QB U: When Alabama and Georgia Became Quarterback Factories
QB U: When Alabama and Georgia Became Quarterback Factories
Plus, the QB epicenter of the country is the Gulf Coastal Plain.
Welcome to QB U, another regular feature I’m introducing at this here Substack, in which I highlight some items vaguely related to college football quarterbacks throughout the season. Why quarterbacks? I have this schedule-adjusted Points Above Replacement (PAR) metric for QBs going back to 1956, and I figure I should do something with that. If you have a QB U idea you’d like me to cover, email me1 and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏈 UGA-Bama, Pass and Present
The most earth-shattering matchup of Week 5 in college football might be the most important of the entire season (depending on how many SEC teams make the expanded playoff): No. 2 Georgia visiting No. 4 Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
But it’s also arguably the best matchup of quarterbacks specifically, with a couple of Heisman Trophy candidates facing off in Bama’s Jalen Milroe and UGA’s Carson Beck. Milroe currently ranks sixth nationally in my schedule-adjusted QB Points Above Replacement (PAR), while Beck ranks 18th; both were among the Top 15 last season as well.
Huge QB matchups like these are nothing new to this rivalry in recent seasons. Just since 2020, we’ve also seen Stetson Bennett face both Bryce Young and Mac Jones, in addition to Beck versus Milroe Part I in last year’s SEC title game. And before that, we got quality matchups in Jake Fromm versus Tua Tagovailoa/Jalen Hurts (2018) and Aaron Murray versus A.J. McCarron (2012).
But it was not always the case that the Dawgs and Tide were passing powerhouses — and certainly not at the same time.
Famously, Alabama didn’t consistently become an aerial threat until Lane Kiffin was its offensive coordinator in 2014, the year Blake Sims posted 118.9 PAR/13 as the Crimson Tide scored nearly 37 points per game. The truth is that Bama’s place in the SEC quarterbacking hierarchy had already been rising throughout former coach Nick Saban’s tenure, with McCarron and Greg McElroy delivering 20+ TD seasons — a rarity in Tuscaloosa at the time — by the early 2010s. But however it happened, the modernization of Bama’s passing attack ended what had been a QB drought for the school since the 1970s and early ‘80s, if not even earlier. (They produced exactly zero NFL QBs to debut from 1980 until 2006.)
Meanwhile, UGA’s own QB history has been up and down. Beck comes from the same lineage that gave the Dawgs not just Bennett, Fromm and Murray, but also Matthew Stafford, D.J. Shockley, David Greene, Quincy Carter, Mike Bobo and Eric Zeier. (That’s a pretty good run for Georgia QBs going back about 30 years!) But before that, the rule was for Bulldog QBs to be good but not great — more in the mold of Buck Belue and Ray Goff than Stafford.
Because of this, the two programs have seldom gotten outstanding quarterbacking at exactly the same time, until fairly recently. Here’s a 5-year rolling average of each team’s percentile rank within the SEC, since 1960:
As we examine the ebbs and flows of UGA and Bama’s passing success, it is striking to see the trough the Crimson Tide occupied — around the bottom third of the conference — from the late ‘80s into the mid-2000s. Georgia has been consistently better for longer, though even their recent placement was dragged down by a few seasons with Jacob Eason and Greyson Lambert before Fromm, JT Daniels and Bennett came along.
But now, both programs are on a really good run of QB play, including the young men currently leading the way. Let’s hope both Milroe and Beck live up to the hype on Saturday evening.
🏈 A Toast to the Gulf Coast
I mentioned above that Milroe-Beck was “arguably” the top QB matchup of the week. And if we include last season, that is true. But based on this year’s performance, there is one other matchup in which both QBs have maintained a higher level of performance: LSU versus … South Alabama (??).
The Bayou Bengals shouldn’t be too surprising, with Garrett Nussmeier (114.5 PAR/13) ranking among the 10 most productive QBs in the nation early on. While he is new to being LSU’s primary starter, the fourth-year junior (and son of former NFL QB Doug Nussmeier — go Vandals!) went into the year with a lot of experience as a backup, an awesome bowl performance last season, and he inherited an offense that had seen Jayden Daniels put up silly numbers the year before. Nussmeier was a known quantity.
The far bigger surprise among the national PAR leaders is South Alabama QB Gio Lopez, also in his first season as a primary quarterback for the Jaguars. Under coach Major Applewhite, this team’s offense ranks ninth nationally with 48.2 PPG — and while 87 of those points came in a romp over FCS foe Northwestern State, they’ve also put up 38 on North Texas and 48 on the road at Appalachian State.
Lopez missed the second game of the season against Ohio, with Bishop Davenport2 taking the reins, and they only scored 20 points. In Lopez’s starts, though, USA is averaging nearly 58 PPG and he would be on pace for these ridiculous stats per 13 games: 3,653 pass yards, 39-0 TD-INT ratio, 732 rushing yards and 9 more rush TDs.
Obviously, that’s against competition far worse than LSU. (Far worse!) So I wouldn’t hold out hope for Lopez and the 20.5-point underdogs to pull the upset or anything, particularly not in Tiger Stadium. But given the numbers both Nussmeier and Lopez have put up, the Gulf Coastal Plain of Lousiana and south Alabama has been one of the epicenters of exciting college QB play so far this year.
Filed under: College Football, QB U
Yes, I’m using the same email as for Baseball Bytes, LOL.
Which is somehow not the name of a fake high school football team.