Ad Disclosure
Criticize Nick Saban for Jalen Hurts if you must, or just praise a guy who figured it out
Published:
“The greatest coach in college football history benching the reigning SEC Offensive Player of the Year at halftime of a national championship” was how I always thought we’d remember that moment. Seven years after Nick Saban made the most notable mid-game switch in college football history by taking out Jalen Hurts for Tua Tagovailoa to fuel a comeback win in the College Football Playoff National Championship, there’s apparently a new way that some remember that moment.
“Saban benched the Super Bowl MVP.”
As Hurts delivered a dominant performance Sunday night to halt the Kansas City Chiefs’ 3-peat attempt in Super Bowl LIX, the rewriting of history came pouring in on social media. A chance to take a shot at Alabama was had because, in case you didn’t know, Hurts has been a better NFL player than Tagovailoa. That would’ve been undeniable even if Hurts fell short vs. Patrick Mahomes in his second Super Bowl in the past 3 seasons.
But should be undeniable is that Alabama didn’t butcher the Hurts situation just because of his remarkable NFL career — the guy just figured it out.
He figured out after his aforementioned benching that he had to improve as a multi-read passer instead of being Calvin Ridley-dependent, which he was throughout that 2017 season leading up to the title game. Go back and watch Hurts in 2017 and compare it to who he was in relief as Tagovailoa’s backup in 2018. Those steps, which came with offensive coordinator Mike Locksley and quarterbacks coach Dan Enos, were what allowed Hurts to step in and become the hero in the 2018 SEC Championship, AKA when Saban was choked up speaking about Hurts’ resilience.
I remember being at Mercedes-Benz Stadium that night — the same building where Hurts was pulled a year earlier — and thinking “I don’t know what’s next for his future, but nobody can ever take that away from him.” As it turned out, a year later at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, I watched Hurts get overwhelmed by the 2019 LSU squad in the Playoff semifinals after a Heisman Trophy runner-up season at Oklahoma. If you include Tagovailoa earning the praise for the 2017 title, it was the 4th consecutive season in which Hurts watched confetti drop for someone else. That included when he nearly led Alabama to a perfect season as a true freshman in 2016 but was on the wrong end of a game-winning Clemson touchdown in the final seconds.
In 2017, Hurts’ phone background was a picture of himself walking off the field with confetti falling on Clemson. Seven years later, Erin Andrews mentioned to Hurts in the postgame interview that he had a picture of the confetti falling on the Chiefs as his phone background, and this time, he could watch it fall on his team.
It’s cliché to say that Hurts wouldn’t have gotten his confetti shower if not for those experiences, but it’s true. He spoke about that on Sunday night.
And to be fair, there are plenty of other moments that get lost in the shuffle of what Hurts correctly dubbed, his “unprecedented” journey. He’s right. From getting asked at the Senior Bowl if he’d consider a position switch and being the subject of a benching as recently as this past September, Hurts’ career has become an over-the-top sports movie.
Even the DeVonta Smith touchdown when he got behind the Chiefs secondary for the dagger — just as he did on “2nd and 26” to catch Tagovailoa’s walk-off winner with Hurts on the bench 7 years ago — felt like we were watching a Hollywood script play out.
Read the comments to that tweet and you’ll see plenty of pushback on Alabama posting anything about Hurts. After all, he entered the NFL Draft as an Oklahoma quarterback, where he had his best college season.
For what it’s worth, Hurts claimed both Alabama and Oklahoma at the Senior Bowl by putting both teams in his helmet. The Sooners have every right to declare Hurts as their first Super Bowl-winning quarterback ever, and Alabama fans have every right to feel tremendous pride in watching Hurts become a legend.
There’s a difference between being “run out of town” and losing a starting quarterback job. Hurts lost a starting quarterback job to a guy who was the Heisman runner-up in 2018. The irony is that if Tagovailoa had stayed healthy and executed in the 4th quarter of the 2018 SEC Championship, he likely would’ve won the Heisman and Hurts would’ve never experienced a defining moment of his career.
Of course, that’s not how it played out. Hurts used a year of eligibility as Tagovailoa’s backup. He could have bailed on the 2018 team and announced his intentions to transfer after he didn’t win the starting job. That selfless decision to stay — something that isn’t a given in this era of the transfer portal — prompted Saban’s aforementioned emotional postgame moment.
Saban’s emotions could’ve also stemmed from the likely scenario that Hurts had just delivered his last bit of greatness in an Alabama uniform, and soon, someone else would reap the benefits of his presence. As loyal as Hurts was to Alabama for staying as the backup in 2018, let’s not forget Matt Hayes’ viral story ahead of that season wherein Hurts’ dad, Averion, declared that if his son lost the starting job, he’d be “the biggest free agent in college football history.”
But there was another part of that story that stood out:
I told Jalen, you f–ked up, you opened the door and put yourself in this situation,. Now it’s up to you to dig yourself out.
Hurts’ own family admitted that he opened the door by not playing well enough in an all-or-nothing game. We don’t have to rewrite history. We can instead praise Hurts for doing the thing that defines legends — he dug himself out and earned his own confetti.
Nobody can ever take that away from him.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
