Eli Lopez | Quarterback | Class of 2029 | Science Hill High School | Johnson City, Tennessee
Eli Lopez will tell you the best part of playing quarterback has nothing to do with playing quarterback.
“The thing I enjoy most about being a QB isn’t on the field,” he said. “A quarterback is a personality. You need to be a leader on and off the field. If you are all about the athleticism and arm strength, you’re not a quarterback.”
That’s a strong claim from a player in the Class of 2029, and the useful thing about Eli is that he’s already had to prove it. Early in a season, he broke his clavicle. For a young quarterback, that’s the version of the injury nobody prepares you for — not a surgery or a career question, just a long stretch of standing on the sideline watching the sport happen without you.
“I was devastated and didn’t know if I would be able to play the rest of the season,” he said. What he did with the time says more than any throw would have. He stayed at practices. He worked with his teammates. And he sat with the other quarterbacks — the ones playing in his place — and helped them understand the things they hadn’t figured out yet. He credits his faith for getting him through it, praying his way across a season he couldn’t participate in.
A player who defines the position as personality and leadership, then spends an injured season coaching up his own replacements, is a player whose definition is real.
Football came to him through two sources: Tom Brady in Super Bowl 50, and his dad, who played and coached. “I took after people I looked up to and inspired myself to be better than them,” he said, “but most importantly always be better than myself.”
Ten years in, his list of what makes a quarterback reads like something he’s revised more than once. Leadership on and off the field. Accountability for yourself and everyone else. Discipline. Mindset, which he marks as the most important. Confidence — and he adds, unprompted, not cockiness. Determination toward goals. It’s a list of six things and not one of them is physical.
His quarterback influences break the same way. Brady for leading a team back from 28–3 and for who he is off the field. Joe Burrow for accountability. Josh Allen for grit, and specifically for the part where nobody believed in him. “He falls short of the Super Bowl, but he doesn’t give up and he never will.” And Drake Maye, whose mindset and public faith Eli connects directly to his own.
The coach who shaped him is Jeremy Bosken, who had him from seventh grade through the end of eighth. “He’s the one who taught me how to be a man and to not let the little things stop me,” Eli said. The word he attaches to that lesson is footsoldiers — a reference to Jeremiah 12:5, one of the two verses he names as central to his life alongside Joshua 1:9. The passage asks what you’ll do against horses if you’ve already worn out racing men on foot. It’s a question about whether you’re prepared for the harder thing, and it’s a strange and fitting thing for an eighth grader to carry into a football career.
Bosken trusted him enough to put him on the varsity field as an eighth grader at Tri-Cities Christian Academy, which is where Eli’s favorite plays come from. His first varsity touchdown throw was a screen that went 70 yards, and he’s quick to hand the credit over — he threw it, the receiver did everything after. The second was a slant from the 20 that he places precisely. There’s also a fourth-and-nine where he pulled the ball, evaded three defenders, and dove out to barely get the first.
Bosken has since moved on to become an athletic director at Furman, and Eli has transferred. They still talk. “I would not be who I am or where I am without him.”
His goals now are concrete. Get physically ready to compete for the starting varsity job as a sophomore, and hold onto the pinpoint accuracy he’s built. Past that: learn what leadership actually requires, so he can put his teammates and coaches in the best position possible and build real relationships with them.
He’s been to camps at Tennessee, Chattanooga, ETSU, Tusculum, Carson-Newman, Maryville, Lenoir-Rhyne, and UVA Wise. That’s eight programs across the region, from FBS down, and it’s a player treating exposure as work rather than waiting for it.
Eli Lopez thinks the job is bigger than the throws. He’s spent a season proving he means it.
The Part Film Doesn’t Capture
Eli’s own argument creates his own problem. He believes the quarterback position is mostly what happens off the field — the team dinners, the church, the accountability, the season he spent injured teaching the quarterbacks who replaced him. He’s right. He’s also describing the exact set of qualities that never show up on a highlight reel.
Film shows the slant from the 20. It does not show a kid with a broken collarbone standing at practice helping someone else read a defense. The only way that reaches a coach is if someone writes it down and puts it in front of him — which is what an upgraded QB Magazine membership is built to do, and why doing it heading into a season he’s competing for a varsity job is worth more than doing it later.
Custom graphics. Our design team produces pieces from a member’s own photos, stats, and milestones — season openers, game performances, camp announcements, starting-job news. Eli has already been in front of eight college programs at camps. A clean graphic in publication format is what keeps him on their radar between those visits, and it’s what a coach forwards to another coach.
Our platforms, not just his. His accounts reach Johnson City — school, teammates, family, church. QB Magazine’s Instagram and X reach college staffs, quarterback trainers, camp directors, and recruiting-side followers across the country. Same content, a fundamentally different audience, and for a player whose camp list is regional, national reach is the piece he can’t manufacture himself.
Three seasons of accumulation. Recruiting runs on familiarity. A staff that has seen his name repeatedly across a sophomore and junior season doesn’t open his film cold — they open it recognizing him. That builds by appearing consistently rather than by one big moment, and starting it as a sophomore gives him the full runway instead of a senior-year sprint.
Where the whole story lives. Every article and graphic stays permanently on his QB Magazine profile, one link that carries the throws and everything Eli thinks matters more than the throws. The injured season. The verses. Coach Bosken. The part he’d want a coach to actually know.
He said the goal is to always be better than himself. This is where that gets documented.
More info: quarterbackmagazine.com/memberships