Alabama football: QB quandary will lurk for however long it has to this fall
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The moment Bryce Young jogged heroically off the Superdome turf last New Year’s Eve — Sugar Bowl victory secured, legendary career locked and sealed — everybody who cares about Alabama football began thinking the same thought.
In roughly 8 months, when it was time for the Tide to play another football game, who would be the guy jogging out to the offensive huddle for the 1st possession of the 2023 season opener against Middle Tennessee?
What would his name be? What number would he be wearing? And would he be T-Town homegrown or some transfer portal import from who knows where?
Well, here we are. It’s the final day of August. Those Blue Raiders will be invading Bryant-Denny Stadium in 2 nights to play the 4th-ranked Crimson Tide.
The ’23 season has arrived.
But the elephant (not named Big Al) in the middle of the room, or smack at the 50-yard line, is still out there, roaming aimlessly.
Because — still — nobody knows, outside of Nick Saban and his inner workings, who Young’s ultimate successor will be, let alone who the starting quarterback will be for a likely Week 1 beatdown of Middle Tennessee.
Everything in Alabama’s Quarterback Universe is so very much up in the air, like a Young tight spiral that refuses to come down.
But when it comes down to it, when the proverbial dust settles, Saban will settle on a starting quarterback for the season, and that will be that.
Right?
Wrong. So very wrong.
And that’s the thing about Bama’s signal-caller saga that has now stretched all the way through the offseason, which technically started on New Year’s Day — the day after Young fired his final pass in crimson and white in that dominant win over Kansas State. The thing is, even when the Week 1 suspense ends on Saturday night and Jalen Milroe, or Ty Simpson, or Tyler Buchner, or maybe even true freshman Dylan Lonergan takes the field for that 1st snap, the Alabama quarterback quandary won’t finally be ending.
Hardly.
It’ll just be getting started.
That’s not a guess or an opinion, either. It’s a certifiable fact, cemented continually during fall camp by the main man himself. It has been Saban’s mantra, over and over and over again, whenever the Quarterback Question is asked by the media, which is basically during every press conference he gives. When Saban gave his Monday press conference to discuss Middle Tennessee Week, the question came again, naturally.
And Saban stayed on script.
He was asked about potentially using more than 1 quarterback against the Blue Raiders. Like 1 of his talented bevy of shifty running backs, Saban sidestepped the question and said, for about the 1,000th time this month, that the quarterback competition doesn’t end when Week 1 begins.
What Saban seems to be saying — over and over, no matter how many times it takes to understand — is that none of his talented quarterbacks not named Young has distanced himself enough to create a clear pecking order. If 1 of them had, all of you would have known by now, if not at the very start of fall camp then certainly midway through August … and definitely by now, in very late August, with the opener to Saban’s 17th season in Tuscaloosa just 48 hours away.
But you don’t hear any of that, do you? You don’t get any sense that Saban and new offensive coordinator Tommy Rees have settled on anything, do you? The only real sense you get from what’s transpiring in fall camp and behind closed doors is that right now it’s sort of a blank canvas at quarterback, with 1 of these guys or a few of them or even 4 of them primed to paint their picture on the 2023 season.
Man, what a departure from the past 2 seasons, right? In 2021 and last season — and, shoot, a good deal of other seasons in the Saban Era when everyone knew who The Guy was as Week 1 beckoned — the only question surrounding the quarterback position was how many snaps the backup that year was going to accumulate during a season’s worth of garbage time.
The summer into fall of 2023 is uncharted territory for Alabama football, for a lot of reasons really, but chiefly because the most important position on the field is such an unsolved mystery so close to the start of the season. It’s weird and crazy and fascinating, and for Tide fans it’s stressful as heck, because they’re just not used to not knowing so darned much about who’s going to play quarterback.
Unless … unless this is all 1 giant SEC-sized smokescreen that Saban has concocted (and we really don’t think it is, mind you). Unless Saban is saving a huge surprise for a football-crazy fan base, a football-mad conference and a college football-loving country that’s craving way more answers than Saban wants or cares to give them.
Unless Saban is playing the ultimate chess game while he pretends to watch all of this play out. Unless he’s playing coy because Texas is lurking in Week 2 in T-Town, and the start of the SEC minefield is lurking 2 weeks after when Lane Kiffin brings Ole Miss to Bryant-Denny.
More than likely or very likely — quarterback conspiracy theories aside — there is no huge smokescreen and there is no brilliant chess game, but rather a tedious, tense waiting game that Saban and Rees are playing because they have to. Because right now, as we sit dangerously close to the season opener, even if it’s a game Bama should win by about 40, there is just no definitive answer yet at a program and at a position that usually has all the answers.
And sometimes, in life and in football, even at Alabama, not having the answer yet is the answer. Right now, until we know more — and we’ll begin to know more come Saturday night despite the likely lopsided score — the cloud of mystery and intrigue around this whole situation will persist.
That’s what can happen when a legend departs and nobody is quite ready (yet) to take his place. Take it as a compliment to Young, and don’t assume it means the quarterback or quarterbacks who will see the field this fall are doomed to take the Tide under water. A lot can happen in a 4-month college football season that you don’t expect to happen, and that includes a possible midseason or even late-season emergence of 1 of these 4 guys.
Just maybe, in the end, it’ll be Milroe, the guy who took over last season when Young injured his shoulder and did OK. During Monday’s press conference, Saban did what he doesn’t do often, especially during a position battle of this magnitude. He praised Milroe for the consistency he has shown in the pocket, which wasn’t exactly Milroe’s strong suit during that limited action last year.
“I think Jalen has made a significant amount of improvement,” Saban said.
We’ll soon find out how that solid pocket presence in fall camp translates to Milroe possibly winning the job, once and for all.
Right now, we’re living in a land of firsts for Alabama football under Saban.
Right now, for the very 1st time in Saban’s 17-year Tuscaloosa tenure, there was no Week 1 depth chart, because Saban said he doesn’t like the distractions depth charts cause for his players.
And right now, for the 1st time in a while, there apparently is no clear-cut guy ready to take ownership of the Alabama starting quarterback position.
The elephant in the room still lurks, for however long, and everyone will just have to get used to it.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
