The joke would be: Nick Saban is the only person who successfully stopped Jalen’s pain.
But before we rehash the past, or who did what, and why, perhaps this could be a falling and rising moment for this generation of college football quarterbacks.
Maybe if we really look close, the wound is not an outlier. He is part of a quarterback trend that can no longer be ignored.
“Failure is worthless to be told,” Georgia Kobe coach Kirby Smart told me last summer.
Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of it.
Somewhere, in the h and bust of free player movements and nil trading, if it doesn’t work here, there is always a transfer portal and a real story that everyone needs.
It tells the story of a young quarterback from suburban Houston who arrived in Alabama as a medium-term subscriber in 2016, when Saban realizes that a quarter of the season opener has to be on the field. It took me. If you think it’s an unlikely ride, consider these next steps.
– But on the two-minute touchdown drive from Deshaun Watson and Clemson, Hurts would have been a national championship quarterback as a freshman.
– A year later, after leading Alabama to 25 wins with 27 starts, Harts was benched for freshman Tua Tagovailoa at halftime in the College Football Playoffs National Championship Game against Georgia .
– A year later, after the humility of losing his job again in fall camp, Hart stayed in Alabama, eventually replacing Tagovailoa, who was injured in the SEC Championship Game. And he led the comeback victory.
The move to Oklahoma was then a finalist in the Heisman Trophy as he led the Sooners into the college football playoffs. He then endured five more years ago, finally completing his path to red in the Super Bowl Championship.
From the bench at the time moments of his athletic career until he returned to the point where he was named Super Bowl MVP. That’s the value of failure.
After losing Super Bowl LVII in 2023, the mobile phone wallpaper was a picture of his disappointing self. That photo was the first and last he saw every day.
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But it’s not just Hearts in his unique battle with failure.
Almost a year ago, Kansas told Wil Howard four seasons after the programme that he was moving forward with sophomore Avery Johnson at Uber-Talented. There, Howard signed with Ohio State, absorbing two brutal losses to Oregon and Michigan, then did the best four-game stretch of his college career, earning it all.
Stetson Bennett failed in Georgia and was told not to play Bulldogs quarterback and left to play in junior college. He returned a year later and eventually won consecutive national titles from 2021-22.
Joe Barrow won three seasons of starting job at Ohio State, then moved to LSU in 2018, and in 2019 he marked the biggest individual season in college football, winning the national title and the Heisman Trophy. did.
Do you see trends?
College football issues are not transfer portals. I’m giving up.
The problem is that players bet the system for more money, not making money from names, images, and portraits, but ignoring the beautiful throws of the grind.
It’s a quarterback, the most important position on the field, one position with more departures than any other, and you can jump from team to team and dream.
For the simple money and simple things for the next team, we avoid all the chances of failure and learning from it and developing.
According to the 247Sports Composite rankings, four of the top 10 quarterbacks in the 2024 recruitment class are no longer with the original team. Not five of the top 10 of 2023.
The Free Player move saw Hurts benched in 2017 and again won the job in his 2018 junior season. You may graduate early from Alabama before the start of the 2019 season and then use your alumni. Transfer rules and play immediately in Oklahoma.
But think about this. He could have left Alabama in the fall camp of 2018. He could have put out a season and played for Oklahoma in 2019.
A beautiful throw changed him. Just as Bennett, Barrow and Howard did after him.
Like it was for Bo Nix and Kurtis Rourke, and even Arch Manning.
Failure is worth it. You don’t need the Super Bowl trophy to see it.
Matt Hayes is a senior national college football writer for the USA Today Sports Network. Follow him with X at @matthayescfb.