Things got off to a rocky start when, on his very first play as the Alabama football QB, Jalen fumbled the handoff on a zone read and lost the ball to USC. Everyone, including myself, thought Saban would go ballistic and immediately replace Hurts with Barnett or Bateman. Thankfully, he had the patience and foresight to stick with Jalen.
A couple more scoreless drives played out and Jalen still was in the game. His fourth drive at QB started like the first two. Two plays negative three yards and Alabama was trailing by three in the second quarter. However, on a third and thirteen, Jalen took the snap, rolled out to the right to escape pressure, and threw a 39-yard strike to ArDarius Stewart in the endzone over two USC defenders. It was at that moment that Jalen Hurts’s story really began.
As we all know, Jalen went on to win the starting job in 2016 and led an undefeated Alabama football team to the National Championship game where he was two seconds (and one missed pick play) away from winning a national title in his freshman season.
His Sophomore season was much of the same. Win after win until the Iron Bowl, but even that loss wouldn’t keep Alabama football out of the playoff. The National Championship against Georgia is where it all changed for Jalen, but what followed that game is what makes Jalen Hurts a legend. Of course, that game is where one Tua Tagovailoa became a legend in his own right with an unbelievable second-half comeback and OT game-winner.
Nobody knew what Nick Saban would do with the QB situation in 2018. You have Tua on one hand who is one of the most talented QBs of this generation, but on the other hand, you have Jalen who led your team to two title games and held a 26-2 record as a starter. The correct decision was to start Tua, but how hard is it to tell your starter of two years, who has been nearly perfect, that he is no longer the guy?
For Nick Saban, it was clearly very difficult. He even said as much on multiple occasions.
"I just want to be clear with everyone that I have done this in the past, where we don’t say who the starter is going to be for the first game, and we give both quarterbacks an opportunity to play in the game, which is exactly what we did in this game. So, now we know and you know. But just to be clear on something, I love all of our players on our team. I think as parents out there you relate to this that you love all your children. Sometimes, some of your children do things a little better than others. That doesn’t mean you vilify one and put the other on a pedestal, especially publicly because you want to support and help both to be successful. That’s exactly how I feel about our players."