The last time we saw Josh Allen was in a Denver tunnel back in January. Tears running down his face. Four turnovers. A 33-30 overtime loss that ended with an interception begetting Denver’s game-winning drive, and the best hope Allen had ever had of quarterbacking the Bills to a Super Bowl Championship ended in a defeat that will sting for years. “I feel like I let my teammates down tonight,” he said, and there was no spin to put on it. He had.
Top Three NFL Quarterbacks to Watch in 2026
NFL’s Chaotic 2025 Season
But the 2024 MVP wasn’t the only one who had a miserable 2025 season. Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL against the Chargers in Week 15 as the Kansas City Chiefs finished 6-11, their first playoff miss since 2014 and the first postseason without Mahomes since he was a backup. Lamar Jackson suffered a hamstring injury in Week 4, and the Ravens, who had opened the season averaging 37 points per game and were widely penciled into the Super Bowl, never recovered. They missed the playoffs entirely as they watched Pittsburgh clinch the AFC North from the couch.
The Seattle Seahawks were the ones who took full advantage, riding the wave of their vaunted “Dark Side” defense to claim the Lombardi, despite online betting sites making them +6600 outsiders in preseason. Now, they’re the reigning champions and popular crypto betting sites such as Thunderpick have them as the +900 second-favorites to repeat as champions, only behind their NFC West rival, the Los Angeles Rams.
As 2026 approaches, three quarterbacks with completely different stories, completely different stakes and everything to prove are circling the base, wondering if this could be their year. So, who are they and what could the next NFL season have in store for each of them? Let’s take a look.
Joe Burrow (Cincinnati Bengals)
Watch the 2024 tape first. Not the highlights, all of it: 4,918 passing yards and 43 touchdowns. It was the most complete passing season in the NFL that year and the kind of performance that ends MVP debates before they start. Except Joe Burrow didn’t win the coveted award that year, as his Cincinnati Bengals went 9-8 and missed the playoffs for a second straight year, despite their mercurial quarterback’s exploits. The 2025 season was supposed to be the year they re-emerged as a contender, and then Joey B got injured yet again.
In Week 2, a Grade 3 turf toe injury left him needing surgery and spending two months on the sidelines watching a Bengals that was team built around him fragment without him. Cincy won just once without their talisman and sat at 3-8 by the time Burrow returned on Thanksgiving. Despite the season being already pretty much over, he returned anyway and immediately led his side to a 32-14 victory on the road against rivals Baltimore as if he’d never been away.
Two injury-disrupted seasons out of the last three, however, is the central question. The Bengals have missed the playoffs in each of them, and even when he displayed league-leading numbers in his one fit season, it wasn’t enough to mount a postseason charge. What if this is just who Joe Burrow is now? What if the turf, the wrist and the toe have permanently altered the calculus on a talent that should be generational?
But if it hasn’t, the upside is clear. Joe Burrow remains a top-three quarterback in the league when he’s fit, and 2026 will surely be the season he remains fit. At 29, he’s now in his prime and his championship window may well start to close in the coming years. There won’t be many more chances for him to get it right, and Burrow will seek to do exactly that in 2026.
Bryce Young (Carolina Panthers)
Carolina drafted Bryce Young first overall in 2023. The benching came in 2024 and the trade rumors followed; not idle speculation, but specific, sourced ones about real conversations between front offices on whether the Panthers had made a catastrophic mistake, especially with the number two overall C. J. Stroud thriving in Houston. The football world had already written off Young’s NFL career before he’d even turned 23.
The backend of 2024 brought some home, however, with the former Heisman winner returning as a starter and leading his team to two wins in their final three games. In 2025, Young led the Panthers through six game-winning drives, an 8-9 record and an NFC South title nobody predicted in August. The Wild Card berth, which was Carolina’s first postseason appearance in years, was capped by a performance against the Rams that nearly ended in a stunning upset. Young posted 3,011 yards, completed 63.6% of his throws, threw 23 touchdown passes and ran for 216 yards and two more scores.
His fourth year is is when we find out who Bryce Young actually is. Carolina exercised their fifth-year option for 2027, indicating the Panthers aren’t hedging, and Tetairoa McMillan is developing into the kind of weapon that can make a quarterback’s life measurably easier. The agents negotiating Young’s future know exactly what this season means and so does he. With one more step forward into cleaner decision-making and reducing those 11 interceptions, the redemption arc can become a franchise cornerstone story. But Young still has to prove 2025 wasn’t the outlier and that proof should come this fall.
Jaxson Dart (New York Giants)
John Harbaugh spent 18 years in Baltimore, watching Lamar Jackson arrive as a raw dual-threat athlete in 2018 and guiding him into a two-time MVP. When Harbaugh was fired after the Ravens’ surprising playoff miss, the Giants moved quickly to make him their head coach. People asked why he would head to this ailing franchise, to which he said, “Take one look at Dart’s rookie tape.”
The Giants traded back into the first round to take Dart 25th overall, and by Week 4, he’d displaced Russell Wilson as the starter and never looked back. Over fourteen games, he racked up 2,272 yards and fifteen touchdowns against five interceptions, a 3:1 ratio on a 4-13 team with Malik Nabers barely available. And then the number that made NFL scouts stop in their tracks: 487 rushing yards and nine rushing touchdowns, a Giants franchise record and the third-most by a rookie quarterback in NFL history.
Can Dart replicate what Jackson did under Harbaugh in Baltimore? The mechanisms are specific: Harbaugh’s system builds from the ground up, emphasizing run-pass option architecture that weaponizes a quarterback’s legs without compromising his development as a pocket passer. Lamar Jackson didn’t just become an elite runner under Harbaugh; he became a legitimate deep-ball threat, a play-action master and a chess player. The dual-threat nightmare evolved into something complete.
Jaxson Dart has the athletic profile. He has the accuracy. He has, critically, the coach who has done this once before. Every NFC East rival watching that combination with a full offseason together should be uncomfortable.
Thanks for reading our article on the “Top Three NFL Quarterbacks to Watch in 2026.” You can find more articles like this here on our website or on our YouTube channel.
*Photo Credit: Jim Dedmon – USA TODAY Sports*
