Talley Swears Allegiance to Hogs
A Top 100 defensive end who looks like The Rock with a mean streak with a full season of working with SEC strength and conditioning coaches under his belt walks into the University of Arkansas and commits while his freshman brother, who looks like he might be fighting for the Intercontinental championship at WWE’s Day 1 pay-per-view in a few weeks, looks on.
So who should I write about? Of course, the walk-on who also committed, but most people didn’t notice…for now.
The internet was littered with videos of LSU transfer defensive Landon Jackson destroying everything from tackling dummies labeled with logos from SEC West schools to your mother’s new boyfriend.
OK, I didn’t necessarily see that last one, but it was easy to envision. Seriously, this young man needs his own YouTube series where he just demolishes everything in sight. He’d be a millionaire by Valentine’s Day.
While streaming through a string of people trying to guess which No. 40 is the 6-7, 273 pound Landon and which is his younger brother Lance, a 6-5, 240 pound defensive lineman who just finished his freshman year of high school, I happened upon a retweet of a tight end from Siloam Springs.
There he was, standing in the Arkansas Razorback version of a Norman Rockwell painting alongside what I can only assume is his mother and father. If it weren’t for the badges around their necks, they could have easily been mistaken for a wholesome family snapping a quick early morning photo on game day before going to volunteer in the concession stands.
I glanced at the name.
Hunter Talley.
Tight End.
Siloam Springs.
It didn’t ring a bell.
The young man appeared to have a strong natural build and decent size. Arkansas head coach Sam Pittman and his staff spent the past year trying every way possible to plug the team’s hole at tight end, so surely the mysterious Talley was among the lists of the nation’s top tight ends.
I settled in, combing a list of five stars, four stars and high three stars, but no such luck. I even ran a Command + F search, but the spreadsheet just coldly spat back a big fat 0.
My efforts thwarted, I turned to the undisputed champion of finding all things obscure. No one can outrun Google.
It turns out Talley gave it a good shot. Division I college recruits don’t have their search results end in the single digits, but the Siloam Springs tight end. Wait. It says here, on one of only five pages of returned search results, that’ he’s a quarterback.
On top of that, it says he threw for 2,221 yards, ran for 1,162 yards, and accounted for 37 touchdowns while racking up a mountain of awards against 6A competition.
How is this kid so invisible?
As I sifted through the crumbs of information, I discovered a young man with a near-perfect ACT score and a list of elite academic schools, plus Memphis.
Great! Now I’m curious, so I have to track down the mystery tight end who’s actually a quarterback from Siloam’s Springs’s Twitter account because there’s no way I can go to sleep with Memphis on a list that includes Columbia, Penn, Harvard and Northwestern witn no explanation.
Talley responds immediately to my out of the blue question with an air of politeness and respect that is sadly becoming uncommon in teens. The explanation is less dramatic than I had hoped, but it makes sense.
“They showed interest early and often,” Talley wrote. “I had been talking to them for a long time and went to a camp and did pretty well.”
Nothing about the young man seemed anything less than top notch. However, as I discovered and confirmed that he would attend Arkansas as a preferred walk-on, I searched up his game film expecting to see the one chink in the persona that is Hunter Talley.
Boy, was I wrong.
I get that what I was watching was the highlights, but there were so many. On top of that, what I was seeing from a 6-4, 220 pound horse was quarterback play that exceeded what I have seen from players with multiple stars behind their names.
Time and time again Talley slid through the pocket, feeling the pressure while keeping his eyes downfield. With the world crashing in around him, he’d cooly make one more side step and a quick step to the precipice of the line of scrimmage before hitting a pass into the tightest of windows for a touchdown.
When the pass wasn’t open in the RPO, Talley tucked it and used his natural instinct for finding daylight where oftentimes there wasn’t any, and simply ran away from defenders.
His style of play is a mix of Matt Jones and K.J. Jefferson. Talley is fearless in all facets and has breakaway speed that looks like it shouldn’t be as he packs on yards of distance between himself and large school secondaries.
At one point, I stopped down to put on the Arkansas vs. Ole Miss seven overtime game just to get a feel for what it would take for Talley to develop into a walk-on version of Matt Jones. That video showed me two things: 1) I can’t believe how much better football was with a fullback or how dominant Mark Pierce was in that game. 2) Talley will not be freshman Matt Jones next year, but then again, neither was Jones in his later years following a shoulder injury.
That being said, the raw materials are there for development. He has touch on his passes, is extremely accurate, and can put a solid zip on the ball when it’s needed. When Talley isn’t working at tight end next fall, it wouldn’t hurt for an offensive assistant to pull him aside and put in a little quarterback work.
At the very least, getting a few cracks at running the opposing team’s scout offense just to see what he can do every now and then might be worth a dabble to squeeze a little extra added value from his time on the team.
In the end, tight end might be just what the doctor ordered as far as landing Talley that sought after opportunity to be a scholarship player for the Razorbacks. But either way, I don’t think signing day will be the last time you see Talley’s name in print for the Razorbacks.
Oh, and that defensive end transfer who looks he rips the head off bears and drinks their blood for fun, he might be pretty good too.
