To say that Tua Tagovailoa’s past 365 days have been eventful would be an understatement. That’d be like saying “Nick Saban is a successful football coach” or “Alabama fans are passionate.”

Tagovailoa’s rise isn’t quite the oft-used Drake lyric (“Started from the bottom, now we here”) because at this time last year, the Alabama quarterback wasn’t at the bottom. He was still a former 5-star recruit who had played a somewhat decent amount his freshman year. Some believed that when Alabama’s offense slowed a bit down the stretch, Tagovailoa deserved a chance to start over Jalen Hurts.

Tagovailoa’s 365 days are more “started from a pretty good place, now we here.”

As he prepares to start in his first national championship game (technically true), I thought it’d be a fitting time to look back on just how eventful his year has been.

Pre-2017 national championship: The anxious freshman backup who wanted more

Zero career starts + 2 more years of Hurts = 1 extremely unique ultimatum.

We later found out that’s what Tagovailoa had ahead of the national championship. In his mind, the only way he was going to stay at Alabama was either if Hurts got, well, hurt, or if Nick Saban made one of the boldest in-game switches in college football history.

Originally, it was former Alabama offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin who broke that news days after the title game during an appearance on “The Dan Patrick Show.” According to Kiffin, people inside the Alabama program knew that Tagovailoa was frustrated that, despite outperforming Hurts in practice, he didn’t have a chance to start and that anything but a miracle in the title game against Georgia was going to result in his departure.

Months later, Tagovailoa confirmed what Kiffin said.

“I wanted to leave the school. So I told myself if I didn’t play in the last game, which was the national championship game, I would transfer out,” Tagovailoa said, per Hawaii News Now.

Apparently there was even a moment during the 2017 regular season when Tagovailoa had a specific transfer destination in mind.

“I called my dad and asked him if my offer to the University of Southern California was still available,” Tagovailoa said about his thoughts during his first months with the Crimson Tide. “I wanted to leave. I told my dad I wanted to go to a school where I thought it’d be easier for me and wouldn’t challenge me so much.”

Tagovailoa has since walked back those comments and chalked up his wavering Alabama faith to just not wanting to deal with the difficulty of practices. The “out-of-context” reasoning was used by Tagovailoa, who said that playing time wasn’t dictating his pre-national championship emotions.

Whether you believe Kiffin’s side of the story or Tagovailoa’s, it was clear that the freshman quarterback at least had some doubts about his future in Tuscaloosa.

2017 national championship: Not one, but two miracles happen

After a scoreless first half against the stout Georgia defense, Alabama needed two miracles. Or rather, Tagovailoa needed two miracles.

The first was that he needed Saban to make the ultimate roll-of-the-dice call — bench Hurts, AKA same player who earned SEC Offensive Player of the Year honors a season ago and had led the program to a national championship. It was the type of move that seemed more like something a fan would demand from his living room. In reality, the ramifications of doing something like that could’ve had a ripple effect across college football.

Saban would cross that bridge when it came. Tagovailoa was in, and miracle No. 1 was in the books.

As for the other miracle, perhaps that was the wrong way to describe it. As we’ve seen since that night, dropping in a perfect deep ball after looking off a safety in Cover 2 isn’t anything miraculous for Tagovailoa.

But doing so in overtime on second and 26 to walk off the national championship? At the very least, it qualified as “legendary.”

From the moment the ball dropped into DeVonta Smith’s hands and he raced around the end zone in celebration, Tagovailoa had carved out his place in history. An instant classic it was, not only because of the ending but because of the magnitude of Saban’s gutsy call to turn to his true freshman.

The anxious freshman backup became the talk of the sports world — with botched pronunciations of his name left and right — for all the layers in the plot-twisting opening act of the made-for-Hollywood movie that was the Alabama quarterbacks.

That’s right. It was only the opening act.

The hot summer debate: Tua or Jalen?

If you were on the internet at all from January-August, chances are you saw several stories on the quarterback battle in Tuscaloosa. Tagovailoa’s late-game heroics created a situation reminiscent of what we saw at Ohio State after it won the 2014 national championship.

Everyone had an opinion. If someone was pro-Hurts, his 25-2 record was the centerpiece of the argument. If someone was pro-Tagovailoa, the argument centered on what he did in the title game.

As much as Saban tried to silence the debate by telling media members it was their fault that his quarterback battle had become a story, there was drama all offseason involving the two quarterbacks.

  • March 23: Tua Tagovailoa breaks bone in index finger in first spring practice.
  • April 19: Bleacher Report story quotes Hurts’ dad saying son “will become the biggest free agent in college football” if he doesn’t win the starting job.
  • April 21: Injured Tagovailoa sits spring game while Hurts plays, but he struggles passing, and hot mic catches Saban saying after a long Hurts run, “Without me saying it … Two years. I mean the third-team quarterback can move the team right down the field throwing the ball.”
  • July 18: Saban says he “has no idea” when asked at SEC Media Days if he thinks Hurts will be on Alabama’s opening game roster.
  • Aug. 4: Hurts says in first media availability of offseason that “nobody asked me how I felt” about the quarterback situation, but he also says he was “shocked” at Saban’s uncertainty at SEC Media Days because he was only 15 hours away from graduating.

As expected, none of that offseason drama led to Saban announcing his starting quarterback. Fortunately, a long summer eventually came to an end.

2018 opener: Tagovailoa goes off in first start, prompting classic Saban postgame moment

By the time the 2018 opener rolled around, it seemed like anything but Tagovailoa starting would be a surprise. So as many predicted, the true sophomore got the nod, and Hurts did indeed play in the game in the second quarter and a decent portion of the second half.

That, of course, was because Tagovailoa did his thing. He completed 12 of 16 passes for 227 yards and 2 touchdowns while adding a rushing score to fuel Alabama’s blowout win against Louisville in Orlando. Alabama looked like a “super team” with Tagovailoa at quarterback. Clearly that was going to be the case moving forward.

But the most noteworthy moment of the opener came in the postgame interview when Saban teed off on Maria Taylor for asking about the quarterback situation:

Clearly, Saban was conflicted about watching Tagovailoa deliver that kind of an emphatic performance because of the inevitable future for Hurts. That is, Hurts wasn’t starting unless Tagovailoa got hurt. Tagovailoa was the guy, and the new hurdle was figuring out ways to keep Hurts around for all of 2018.

2018 medical tent drama: The ironic, but telling sequence of events that got us here

Since second and 26, nothing about Tagovailoa’s play was really what you’d call “dramatic.” He didn’t throw a single fourth-quarter incompletion in the regular season, and he helped Alabama make history with a 12-0 regular-season record with every win coming by at least 22 points. Tagovailoa nearly became the first Alabama quarterback to win the Heisman Trophy but fell just short to Kyler Murray.

The only drama over Tagovailoa’s 2018 season was the trips to the medical tent, of which there were many:

  • Oct. 13 vs. Mizzou: Tagovailoa aggravates right knee injury during slide in third quarter, goes to medical tent
  • Oct. 20 at Tennessee: Tagovailoa limps off field after taking hit during TD pass in third quarter, goes to medical tent
  • Nov. 3 at LSU: Tagovailoa comes up limping after 44-yard TD run in third quarter, goes to medical tent
  • Nov. 10 vs MSU: Tagovailoa takes sack low in third quarter, goes to medical tent
  • Dec. 1 vs. Georgia: Tagovailoa takes sack in fourth quarter, goes to medical tent

By the way, Tagovailoa has yet to miss a start all season. And while many debated why he started against The Citadel following four straight games of exiting and going to the medical tent, Saban refused to rest the sophomore southpaw.

The SEC Championship injury opened the door for Hurts’ heroics, which was another epic action scene from the Alabama quarterbacks movie the last 365 days.

Interestingly enough, though, there was never any question about whether a healthy Tagovailoa would start in the Orange Bowl. Instead, the priority was on getting an ankle surgery that’s somehow only available to Alabama players (according to what was reported on College GameDay) so that he could start. And this time, Tagovailoa didn’t need to visit the medical tent to get though a game.

There’s obviously no guarantee that Tagovailoa, who is still getting treatment for the ankle he injured against Georgia, will make it through the title game unscathed. What’s interesting is that despite all of those in-season ailments, his play has been so good that it didn’t even matter that Hurts got his miracle in the SEC Championship. Tagovailoa is still the guy if he’s healthy, no questions asked.

Tagovailoa is now trying to do something that no quarterback at Alabama has ever done — close out consecutive national championship victories to start his college career. Technically, this will be Tagovailoa’s first title game start, though history will always credit him as winning the 2017 national championship.

No longer is Tagovailoa the anxious freshman backup with a roadblock standing in his path to success. A lot has changed since he was in that precarious spot.

But he wouldn’t mind if Monday was more of the same.