CFP COTTON BOWL: O'Brien-Young duo rises to the top of college football

Alabama quarterback Bryce Young seen here at Tuesday’s Cotton Bowl workout, has built a winning relationship with first-year offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien. (UA Media Relations)

By GRAHAM DUNN

ARLINGTON – Alabama defensive coordinator Bill O’Brien was back with the team on Tuesday. He along with offensive line coach Doug Marrone had spent a few days in isolation after a bout with COVID-19.

While away,his coaching was via a computer screen. How weird was that?

“It wasn't weird, only because I've had that experience in the National Football League last year, everything was Zoomed relative to – you know, this has been going on for a couple years now in our country,” O’Brien explained. “So I had experience with the Zoom and, really, what I think the biggest thing is that Coach [Nick] Saban made everything normal. It was like I was actually there. So I was in every meeting.”

O’Brien has been under the microscope after taking over from Steve Sarkisian and his record-breaking offense a year ago.

The new coordinator did not have quite the lineup that Sark had, which included five first-team All-Americans. But it wasn’t bare.

He did have a quarterback in Bryce Young that steadily improved to the point of leading the Crimson Tide back to the College Football Playoffs. And he won the Heisman Trophy, a first for the storied program in that no quarterback had ever done that.

 “Bryce is a tremendous young man. He's very smart. He's very poised. He's very humble. He's a great teammate,” O’Brien said.

“And every great quarterback that I've been fortunate to be around has those qualities. They're all different. They all come in different shapes and sizes and things like that, but they all have those qualities. And the quality of humility is a tremendous quality that he has.

“When he went to the Heisman, when he came back, he made that statement to me that, 'Look, I'm very grateful and very honored to be the Heisman Trophy winner, but we have more to do. There's more out there for me to do.' He's a young man that really gets it, and he's practiced really well the last couple weeks for a very, very challenging game on Friday against a very good defense, like I said in the beginning. But can't emphasize enough the special qualities that Bryce has.”

Apparently the feeling is mutual considering Young’s words during the Cotton Bowl press conference and how he missed having his coach around during workouts.

“That was really rough,” Young explained. “Not having him in person for an extended period of time, not having him on the field for a few practices, that was tough.

“Someone like OB who is such a great mind and gives us in the quarterback room and meetings so much intel and knowledge and out on the field the entire offense, really leading that from a coaching standpoint, whenever you can't have someone like that on the field and around us, he did a great job. He was still Zooming in. He was still running every meeting virtually, so he was helping us out throughout everything. And he was on – he was still talking to us. But when he's not there in person, you obviously lose that instant feedback, that presence.”

When O’Brien arrived in Tuscaloosa, he was adamant in his claim that he wasn’t interested in changing what Alabama did offensively. 

It was just the opposite.

“I think the most challenging thing for me was, when I came in here, learning this offense,” O’Brien said. “And I had a lot of people help me, people that were here before, guys on the coaching staff, obviously Bryce.

“I've said before, Mac Jones, when he was working out for the draft, helped me a little bit, which was great.

“So I'm really thankful to those people. That was the most challenging thing because I had been involved with an offense for 10 to 15 years, whatever it was, similar offense. But when you come here, you're running Alabama's offense; you're not bringing your offense in here. And it's a great offense with a great history. And it was really awesome to learn it, but it was very challenging.”

Young noticed immediately the humility O’Brien showed and that helped the relationship grow.

“We were able to bounce certain things off of each other,” Young said. “When he first got here, really we wanted to keep verbiage and we wanted to keep a lot of things the same when OB got here. So I think for him, kind of learning new stuff, and figuring out what he would change, and what he would keep, and figuring out how he would interpret the whole offense.

“And, for me, I had been there for a year. And for someone to have the track record that he has and still come in and be humble enough to say, hey, how do you guys read this? How do you guys feel about this? Do you like this play? How has this worked in the past? I think having that conversation early on was really big for us, really big for me. And I think that was kind of big for us learning together.”

That combination worked a couple of miracles during the season and then finished off the almighty Georgia Bulldogs in the SEC Championship game. That leaves the ultimate goal of the national title.

“In the end, we were able to come out victorious in most of our games, which is a credit to our offensive line and everybody else on offense, coaching staff, the whole thing,” O’Brien said. “So I think that we came out of the Auburn game, we made some adjustments. We knew what we had to do to get fixed, and then we studied Georgia and we tried to do as good a job as we could.

“And now we've moved on to, obviously, Cincinnati. So it's one game at a time, and we've been working real hard on Cincinnati. And hopefully we'll coach and play well on Friday.”