2026 Gophers Position Previews: Quarterbacks

Summer days are getting shorter. Football is coming. To make you the fan at your tailgate most informed on the top, middle, and bottom of Minnesota's depth chart, Ski-U-Blog is previewing each position group on the roster. Today's post covers quarterback, a position the Gophers have reason to believe is settled for a long time.

Likely Starter

Playcaller Greg Harbaugh Jr. did not go easy on his redshirt freshman quarterback. From the outset, Drake Lindsey ran the full Minnesota offense. In three of his first four starts, Lindsey attempted 32 or more passes.

The fourth, a shootout win over Rutgers, was a banner day.

Lindsey threw for 324 yards, the most by a Minnesota quarterback since 2019. He was precise and composed, cutting up the defense in a game where his team needed every one of those yards. It was a class performance, the kind that said with minimal qualification that the Gophers had found their guy.

There were another nine games to play, however, and those were not as superlative. His pedestrian (or worse) outings outnumbered the great ones. He ran in the winning touchdown in overtime versus Michigan State, offering a signature moment in a game where he still averaged just 5.1 yards per pass attempt. He finished the year with 6.1 yards per attempt, ranking 129th out of 145 FBS players who threw 150 or more passes.

Yet Lindsey enters this fall with some hype — hype I'm not really sure is misplaced, at least on a long-term scale. What are fair, measured expectations for his second season?

The first positive from Lindsey's debut is simple but still important: He led a complicated West Coast scheme, full of motions and shifts and short on the easy RPOs that defined past Minnesota offenses. He did so behind a line that the coaching staff rearranged multiple times midseason due to poor performance, with Darius Taylor — a vital part of the passing game — spending much of the season hobbled or sidelined with injuries. His receiving corps, while not without talent, was thinner than hoped and lacked a genuine star. Lindsey had a tough job, and he never relinquished it or even provoked external conversations about benching him. Even if he won't get credit for that as a sophomore (and shouldn't), he deserved it as a freshman.

As a passer, Lindsey shows purposeful footwork. He plays from a solid base, not from his toes, and usually does not waste a motion as he goes through his progression. He points his front foot at his target and brings his hips around, leading the receiver into the open space with well-weighted passes. When his passes are good, they look real good.

Lindsey's greatest strength is, well, the strength of his arm. Lindsey is unafraid to attack the middle of the field, and that is where he makes many of his best passes. He puts real zip on the ball, and his quick release looks easy. The wobbly, ugly spiral he had in high school is much crisper, making a simpler catch for the receiver — whom Lindsey spares from headhunting safeties with deft placement and timing.

For narrative convenience, earlier, I glossed over how good Lindsey was
versus Northwestern. You really should watch it again, even despite the ending.

Lindsey delivers the deep ball on a high arc into his receiver's path, leading them open. He is long more often than he is short, and he is not usually long by much. He can absolutely make the big-boy throws.

However, Lindsey sometimes falls out of his throw or puts too much weight on his back foot, which creates a less stable platform. This puts more of the motion on his arm, which leads to inconsistent accuracy and lessened velocity on throws that need precision and heat to complete.

The platform issues get worse with defenders in his face. In general, Lindsey's clock can accelerate too much under pressure. Rather than stepping up in the pocket, he often tries bailing out the back door, which for a guy as slow as him means adding yards onto a sack rather than actually buying time.

In a game like the blowout loss to Ohio State, where Lindsey was under constant duress, the negatives compounded. After taking a beating for almost three quarters, Lindsey's habit of rainbowing screens made this play dead on arrival:

Easily his worst performance of the year was four weeks later in Iowa City. The Gophers' line (especially the right side) was having another woeful day, and receivers at times struggled to get open, but Lindsey looked out of sorts. He was frequently off-line, missing over, behind, and ahead of his target. He threw three picks through terrible decision-making. The first was a brutal, unnecessary throw into double-coverage; the second a hopeless, 45-yard backyard-football heave on the run; the last a more forgivable but still forced throw zipped past his checkdown into the arms of a linebacker. Lindsey's final line: 16-for-28 (57.1 percent), 109 yards (3.9 per attempt), 3 interceptions, 4 sacks.

The good news is that Lindsey finished the season without throwing another interception. Escaping the New Mexico game without a pick was admittedly unlucky, but overall, Lindsey does take care of the ball. He has impressive traits and puts some real "wow" moments on tape. The negatives are both fixable and in significant part external.

I won't go as far as to put him in the first round of a way-too-early 2027 NFL Draft board. (Such lists are always in part spitballing to fulfill content demands, but Nate Tice is not the type to just throw stuff at the wall unless he means it a little bit.) Lindsey can end up one of the top quarterbacks in the Big Ten, however long it takes for him to get there.

A reasonable goal for this season is just entering the middle of the pack. If he produces that outcome, we can consider loftier aspirations for Lindsey and for next year's Gophers.

Key Backups

Max Shikenjanski arrived to the program as a walk-on and has been here longer than anyone else: He's the only quarterback who was on the roster in 2023. He must have stuck around for good reasons, as he has fended off competition from multiple transfers and enters the fall as a lock for the No. 2 job. Concessions about the Northwestern State game abound, but it's still neat to see the backup rip a 52-yarder.

Shikenjanski's day — 4-for-5 for 80 yards, plus a rushing touchdown — was enough to make him a cult favorite but, combined with an okay spring game, probably indicates little about his bona fides. (A former basketball player at Stillwater, he's identifiably more mobile than Lindsey.) It is most likely bad news if we have to find out whether he can take on Big Ten defenses.

Darius Taylor has served as Wildcat quarterback the last couple of seasons and will continue to do so. There is also freshman tight end Roman Voss, who threw and ran for 10,015 yards and 123 touchdowns in his high school career. If the Gophers trust Voss with a real role early on, this could be one of his places.

Notables Unlikely to Contribute

The story remains the same for Dylan Wittke, who was the third Gopher quarterback to play against Northwestern State and was swiftly benched again for Shikenjanski after throwing an interception. He must like being here (and people must like him here), as Wittke won't find playing time at the U of M.

Redshirt sophomore Michael Merdinger is on his third school. Originally a North Carolina signing, he transferred to Liberty last season, where he started two games and even threw a 59-yard touchdown to force overtime against Kennesaw State. He has 92 rushing yards and a touchdown on 13 non-sack carries as well. But when in games, his coaches didn't let him run a complete playbook, and if he ever starts for Minnesota, it will be for catastrophic reasons.

Of Minnesota's two true freshman quarterbacks, Owen Lansu easily had the better spring game. He went 5-of-7 for 110 yards and a long touchdown to Hayden Moore. Lansu threw some excellent seam passes as well, like here to Zion Steptoe:

In his prospect highlights — which are organized in unusually convenient fashion — Lansu demonstrates that he can make all the throws an offense needs: deep, inside, outside, quick. He improved his completion rate by 8 points while adding 1.4 yards to each completion as a senior. Listed at 6 feet, 1 inch, he does not have archetypal height, but Lansu will be an intriguing prospect while he sits and develops.

Meanwhile, Brady Palmer's spring game was dreadful: five attempts, three interceptions, no completions. He'd only been a college student for three months, mind, so we will not assume that is Palmer's true level.

As a high schooler, Palmer looked quite sharp. He drops deep passes perfectly in stride for his receivers. He is comfortable throwing on the run and scrambles well — maybe too quickly and a little too adventurously, but well. Since the Gophers have an undisputed starter with plenty of eligibility left, Palmer will spend plenty of time on the shelf. The hope is that, if he stays in the program, the staff can lessen his hero ball tendencies and convert his physical talent into a capable, stable quarterback.