Young at heart of Texas' dreams
By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
Everything he'd been taught about playing quarterback told Vince Young what he was seeing in the FedEx Orange Bowl last January wasn't right.
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</TD><TD class=sidebar vAlign=top width=75>Vince Young hopes to take Texas back to the Rose Bowl again this season, this time for the BCS title game.</TD><TD rowSpan=2>
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=bottom align=left>By Mark J. Terrill, AP</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
He stared into his TV. Glared at it. Young had starred in the Rose Bowl a few days earlier, running for four touchdowns and passing for another, refusing to let Texas lose to Michigan. And now he waited for Oklahoma's Jason White to show the same strength of will against Southern California — something the Heisman Trophy winner never visibly did. (
Related item: Young's 2004 season)
White and the Sooners didn't just lose college football's national championship game, they were embarrassed 55-19. "When they got down," Young says, "I kind of saw him just walking around and not saying anything to the guys. As a leader, as a quarterback, you've got to keep everybody in the game ... everybody believing in each other.
Keep on going. We're going to overcome this.
"I think from Oklahoma's standpoint, they gave up a little bit. ... I thought Jason White should have done more."
Granted, Young's unsparing assessment might have more bite if he'd beaten White in either of his two career starts against OU. He and the Longhorns weren't in the Orange Bowl seven months ago because they'd fallen to the Sooners 12-0 in October. White was better that day.
But he wasn't, arguably, by the end of a season in which Young engineered six successive come-from-behind wins.
And nobody outside Los Angeles, where No. 1 draft-pick-in-waiting Matt Leinart is back for USC, might be better than the breathtaking Texas junior this season.
"He'll be one of the great quarterbacks to ever play college football before he leaves," predicts Longhorns coach Mack Brown. "And I think he'll be an NFL quarterback, and a very, very good one."
Think Randall Cunningham.
Brown likes to compare the 6-5, 235-pound Young to current NFL standouts Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper and Michael Vick — all of whom, like Young, can run as well as pass their teams downfield. But former Dallas Cowboys savant Gil Brandt, now a senior analyst for NFL.com, sees him as another Cunningham, who played in four Pro Bowls before retiring in 2002 as the league's all-time leader in rushing yardage by a quarterback.
"I think he's a more active player than McNabb or Culpepper," Brandt says. "If you timed them in drills like the short shuttle (in which players sprint 5 yards one way, 10 yards the other, back and forth), I think he would have a better time. He seems to me to have quicker moves than those guys.
"They say he's not the most accurate passer in the world. Well, I'll tell you, some of the throws he made last year, especially the one at Kansas ... (for a 21-yard touchdown that pulled out a 27-23 win), were as good as you'll ever see."
Strong finisher
Brandt, like Brown, points to the bottom line. That 7-0 closing kick gave Texas an 11-1 record. Young's overall record as a starter is 17-2.
Texas returns 14 other offensive and defensive starters, including potential All-Americans in 6-7, 315-pound offensive tackle Jonathan Scott and defensive tackle Rodrique Wright.
But Young is the principal reason the Longhorns sit at No. 2 in both the USA TODAY coaches' and Associated Press media preseason polls.
They open Sept. 3 vs. Louisiana-Lafayette. A week later, they test themselves with a trip to No. 9 Ohio State.
Survive that, the annual early-October showdown with Oklahoma (which Texas hasn't won since 1999), a day-after-Thanksgiving trip to Texas A&M and the Big 12 Conference's Dec. 3 championship game, and the 'Horns should find themselves back in the Rose Bowl.
There on Jan. 4, he could get his own shot at Southern California in the Bowl Championship Series' title game.
Young's notion of quarterbacking comes, in part, from an uncle, Keith Young, a former Houston schoolboy star who played quarterback at the University of the District of Columbia. He's the 40-year-old brother of Vince's dad, Vincent, who disappeared from Vince's life before he was in school. Two summers ago, his father — repeatedly in trouble with the law — was sentenced to 16 years in prison for burglary.
"I made a promise to my brother when that happened," says Keith, a middle school teacher and coach in Houston. "I told him, 'Look, one thing you don't have to worry about is your kid.'
"We have such a huge family, both his mom's side and the Young side. I have six brothers; I'm the youngest. So he has five uncles on his side with wives, and he has 24 or 25 first cousins. And we all love him. We all support him."
Keith Young started Vince's football tutorial at age 8. They worked on mechanics, throwing through an old tire as Vince's late granddad, Earl, once did with Keith.
And they talked. A lot. There's much more to it, Keith kept telling his gifted nephew, than passing and running. "You're a leader on the field, keeping everybody upbeat, knowing what everybody's doing on the field. And Vincent has those skills," Keith says
"When he was coming up and I watched him at games, everybody else was looking at his running and his touchdowns and all that. I was looking at his demeanor, how he worked the sideline. Say a bad play happened. When he comes off the field, what's his reaction? Is he off to himself? Is he going to his linemen and keeping them up? Is he going to his running back and saying, hey, we're going to pull this out?
"You pull any film on him out, and watch how he operates the sideline with his players."
Of course, Vince tends to stand out even more
on the field.
His Vick-ish running and improvisational skills have never been in question. Young rushed for 90 yards a game last season, a better average than the two Auburn running backs, Ronnie Brown and Carnell "Cadillac" Williams, who were the second and fifth overall picks in the NFL draft.
But Young hears the same things as Vick about his passing touch. His drop-down throwing motion isn't easy on the eye, and he has thrown just as many interceptions at Texas (18) as TD passes. Is he a running back masquerading as a quarterback?
Young practically spits his response. "If I'm completing balls to my guys down the field," he says, "I'm a quarterback."
Let him loose
A switch was flicked after a lackluster win vs. Missouri in October in which Young threw for only 19 yards, was intercepted twice and benched. He sat down with Brown in his office the next day and asked his coach to liberalize the play-calling — "just trust me a little bit more." Brown agreed he and his staff might have been a bit too restrictive.
"We tried to help him too much by limiting what he was doing to make sure he got more confidence, and I think it sent him the wrong message," Brown says. "So we said, 'Let's just go for it.' "
Young completed 62.8% of his passes, rushed for 6.7 yards per carry, averaged 306.5 total yards and accounted for 17 TDs in the final six games.
Texas erased second-half deficits in its last four games. In the Rose Bowl, the game that stamped Young a star, he had four TD runs ranging from 10 to 60 yards and an 11-yard scoring pass — all before he ran for 34 yards on the Horns' final 47-yard drive. That set up the field goal with no time left that beat Michigan 38-37. "If they watched the Rose Bowl, they see I am a quarterback," Young says. "They can say this. They can say that. ... I'm going to be a quarterback for life."
Young is taller than 25 of the 32 quarterbacks starting in the NFL and stands eye-to-eye with the rest, including the Colts' Peyton Manning, Cowboys' Drew Bledsoe and Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger.
"Two years from now, after he's finished his (college) career, I don't think there's any question that this guy's a first-rounder," Brandt says. "And I don't think there's any question that he'll be an impact player."
Young, who redshirted his first year, already is fielding speculation he'll be draft-ready in April.
Leinart, of course, was shown first-pick money and took a pass, defying expectations by returning for his senior season at USC.
"That's his decision, man," Young says. "Family-wise, (to) get a degree, whatever he's trying to do. ... Two different worlds."
Maybe so. Leinart's return to the Trojans preserves the possibility they'll intersect, however. In the Rose Bowl a little more than four months from now, a national championship on the line.
Time, then, for Jason White to sit in judgment.
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17-2 as a starter. Can't argue w/ that.
