A Jersey Guy: Young's star keeps getting brighter
The ironic part about Bryce Young being one victory away from an historic national championship-Heisman Trophy daily double is that he came to Alabama because of the lack emphasis on such accomplishments.
"One of the biggest reasons I went to Alabama,'' said Young, who will lead the Tide surge against Georgia in Monday night's national championship game in Indianapolis, " was I knew I would never have to worry about individual accolades.''
That, dating back to the days of Paul Bear Bryant, has always been the Tide way of doing things: accomplishments as a team (SEC, national championships) were the preferred method.
If individual residuals were by-products of that, so be it.
That seemed especially true at quarterback, where Alabama, while producing a trove of NFL quality QB's has seldom kicked a legendary QB into the system, with Bart Starr, Ken Stabler and Joe Namath being the leaders of a pack which as you can see all came from a generation 50 years ago.
That has change in the past two years.
A year ago, Alabama coach Nick Saban won his sixth national championship in Tuscaloosa with a Heisman winning wide receiver DeVonta Smith) and an NFL first round QB (Mac Jones).
This year's team has rolled into its second consecutive national championship game with a 13-1 record, led by an improbable (at the start of the season) Heisman winner in Young, a 6-foot-190 pound sophomore from California who had not started one game.
That is not to say Young's success--46 TDs, 5 interceptions 4,503 passing yards) was unexpected.
In fact, it was almost the opposite. Young came to Alabama from Mater Dei High School in southern California as a 5-star recruit, one of the most highly sought after QBs in the country.
He was first recruited when he was 14 by Texas Tech and then coach Kliff Kingsbury.
He has made a seamless transition from Jones, who has been a key element in the New England Patriots return to the playoffs this season.
"When you look across the board at the efficiency with which Bryce Young has played and he has good weapons around him, he's really got a good team around him,'' said Georgia coach Kirby Smart in Sunday's zoom press conference call.
"But make no mistake about it, he's elite at what he does. To have the number of touchdown passes. the interception ratio, I don't know that I've ever seen anything like it.
And we talk about him as Houdini because he can make people miss. He gets rid of the ball. People don't even account the number of times this guy has avoided sacks and thrown the ball with no intention of anybody catching it. But he knows where to throw the ball, to not take a sack. When you do that, you're really elite.''
Saban, who is chasing a record 8th national championship, sees a first-year starter with the poise of a veteran.
""Bryce does about as good a job as anybody we've ever had in our program in terms of how he prepares for a game,'' said Saban. ""how he studies the other team, how he sort of knows the ins and outs of what we want to execute and we want to try and do on offense.
He's well liked by his teammates. He's a leader and he's got the sort of emotional stability about him, he doesn't really get frustrated or upset in any kind of way, even when things don't go well. He's a very, very mature guy, way beyond his years in terms of what he needs to be successful.'
It was Young who was the catalyst for Alabama's game season saving come back against Auburn in the final game of the regular season, as well as Young's coolness in taking apart Georgia in the SEC title game.
Now he must do it one more time, on the biggest stage of the college football season.