That Georgia finds itself in a quarterback tangle was inevitable. Jake Fromm led the Bulldogs to the national championship game as a freshman. Georgia signed Justin Fields, the No. 1 dual-threat quarterback of his recruiting class. This was not dissimilar to what transpired at Alabama, where freshman Jalen Hurts took Alabama to the title game in January 2017 and, the next month, the five-star recruit Tua Tagovailoa signed with the Crimson Tide. We see what happened there.
The way of college football is for the best quarterbacks to cluster – and then to scatter. Of the top 13 teams in this week’s Associated Press poll, five have starting quarterbacks who first enrolled elsewhere. One – LSU’s Joe Burrow, who began at Ohio State – just dealt Georgia its third loss with Fromm as the starter.
The Bulldogs lost in Death Valley with Fromm having his worst game as a collegian, spawning heightened bye-week speculation as to What Comes Next. It's thought that Fields, who worked five snaps and ran the ball once in the thudding loss, will be given a larger role when Georgia faces Florida. (Wait. Didn't Mark Richt promote a backup for the Jacksonville game? Believe his name was Faton Bauta.) Kirby Smart, who coaches these Bulldogs, has said only: "Whoever gives our team the best chance to win is what we'll decide to do."
Everything in college football revolves around Alabama, especially when it comes to quarterbacks. Jake Coker left Florida State, where he would have been the backup to Jameis Winston, and sat behind Blake Sims in Tuscaloosa for a year. Then he led Bama to the 2015 national title. Blake Barnett started the first game of the 2016 season, was displaced by Hurts and transferred to South Florida, where he’s the quarterback of the unbeaten Bulls. Hurts is 26-2 as the Crimson Tide starter but hasn’t started this season, having ceded the job to Tagovailoa, who might win the Heisman Trophy.
Some Georgia fans noticed that, when their team led Alabama 13-0 at halftime in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Nick Saban pulled his No. 1 quarterback for a freshman who hadn’t played much and won in overtime. When Georgia trailed 16-0 at halftime in Baton Rouge, Smart – long Saban’s aide-de-camp – stuck with his No. 1 and lost 36-16. Whispers hold that Tagovailoa’s camp had communicated to Saban that, unless he saw significant action in the championship game, he would consider transferring. He threw three touchdown passes that night and has started every game since.
Because every gifted quarterback who’s not starting has one eye on the door – Jacob Eason left Athens for Washington after he was injured and supplanted by Fromm – and because relaxation of the redshirt rule has made transferring even easier, a coach considering a quarterback change must weigh the impact it could leave not just on two players, but on his program. Clemson is both case study and cautionary tale.
Kelly Bryant, the incumbent, started the Tigers’ first four games. Coach Dabo Swinney announced that Trevor Lawrence, the freshman from Cartersville, would start against Syracuse. Bryant quit the team and declared his intention to transfer. Having played only four games, he can count this as a redshirt season. Having already graduated, he’ll be eligible to play somewhere else next season. (Speculation holds that he’ll land at Arkansas, which is coached by Chad Morris, once Clemson’s offensive coordinator.)
As fate would have it, Lawrence was injured in his first start and couldn’t continue. The Tigers fell behind Syracuse and needed a fourth-down completion from Chase Brice of Loganville, another freshman, to stay undefeated. Even a team with too many quarterbacks can run short.
Per Michael Casagrande of AL.com, 10 Alabama quarterbacks under Saban have transferred with eligibility remaining. Hurts isn't among them, despite his father's preseason declaration that, should his son lose his job, he'd become "the biggest free agent in the history of college football." Hurts has played beyond the four-game redshirt ceiling, but it's widely believed he'll exit in December as a grad transfer.
Note, though, that Tagovailoa tweaked his knee in Alabama’s victory over Missouri on Saturday and didn’t finish the game. He has returned to practice. Still, what if Hurts departs after the SEC championship and Tagavailoa goes down in a playoff semifinal?
Back to Georgia: Fan fervor notwithstanding, there’s no compelling reason to elevate Fields above Fromm. The latter had a bad day in a big setting. Fields hasn’t yet been asked to do anything difficult in a competitive game. He has thrown one pass – that at South Carolina – in the Bulldogs’ three road games; he has run the ball once in each of those three, each time for three yards. He looks like a player, yes. Fromm has proved he’s a player.
Look for Smart to give the freshman more snaps to make these Bulldogs more dangerous – the offense went belly-up in Baton Rouge – and, not incidentally, to placate Fields for the longer term. Georgia might well envision a succession plan that sees him becoming 1-B to Fromm's 1-A in 2019 and having the job to himself in 2020. (Fromm is rated highly in 2020 NFL mock drafts.) Still, that would leave Fields eligible to turn pro after one season as a full-time starter. Would that be enough for Georgia, or for him?
Big-time players tend to be in a hurry. Tim Tebow spent one season behind Chris Leak at Florida. Kyler Murray spent one season behind Baker Mayfield at Oklahoma. And would it even be feasible for Fromm and Fields to split snaps more/less evenly? Where lately has that worked? It didn’t happen at Clemson. It’s not happening at Alabama.
It could be that Fromm and Fields, Georgians both, would be content to stay in Athens for however long doing whatever’s asked for the greater good of the Red and Black. We recall D.J. Shockley waiting four years behind David Greene and leading Georgia to the 2005 SEC title. The world, though, was different then.
The Bulldogs are happy to have two quarterbacks as talented as Fromm and Fields on their roster. Keeping both happy beyond January 2019 will be difficult. It might be impossible.
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