Urban Meyer took Minnesota quarterback Drake Lindsey from a good weekend storyline to an NFL conversation on Friday, saying Todd McShay believes the Gophers passer could still sneak into the first round. Meyer called Lindsey a big, stationary quarterback with a laser, then added that the quarterback’s arm strength and mistake-free style are drawing real draft attention.
The comments landed just as the Gophers were hosting FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff for the first time in program history before meeting Michigan on Saturday morning. That made Lindsey the center of a rare national stage for Minnesota, with Meyer’s remarks giving the matchup a draft angle as well as a Big Ten one.
Meyer said Lindsey was a risk-taker against Washington last week and pointed to three throws he would have told him not to make. Still, Meyer framed those same snaps as evidence of why evaluators keep looking harder at him. In Meyer’s view, Lindsey is a big, strong-armed kid who does not make mistakes, and that blend is why a first-round path remains in play.
The praise carried extra weight because Meyer has spent 25 years around quarterbacks and coached some of the best of the last 25 years of college football, including Tim Tebow, Alex Smith and J.T. Barrett. He also said he has known P.J. Fleck for a long time, dating back to when Fleck was a receivers coach at Rutgers under Greg Schiano from 2010 to 2011. Meyer called him a nut job in the best possible way, a coach with unbelievable energy, and said Minnesota has not been bad under any of several recent staffs.
Even with that boost, the numbers around Saturday kept the bigger picture grounded. Minnesota entered as a 5.5-point underdog against Michigan, and a victory would have been its first in the Little Brown Jug since 2014. That is the friction in Lindsey’s rise: the draft talk is getting louder, but it is arriving in the middle of a game Minnesota still had to prove it could win.
If Lindsey handles Michigan the way Meyer thinks he can handle NFL pressure, the first-round talk gets harder to dismiss. If he does not, Friday’s praise will read like another early spotlight on a quarterback still trying to turn traits into proof.
