During Tuesday’s media availability at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, former Alabama and Oklahoma quarterback Jalen Hurts was asked if he’d consider switching positions at the NFL level.
“I’ve always been a team-first guy,” Hurts responded, “but I’m a quarterback.”
And with that, we were off again. A guy who threw 80 touchdown passes and 20 interceptions, and averaged 9.7 Adjusted Yards per Attempt, for two of the NCAA’s most prominent programs, was given the tired old inquiry about whether he’d be better off moving away from the quarterback position.
“Just did enough in the passing game to get by,” ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper said two years ago of Hurts. “When they needed more, they went to Tua [Tagovailoa] and they got it. So, who knows? [Alabama head coach] Nick [Saban] isn’t going to discard a Jalen Hurts, but to say he’s a pro prospect right now, I’d say no. I don’t think — as a quarterback — I wouldn’t say he was an NFL quarterback prospect. But we’ll see if he could maybe make a change to another position down the road.”
What position would that be? Nobody is quite sure. Perhaps Kiper was inspired by Hurts’ five receptions for 40 yards in his collegiate career.
Hurts transferred from Alabama to Oklahoma following a 2018 season in which he completed just 51 of 70 passes for 765 yards, eight touchdowns, and two interceptions. Tagovailoa had indeed taken over the Crimson Tide’s offense, but who was the guy who threw 32 touchdowns and just eight picks, averaging 12.2 AY/A, for the Sooners in 2019? It was Hurts, in Lincoln Riley’s offense. And if you don’t think production in Lincoln Riley’s offense matters at the NFL level, don’t tell Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray, or the NFL teams who have tried to pry Riley away from his current home.
If this sounds a lot like the stuff Lamar Jackson had to go through when he came out of Louisville, it obviously is. Former NFL general manager Bill Polian famously said that Jackson would have to move to receiver to succeed in the NFL, something he later had to recant when Jackson played at an MVP level through most of the 2019 season.
Over 50 years ago, Marlin Briscoe set a Denver Broncos rookie record for touchdown passes with 14 that has yet to be eclipsed. But in the following offseason, while he was working on his degree back in Nebraska, Briscoe discovered that the Broncos were conducting quarterback meetings without him, and that the plan was to move him to another position.
“So, I took a clandestine flight to Denver,” Briscoe remembered in William C. Rhoden’s book, Third and a Mile. “I stood outside the coach’s office, and out walks [quarterback] Steve Tensi, [head coach] Lou Saban, quarterbacks coach Hunter Anderson, [quarterback] Pete Liske, and a couple [other] quarterbacks. They couldn’t even look at me. If I didn’t think it was wrong for a man to cry, I’d have cried. I was that hurt. I just turned and walked out. I knew I wasn’t in their plans. It was like I’d never played that first year.”
Saban’s rationale? “I did what I thought I had to do,” Saban said years later in the book Going Long, Jeff Green’s history of the American Football League. “He went down to Miami a year later and played receiver and did very well. People said, ‘You were right.’ You’ve got to look out for the product, what’s best for the team.”
Well. The Lou Saban era in Denver lasted from 1967 through 1971, and in that time, 10 different quarterbacks had at least one passing attempt for the team. Among those quarterbacks, Briscoe led the pack in touchdown percentage, passer rating, quarterback rating, and passing yards per game.
Briscoe stayed in the NFL as a receiver through the 1976 season, catching 224 passes for 3,537 yards and 30 touchdowns. He made the Pro Bowl in 1970 with the Bills with 57 receptions for 1,036 yards and eight touchdowns, and he was a part of the Miami Dolphins’ Super Bowl teams in 1972 and 1973, including the only perfect season in NFL history in 1972.
But the denial of opportunity at the quarterback position never left Briscoe—it always haunted him. Don Shula made him the Dolphins’ emergency quarterback in 1972 after Bob Griese was injured and veteran Earl Morrall took over. As Briscoe later said, “If I was good enough to be an emergency quarterback, why weren’t other teams willing to give me a chance?”
Three guesses as to the common denominator between these three quarterbacks. The only difference between Briscoe in 1969, and Lamar Jackson in 2018 and Jalen Hurts in 2020, is that there are enough coaches and executives in the NFL now who have seen the wisdom of looking beyond archaic stereotypes and prejudices and doing what’s actually good for the team.
“Jalen’s come a long, long way. He really has,” Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy said this week, via the Associated Press. “People asked me about Jalen when I took the job and I said maybe if he comes to the Senior Bowl in a couple of years it might be as another position player. He’s blown that out. He’s come so far.”
Bengals head coach Zac Taylor agreed.
“He’s been successful everywhere he’s been. He really is a little bit like an NFL quarterback in the sense that he had to go quickly and pick up an offense and really prove himself as a leader in a new program in a short period of time, which he did. … Those are things that we get a chance now to see in person. Get to know the kid a little bit more. … He certainly had a great college career. He’s put himself in a good position.”
So, there are some who will at least give Hurts an opportunity.
There are legitimate questions about Hurts’ ability to transition to the NFL level, and it’s not that they should be overlooked. His arm strength is more at a get-the-job-done level than anything incendiary, and he’ll need to work on his anticipation throws. But you could say similar things regarding several of the top quarterbacks in this draft class — or, indeed, most draft classes, and nobody’s asking Justin Herbert or Jordan Love whether they’re willing to switch positions.
When he goes to the scouting combine in late February, Hurts will have to answer the same questions — both from the assembled media and from the coaches and executives he meets with in Indianapolis. Like so many quarterbacks from Marlin Briscoe to Lamar Jackson, he’ll have to take time to deal with a stigma other quarterbacks won’t — and for the same old reason.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”