UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s new era began Saturday with a quarterback it never recruited out of high school.
Rocco Becht, who followed coach Matt Campbell from Iowa State, completed 13 of 18 passes for 271 yards and a career-high four touchdowns in a 45-0 win over Marshall, Penn State’s athletic department said. He is now in the majority: about 65 percent of FBS starting quarterbacks who opened the 2026 season transferred at some point in their careers, the Associated Press reported Monday.
The AP’s survey describes a quarterback market that has moved off the high school recruiting calendar and onto a January one. The numbers behind it, from three separate reports, show what a scholarship offer is now worth to a teenager being recruited this fall.
The mechanics are money. ESPN’s Max Olson reported in May that 200 FBS scholarship quarterbacks entered the portal in January and that only 16 of 55 Power Four teams with settled situations, or 29 percent, planned to start a passer signed out of high school. Programs seeking experienced passers needed deals of $2 million or more in many cases, Olson wrote, against a revenue-sharing budget of roughly $15 million.
Becht is what that money buys. Penn State hired Campbell away from Iowa State on Dec. 5, 2025, on an eight-year deal, ESPN reported. Becht followed, arriving Jan. 4 with 26 career wins as a starter, the most of any returning quarterback in the sport, ESPN reported.
In Penn State’s postgame transcript, Campbell credited the experience. “When you have a quarterback that’s played extensively, I think he’s got the ability to take what the defense gives him,” he said.
AP reported that more than 80 percent of the top 50 quarterbacks in the 2023 recruiting class have transferred, and that nearly twice as many of that group have attended at least three colleges as have stayed at one.
“Instead of recruiting the child, now you’re recruiting a man,” Trent Dilfer, a former UAB head coach and Super Bowl-winning quarterback who now coaches Lipscomb Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, told The Associated Press.
Jason Negro, the coach at St. John Bosco in Bellflower, California, told the AP the timing punishes recruits who sign in December, weeks before the portal opens. “You might look at a roster in November or December — and in January it looks completely different,” he said.
The path through a college depth chart has narrowed with it. Power Four teams averaged 10.3 transfer starters a season from 2016 through 2021 and 26.8 from 2022 through 2026, while starters who were true or redshirt freshmen fell from an average of 37.7 to 22, USA TODAY’s Paul Myerberg reported Sept. 2. Only seven quarterbacks starting in 2026 spent at least two full seasons as a backup first, he found.
Georgia has started one true transfer quarterback since Kirby Smart was hired in 2016, Myerberg wrote. Smart told him the results are hard to argue with: “The two (quarterbacks) who played for it all last year, what were they? Transfers. Two before that? Transfers. One before that was a transfer. It’s crazy that has become the model.”
Locally, the old model is still winning. Lehigh, ranked 10th in the AFCA FCS Coaches Poll, is 2-0 behind junior Hayden Johnson, a Manheim Township High School graduate who started all 13 games as a sophomore and made first-team All-Patriot League.
Johnson completed 16 of 19 passes for a career-high 271 yards and two touchdowns in a 45-14 win at Georgetown on Saturday, the same passing total Becht posted that afternoon at Beaver Stadium.