford of CBS/247Sports, Green is someone “NFL scouts have mentioned just outside of the elite tier for 2026,” while Pro Football Focus described him as one of the “most physically gifted quarterbacks in college football” and included him among its top 10 quarterback prospects for the 2026 NFL Draft.
However, he also has his fair share of detractors. On3’s Andy Staples left the 6-foot-6 gunslinger completely off his ranking of the top 10 SEC quarterbacks, NFL Draft analyst Thor Nystrom believes he’ll have to convert to tight end at the next level and former Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron recently leveled some particularly harsh criticism of Green:
Criticisms of Taylen Green are certainly fair. But AJ McCarron was real asshat here and acts as if Green is just simply terrible. pic.twitter.com/0bi4Ftqcug
— HoggyLeeJones (@HoggyLeeJ) July 21, 2025
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum resides Emory Hunt.
A former Louisiana-Lafayette running back whose playing career was derailed by a knee injury, Hunt stayed in the game by coaching high school ball before Hurricane Katrina forced him to relocate from New Orleans to New York.
It was there that he got into the media side of things, creating Football Gameplan in 2007 and eventually becoming a college football color analyst for CBS in 2018. With his website, Hunt produces an annual NFL Draft guide and with that, studies thousands of prospects each year.
With the season still about a month and a half away, he dropped this hot take on a podcast hosted by former NFL player Ross Tucker: “How about we start with the best pro prospect in the SEC? That’s Taylen Green out of Arkansas at the quarterback position.”
In a league that features the five of the top-10 quarterbacks in the country, according to The Athletic, the bombshell claim has already made the rounds in Arkansas circles with Hunt making appearances on radio shows such as “Out of Bounds” on the Buzz 103.7.
It also begs many more questions, so Best of Arkansas Sports reached out to the analyst to get more insight on what he’s seeing that others are apparently missing.
Taylen Green over Nussmeier, Sellers?
The first thing BoAS discovered is that Emory Hunt generally only considers seniors or players his sources indicate are leaning toward entering the NFL Draft early.
LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier and South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers, two players ESPN recently put among the favorites to be selected No. 1 overall in next year’s NFL Draft, fall into those two respective categories.
While Hunt did acknowledge he wanted to see more from Oklahoma’s John Mateer against SEC defenses and Texas’ Arch Manning with a larger sample size, those two quarterbacks were not included in his initial rankings because it’s not a lock that they declare for the draft. Once they do, he’ll dive deeper into their film.
However, Taylen Green’s placement ahead of Nussmeier and Sellers is still notable given the near consensus is that they are among the top quarterback prospects in the country, much less the SEC.
The latter of those has quickly gathered steam as a dark horse pick for the Heisman Trophy after ending the year on a high note, leading the Gamecocks to six straight wins — including an upset at Clemson — to end the regular season.
Sellers completed 65.6% of his passes for 2,534 yards, 18 touchdowns and 7 interceptions, plus added 674 yards and 7 scores on the ground, but there’s still room for him to improve as a passer.
“I feel like everything is a fastball and I want to see him throw with touch a little bit better, more consistently,” Hunt said about Sellers. “That’s an area where Green has the ability to throw with touch.”
Another reason Hunt ranks Green ahead of Sellers is that he hasn’t seen enough of the South Carolina quarterback going through his progressions, as he went into scramble mode too quickly last year.
However, he does have Sellers ahead of the more veteran Nussmeier, who’s entering his fifth season with the Tigers and coming off a 2024 campaign in which he completed 64.2% of his passes for 4,052 yards, 29 touchdowns and 12 interceptions.
Those stats are the most impressive of the bunch, but it’s what Hunt saw on film that has the LSU quarterback at No. 3 on his list.
“One thing I like about Sellers is — this is my No. 1 trait for quarterbacks, period — he’s not scared, he’s not afraid of pressure,” Hunt said. “Nussmeier shows some of that, but Nussmeier also tends to not want tot take a hit.”
Hunt also mentioned that Nussmeier’s accuracy against pressure “isn’t always the best,” comparing that aspect of his game to Gardner Minshew with the Colts.
High on the Arkansas QB
Of course, a major reason why Emory Hunt has the Arkansas quarterback at the top of his list is because of Taylen Green himself.
He is a big believer in the skillset he showed transitioning from Boise State in the Mountain West to the SEC, displaying an ability to “leverage his athleticism.”
While that was sometimes to a detriment, scrambling backward 20-30 yards and taking unnecessary sacks, Hunt said that athleticism also created windows in the passing game and allowed things to develop.
“He has the size that they look for and then he has the athleticism that checks off all those boxes in terms of as a runner and also some of his ability to create,” Hunt said. “Then you combine that with his arm talent in terms of being able to throw the deep ball with velocity, to be able to make different throws from different arm angles.”
Hunt is also very confident that Green will experience the same “exponential” growth quarterbacks typically experience from Year 1 to Year 2 under Bobby Petrino.
He went so far as to compare him to the likes of Randall Cunningham, Vince Young and Colin Kaepernick.
Those are some lofty parallels and his placement of Green is certainly unique at this stage of the draft cycle, but it’s also nothing new to Hunt.
While he’s certainly been wrong on some of his evaluations (like thinking DeShone Kizer would be a star), the former college running back has also nailed some others.
In 2021, he compared Cam Ward — long before he was the first overall pick in this year’s draft — to the likes of Steve McNair and Patrick Mahomes. A year before that, he had Jalen Hurts as his No. 2 quarterback in a class that featured Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert and Tua Tagovailoa. Hunt also had Lamar Jackson as his top-rated quarterback in the 2018 NFL Draft, when he was the fifth quarterback taken.
“I’d rather be wrong by myself than wrong in a group,” Hunt said. “If I’m wrong about Taylen Green, cool, at least you got what I really thought about Taylen Green. But if I’m wrong because I didn’t want to stand out there by myself and I kind of agree with all these guys that are saying the same thing, then I’m just being a coward.”
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Emory Hunt talks Taylen Green’s draft prospects around the 3:30 mark here:
More coverage of Arkansas football and Taylen Green from BoAS…