Dear Andy: Bryce Young’s draft potential, a signing day solution, tampering

We’re about to watch one of our favorite college quarterbacks suit up for one last game, and you have questions …

Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Are there any NFL teams that don’t see Bryce Young as a first-round quarterback given his stature? I don’t think anyone would question Young’s ability, but given how Tua Tagovailoa’s season has played out, I would imagine some teams would be worried about his durability at the next level. — Christian

I wouldn’t compare Young and Tagovailoa, because the similarities begin and end at where they played in college. But your initial question about the Alabama QB’s size is a legitimate talking point in NFL front offices.

On the Prospects to Pros podcast I do with The Athletic’s draft guru Dane Brugler, Dane stumped me with the following trivia question: How many quarterbacks have been drafted since 2000 who measured at fewer than 6 feet tall and less than 200 pounds at the Combine?

You’re probably thinking this is a bigger number than it is. Yes, Kyler Murray is shorter, but he did weigh 209. Russell Wilson weighed 204 and Baker Mayfield weighed 215 (and measured 6-1). Tagovailoa, meanwhile, measured 6 feet and weighed 217 pounds. Johnny Manziel was 5-foot-11 but weighed 207. If we’re going back through the decades, Drew Brees measured 6-foot-1 and weighed 213 before the 2003 draft.

Alabama lists Young at 6 feet and 194 pounds. Young probably won’t break 6 feet, and he may not weigh more than 200 pounds at the Combine. That would put him in the company of former Georgia Tech QB Joe Hamilton, who measured 5-foot-10 and weighed 192 and former Iowa State QB Seneca Wallace, who measured 5-foot-11 and weighed 195 pounds. The Buccaneers chose Hamilton in the seventh round of the 2000 draft. The Seahawks selected Wallace in the fourth round of the 2003 draft.

So, no quarterback as small as Young has been taken in the NFL draft in almost 20 years. But a team will select Young in April, and I’d bet that selection will come in the first round.

First, some of the quarterbacks I listed above (Hamilton and Wallace) have shown NFL coaches and general managers that it is possible to be successful at quarterback in the league without being 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds. Second, elusiveness and the ability to keep plays alive in the pocket are probably now more important than prototypical size. Young certainly can do that. In fact, of the 2023 quarterback draft class, Young is the best at floating behind the line of scrimmage and buying time. He’s a capable runner, but it isn’t his first choice. This keeps him from taking too many huge hits.

Christian’s question referenced Tagovailoa’s performance this season, but it should be noted that Tagovailoa also had far bigger injury issues at Alabama than Young has had. In his first season as Alabama’s starter, Tagovailoa had a “tightrope procedure” to help stabilize a sprained ankle so he could play in the College Football Playoff. Tagovailoa’s second year as Alabama’s starter ended with a grisly hip injury.

Young has had one shoulder sprain that caused him to miss one game in his two seasons as Alabama’s starter. He has proven capable of protecting himself at that level. But it’s understandable that some NFL front offices would have questions given his size.

The main reason I think Young will be a first-round pick (and maybe the No. 1 overall pick) is that of the 2023 QB draft class, Young is the best at football. This may sound incredibly reductive, but consider it this way. All of you reading this are huge college football fans, so you’ve seen all of these guys play. If your team was down four points with the ball on its own 15-yard line and two minutes to play, who would you want to lead your team’s offense?

Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud?
Kentucky’s Will Levis?
Tennessee’s Hendon Hooker?
Florida’s Anthony Richardson?
BYU’s Jaren Hall?
Fresno State’s Jake Haener?
Or Young?

For me, that’s not a particularly difficult choice. It’s Young. (Though I understand why the Haener Hive might send me some clips of the 2021 Fresno State-UCLA game.

Would I pick Young over USC’s Caleb Williams or North Carolina’s Drake Maye, who likely will headline the 2024 QB draft class? Maybe not. But of the QBs available in this year’s draft, Young is the one who inspires the most confidence. He seems ready to lead an NFL team, and two years in the spotlight as Alabama’s QB don’t seem to have affected him negatively at all.

So I can’t wait to watch Young — and star edge rusher Will Anderson — run it back one more time with their Crimson Tide teammates in the Sugar Bowl on Saturday against Kansas State. Then, I can’t wait to see what Young does at the next level. By the time he hears his name called, no QB his size will have been drafted in 20 years. But if anyone can be a mold-breaker, it’s Young.

I keep hearing pundits suggest moving the early signing day back to its original spot in February. It seems like the toothpaste is out of the tube on that particular rule and was even trending that way before the December date was instituted. Most recruits at Power 5 programs are enrolling early now, so even if the only official day was in February, there would still be a big scramble to get coaching staffs in place and signatures on financial paperwork ahead of the January semester start. What would be your solution to fix the congestion of the coaching carousel, recruiting calendar, transfer portal and bowl prep season? — Rodney

The early signing period was a half-measure that the schools took because they were afraid of putting it where everyone actually wanted it: August 1 of the high schooler’s senior year. This was initially inconvenient because college programs tended to fire coaches and hire new ones in early December. Add in the recent change in the transfer rules — which caused players to pour into the portal following the end of the regular season — and it sped up the coaching hire/fire cycle even more. Now the early signing period has become a complete albatross.

The best solution remains the one I suggested back in 2008 when I covered recruiting for Sports Illustrated: Eliminate signing day entirely and allow teams to sign any player as long as that player is currently in high school.

On its face, this sounds crazy. But in practice, it would revamp the recruiting process in a positive way.

Now, everything a coach says to a recruit and everything a player says to a coach is meaningless until the FedEx envelope with the National Letter of Intent arrives on the player’s doorstep. Even though the Recruiting Industrial Complex has created an entire lexicon around the idea of offers and commitments, nothing is official or binding until that document is signed and returned.

GO DEEPER

Recruiting winners (Oregon, Bama) and losers (Notre Dame, Ohio State) on signing day

A player can commit at any point in high school, but he is free to change his mind until the moment he signs. Sometimes, a player will commit early and stay in a class for months only to flip at the 11th hour, sending the college coaching staff scrambling. By the same token, a coach can take a commitment from a 10th grader, have that player help recruit the class and then — on the week of signing day — decide to take someone they like better at that point and either yank the original committed player’s scholarship or tell him he has to gray shirt.

Under my plan, you can sign a freshman if you want, but you’re on the hook for a scholarship for that guy in three years. So you’d better really want him. This would dramatically slow down how quickly coaches hand out “offers.” In many cases now, those are utterly meaningless. They may as well be an invitation to come to camp next summer so the head coach can see the player in person and then extend the “committable offer,” which also may not be real. With the exception of Jadeveon Clowney-in-high-school-level talent, most coaches wouldn’t offer anyone until they saw at least one semester of junior year grades.

For players, they’d need to be certain they really wanted to sign with the school. Because they’d be on the hook for a season unless the school changed head coaches. (Assuming schools still attempted to enforce the terms of the NLI.) Of course, given the churn in that profession, there’s a good chance a player who signed as a high school sophomore will get released from his NLI either because the college head coach left for another job or got fired.

This would eliminate the frenzy around December in terms of high school recruiting. The transfer portal frenzy would remain, but at least it would be the only craziness. It also would force athletic directors to think very carefully about how badly they want to fire a coach who had a bad season but who has a strong recruiting class. Or it might make the decision to fire that coach easier if the class feels lackluster. Because the AD wouldn’t only know who the coach had in the next class. The AD also would have a better sense of how high school recruiting was trending into the future.

This wouldn’t stop schools from firing coaches in November. They did that long before the early signing period. But it would force ADs to more carefully evaluate the decision to fire. It also would create a wave of available high schoolers as head coaches moved from school to school and recruits got released from their NLIs. So newly hired coaches would have a ready-made pool from which to draw.

Nothing will solve every problem with the timing of the recruiting process. But that idea helps the most and hurts the least.

If tampering was actually a real problem that coaches had to deal with, why don’t they do anything about it? Coaches are apparently both the victims and the perpetrators in this practice, so the American Football Coaches Association could probably influence rule makers and come up with a penalty structure if this was a real problem that could be proven. This is the biggest non-issue for coaches since fake injuries. — Dan

Exactly. That’s why I laughed when I saw this tweet from UTSA coach Jeff Traylor last week.

Dear @NCAAFootball How does @UTSAFTBL report Power 5 Schools who are trying to poach our young talent? How much evidence do we really need to make this not be a part of our game?

— Jeff Traylor (@CoachTraylor) December 20, 2022

Traylor knows exactly how to report a rival staff for tampering with his players. He also knows the phone numbers for his compliance director, his athletic director and his conference commissioner — all of whom could help push for stricter rules and punishments for coaches caught tampering.

The schools are the NCAA. They make the rules. If tampering were really as big of a problem as coaches want you to believe, the coaches would have their schools move swiftly to create rules that slapped offending coaches — or their supervising head coaches — with 10-year show-cause penalties if they were caught tampering. Those show-cause penalties could be given teeth by banning the coaches from contacting recruits at all. That would effectively render a coach unemployable.

Given the scourge of tampering — according to some coaches — why hasn’t this happened? Because, as The Athletic’s portal authority Max Olson always says, the coaches like to reserve the right to tamper. Most coaches live by an omertà that keeps them from turning in other coaches to their conference or to the NCAA for acts that they themselves might someday commit. Also, any truly strict rules would involve punishments for the head coach even when the offender is an assistant, and many head coaches can’t guarantee that they won’t someday have a bonehead on their staff texting players who haven’t actually entered the transfer portal. (Pro tip: Always have a player tamper, and make sure they never put anything in writing. This way there is no evidence, and even if there is, the NCAA isn’t about to punish a player for wanting to play with another player.)

GO DEEPER

Secrets of the college football transfer portal: 'There's definitely tampering going on'

Unlike with the transfer rules and NIL rules, the public and the antitrust lawyers aren’t going to complain if a coach gets punished. They get compensated fairly based on their market value and don’t have arbitrary rules restricting their income. No one will feel sorry for them if their careers get derailed for breaking NCAA rules.

Who will feel sorry? The coach whose career gets derailed, which is why the rules haven’t been changed yet. As long as most coaches wish to reserve the right to tamper, they’ll complain about it at high volume while doing jack-squat to actually change anything.

A random ranking

Reader Mark wants me to rank the best TV characters to join the show after Season One. (Like Saul Goodman, who first appeared in the eighth episode of the second season of Breaking Bad.)

1. Saul Goodman, Breaking Bad (S2, E8)
2. Marlo Stanfield, The Wire (S3, E1)
3. Woody Boyd, Cheers (S4, E1)
4. Chris Traeger and Ben Wyatt, Parks and Recreation (S2, E23)
5. Andy Bernard, The Office (S3, E1)
6. Newman, Seinfeld (S3, E32)
7. Brienne of Tarth, Game of Thrones (S2, E3)
8. Frank Reynolds, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (S2, E1)
9. Max Mayfield, Stranger Things (S2, E1)
10. Christine Sullivan, Night Court (S2, E2)

(Top photo of Bryce Young: Gary Cosby Jr. / USA Today)