‘Bryce Young, Heisman winner’ sounds good – but there’s a lot more to accomplish

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The rest of us see a quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy and the Maxwell Award and the Davey O’Brien Award, who led Alabama to an 18-13 fourth-quarter lead against Georgia in the College Football Playoff Championship Game despite an offense crippled by injury.

Bryce Young looks in the mirror and sees a guy responsible for Alabama falling short of the national championship.

The rest of us saw Young throw screens and juke and throw deep and run and get rid of the ball and generally make magic.

“He can be looking this way and throw it that way,” said Alabama All-American linebacker Will Anderson, an expert on chasing quarterbacks. “Or he can be looking at you, pump the ball and make you jump and go right around you. Bryce is a good basketball player. When I say he’s smart, he uses those basketball skills on the field as well. He’ll pump(-fake) you, play with the ball, cross over. You think he’s a point guard out there playing QB.”

Young’s stats reached the otherworldly (66.9 completion rate, 4,872 yards, 47 touchdowns, seven interceptions) in 2021. He led Alabama to come-from-behind fourth-quarter leads at Texas A&M, at Auburn and against Georgia in the national championship. Against the Dawgs, Young did so without his top two secondary-stretchers, Jameson Williams and John Metchie III, both of whom were lost to injury and both of whom went early (12^th and 44^th, respectively) in the 2022 NFL Draft.

Young, who will lead Alabama in its opener Saturday against Utah State (1-0), understands what he accomplished. But he knows what Alabama left undone. The Tide didn’t hold those come-from-behind leads at Texas A&M and against Georgia. He looks back and sees how he failed as a leader. He looks back and sees someone who didn’t push his teammates to meet the standard espoused by coach Nick Saban.

Take shirttails.

“Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of internal stuff that – just small stuff, little things like not tucking shirts in, little trivial stuff that we have as a rule and we have as a standard,” Young said. “Sometimes, and I’m the No. 1 culprit, I don’t feel like correcting someone again. I don’t feel like getting on someone again. I don’t feel like being the bad guy again.

“At the end of the day, all those undisciplined things – us not finishing at practice, us not finishing to the ball after the whistle has been blown, which can seem trivial but it’s what we’re supposed to do – it carries over.”

Young waited weeks before he studied the championship-game video. He needed the emotional pain to recede. But when he looks back, he makes the connection.

“I think if we had better team discipline, and that’s on me as a leader, if we were able to do stuff the right way throughout the year, we would have been able to do stuff the right way finishing,” Young said. “It’s not always fun. There’s always these little concessions: ‘Man, I don’t feel like starting something.’ Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I just want to get through this lift and do what I want to do. Maybe I just want to run. I just told someone to do something again. I don’t want to be ‘that guy.’ You know, all that stuff is annoying.

“But when you put all that stuff in perspective, and you look back en masse, if I could have been annoyed or mad or angry for those couple of minutes, instead of the devastation that you feel after losing a game like that, it’s an obvious choice. If you don’t feel like doing what you (don’t) want to do, you can either feel bad in the moment, immediately, for a couple of seconds, or you can feel bad at the end of the year, when everything’s on the line. I don’t think personally I handled it the right way, so that’s something I’m working toward this year.”

Pretty mature for a guy who just turned 21. It’s the sort of attitude that makes the Alabama coach leap out of bed in the morning.

“I think that one of the most important things for Bryce or any player who has success is to understand that success is not a continuum,” Saban said at SEC Media Days. “Success is momentary. So if you’re going to continue to have success, you have to stay focused on the things you need to do to improve, to prepare, to lead, to impact and affect other people around you.

“Bryce has shown every indication that he’s got a willingness to do all those things. He’s a perfectionist in terms of what he wants to accomplish.”

Young is a psychology major; it’s the family business – his father, Craig, has a master’s degree in counseling. He thinks a lot about being a leader. As a southern Californian who self-transplanted to the Deep South, he had to make more than the typical adjustments to college football. And the typical adjustments presented challenge enough. As a freshman, the first time he threw deep to Jaylen Waddle in a drill, Young learned how quick he had to be.

“I threw it all the way from the 40 to the pylon. Put some air under it. I hit the DB in the back,” Young said. “ ‘Smitty’ (DeVonta Smith, the senior wide receiver who would win the Heisman that year) is in my ear. I didn’t even know Smitty. He said, ‘That’s not going to cut it. You’re not in high school anymore.’ ”

Young took over the offense as a second-year player who played sparingly in the national championship season of 2020. He had to learn how to negotiate the hierarchy of the college football locker room, where respect comes with age and productivity.

“Sometimes you could have a good practice or two,” Young said. “You could feel like you’re killing it in offseason workouts, feel like, ‘I got it! I’m the guy!’ But (with) an older guy who’s done it, like we had last year, I can’t really tell them what to do. It’s humbling. You realize you’re not really there yet; you have more work. You haven’t done anything yet.

“It’s different now.”

Young returns to the field with Alabama on Saturday with leadership credibility oozing out of his Nikes. He is no longer just Bryce Young. He is Bryce Young, the 2021 Heisman winner, the player in the Dr Pepper Fansville ads, the top-rated collegiate athlete in the On3 NIL 100. Young will be known as the 2021 Heisman winner for the rest of his life, or until he replaces it with something more accomplished.

“It’s an award to celebrate a season that happened in the past,” Young said. “So, as much of an honor as it is, it has no say on what’s going to happen in my future. It determines nothing moving forward. The moment I won it, the moment it was announced, it celebrated everything before that moment. It is good to look back on. It’s great. But I’m not entitled to anything because of it. So the goal is for it definitely not to be the first thing that comes up because I feel like there’s a lot more that I want to accomplish.”

Young is the first Heisman winner since Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson in 2017 to return to college football. Young can become the second two-time Heisman winner, joining the sainted Archie Griffin of Ohio State (1974-75). He’s more interested in the diploma he intends to earn in December and the second national championship he’d like to win in January.

The next five months offer large rewards. Young plans to stick to the little things.