IF BRYCE YOUNG IS STEPH CURRY WITH A FOOTBALL, HIS SIZE WON’T MATTER
The NFL’s quarterbacking revolution has changed the game — teams want ball distributors, big-play improv and magic — and a smallish build doesn’t have to thwart his star ascent with the Panthers
If we’re dealing with the cosmos here — was he really only 1 when he hit his mother with a ball as she loaded a dishwasher? — it’s foolish to waste saliva on what Bryce Young is not. What he might be is a cunning, ethereal, magical playmaker who defies the conventional measurements of a grunt sport. What he might be is a stealth weapon on the football field, and a model citizen off it — so it makes no sense to strain our brains when definitive answers about his height and weight won’t come for months and years.
Must a quarterback be 6-2 like Patrick Mahomes, thick and wrapped like a museum mummy, to control and master a game? If he’s in firm command inside and outside the pocket — with intellect, creativity and an accurate arm described by his college coach, Nick Saban, as “elastic” — doesn’t Young have a chance to be the rubber-band man of the NFL? We’ve seen Drew Brees take a 6-foot body to the Hall of Fame. We’ve watched Russell Wilson win a Super Bowl at 5-11, back when he was cooking.
So allow me to hold my thumb and forefinger apart, about the length of a popsicle stick, and ask why lacking those few inches automatically buries Young as too short, too light and too fragile to make it big. To worry about it now suggests people have too much time on their hands, an unfortunate fact in a league with just 17 regular-season games in a calendar year of 365 days. Tonight in Kansas City, three TV networks will feature local-flavor shots of barbecue pits when directors in the trucks should invest in crystal balls.
Truth be told, the presumptive No. 1 pick in the draft stands 5 feet 10 and one-eighth of an inch. He weighed 204 pounds at the scouting combine and probably is lighter now, closer to 195. That makes him the approximate size of the average American male … Uber driver. And traditionalists aren’t dealing with it well, recalling Tom Brady as 6-4 and Peyton Manning as 6-5 and refusing to acknowledge the revolution that has overtaken the craft. Get this: Teams want quarterbacks to be ball distributors and slingers these days — Stephen Curry, if you will — and if they can move as dynamically as they throw, then, sure, a Shohei Ohtani double-dip parallel also works. The trick isn’t seeing over a line of scrimmage. It’s about thinking and improvising on your feet, identifying throwing lanes, using funky arm angles, eluding beasts who want to break you in half, and snuffing out defensive strategies before they decipher yours.
We observed enough of Young at Alabama, against premier competition, to project what he might achieve in the NFL. He’s a smaller, thinner Jalen Hurts. He’s a conductor more than a force. Perhaps he won’t live up to his top-pick billing with the Carolina Panthers, but a better bet — and one can wager these things — is that he will. This looms as one of those draft classes with a defined superstar and a major bust — Mahomes went No. 10 in 2017, eight spots below Mitch Trubisky. Trevor Lawrence finally looked like a No. 1 pick last season, while No. 2 Zach Wilson was crashing and forcing the New York Jets to chase Aaron Rodgers around Malibu. Rewind to Manning and Ryan Leaf in 1998, Donovan McNabb and Tim Couch in 1999. Of the four QBs expected to go in the upper half of the first round, or before Mel Kiper’s voice gives out, someone among Young, C.J. Stroud, Anthony Richardson and Will Levis will soar into stardom, while another flops and two settle in the middle.
For all the poison pills and conspiracy theories spewed by NFL analysts in recent months — “If I’m a GM, I’m scared to death of drafting him,” ESPN’s Todd McShay said of Young in February — he’ll be taken No. 1 as expected since the night 16 months ago when he won the Heisman Trophy. His standing only is helped by what seems an unfair rap against Stroud, who reportedly scored poorly on controversial S2 Cognition tests measuring visual and instinctive learning skills. Young scored much higher, in the 98th percentile, as Stroud sweats out the possibility of sliding in the first round if Houston rejects him at No. 2. Don’t think for a second that Panthers owner David Tepper, who is tired of losing, didn’t underline the importance of the S2 scores.
“I'm not a test taker. I play football," Stroud told the Charlotte Observer on draft eve. "At the end of the day, I don’t have nothing to prove to nobody. I’m not (going to) sit here and explain how I process football. The people who are making the picks know what I can do, so that’s all the matters to me.”
The Carolina braintrust has too much QB credibility to take a wild swing and miss, particularly after relinquishing a stunning talent haul — a pair of first- and second-round picks and receiver DJ Moore — in trading up with Chicago for the first pick. “Obviously, it’s a huge decision for the organization,” general manager Scott Fitterer said. Coach Frank Reich played the position and might have won a Super Bowl or two if Andrew Luck hadn’t retired prematurely in Indianapolis. And while he has worked with bigger quarterbacks — Manning, Carson Wentz, Matt Ryan — he also had a “very high grade’’ on Wilson before the 2012 draft. “All these people are putting this label on me that I only look at big quarterbacks,” he said at the combine, an early hint he liked Young.
Also impressed by Wilson back then was Fitterer, who was Seattle’s college scouting director at the time. Wilson’s combine height and weight were eerily similar to Young’s numbers last month. The Seahawks, of course, drafted Wilson in the third round. “Going back to Russ, he might have been 206 pounds. He’s at 220 now,” Fitterer said. “Guys just grow. That’s something (Young) can control and it’s something we can help him with. You can’t control the height. … Nutritionally, we can do some things to educate him. We get him in the weight room. You can see, when you really look at his lower body, his lower body’s gotten bigger. He’s put on a lot of mass. A lot of times quarterbacks don’t want to lift upper body because you get a little bit bound-up. But he’s going to naturally put on size as he ages.”
If the negative “short quarterback” comp is Arizona’s 5-11 Kyler Murray — he tore his ACL and meniscus in December — please understand that quarterbacks of all shapes and sizes get hurt. Wilson has avoided serious injuries in his career because he’s wily and can take hits; Young should study him and build a similar body. Another comp could be 6-foot Baker Mayfield, but he lacks Young’s vision and guile. In the modern era, since 2000, only nine NFL QBs have been shorter than 6 feet, per The Athletic. Young is No. 10.
Who really knows what his fate will be? We’re never sure until careers begin and evidence grows. We knew about Joe Burrow, but we weren’t certain about Justin Herbert or even Mahomes and Josh Allen. Suspense is part of the fun. There is no shortage of suspense about Bryce Young, not that the Panthers are hedging. “If you just looked at it analytically, how many guys at that size have (become) superstars as undersized quarterbacks?” Reich said. “And there are some, like Drew Brees ... and it all goes back to that recipe. How important is that to us as an organization? It’s also a consideration (with) his playmaking ability, his accuracy, his leadership, his instincts.”
Said Fitterer: “You go get the guy that you want. If you have conviction on a guy, you go get him. It’s pretty simple that way. If you don’t know and you’re going to give all these resources to go up and get it, you’re hurting your team in the long run. You better be right. You better have conviction if you do move up. But when you do that, you’re all-in.”
Last week, Fitterer finally asked Reich to reveal which QB he wants. They were in complete agreement. “It was kind of like a proposal — and I said yes,” Reich said. “But there is consensus and we are excited.”
As for the know-it-alls who aren’t part of the consensus, remember this: Brady went in the sixth round of the 2000 draft, 199 picks behind top choice Courtney Brown, 182 picks behind kicker Sebastian Janikowski and 181 picks behind the first quarterback taken, Chad Pennington.
Remember, too, how NBA scouts dismissed Curry’s body as slight and brittle. Guess who invited Young and his family to his New York hotel suite, after they’d attended a Warriors-Knicks game on his Heisman-winning weekend?
Steph Curry.
Who just happens to hail from Charlotte, Bryce Young’s new home.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.