Good for Will Anderson Jr. and Bryce Young for Playing in Alabama’s Bowl Game

Plus more notes as we get into bowl season and then draft season.

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The last few years, my Six From Saturday notes have been included at the bottom of my MMQB column on Monday mornings. This year, they’ll be published as a separate post each week. Here are my thoughts on this week in the college world, geared mostly toward what should be of interest to NFL fans.

1) I was talking to someone a few weeks ago about bowl opt-outs, and Alabama LB Will Anderson Jr.’s name came up. And this scout, who knows the program well, said this to me: “He’ll play in the bowl game. You can mark it down.” I was surprised, to say the least, that he felt so strongly that a surefire top-five pick playing in a program where any bowl outside the College Football Playoff represents failure would give it a go in what would amount to an exhibition game that most coaches use to prepare for the year to follow.

But here we are, and that scout, using the kid’s makeup to forecast this, was dead on. And Anderson won’t be the only Bama star bucking the recent trend of high draft picks skipping bowls to mitigate risk—2021 Heisman winner Bryce Young is doing it, too. Nick Saban, for his part, said Bama has done all it can to help the players get insured, just in case, and lauded both guys for the decisions to play.

Anderson will play in the Alabama uniform one more time :: Gary Cosby Jr./USA TODAY Sports

“These two guys are great competitors,” Saban told reporters. “That’s why they wanted to play. They want to try to continue to create value for themselves, be good teammates and help their teammates play well in the game. That makes them old-fashioned in a lot of ways, but I sort of respect that.”

And I’d just say, good for them. The best part of where we are on these things is players have more information and more freedom to make their decisions than ever before.

As for how good those two are, there is a realistic shot—it’s not certain, because Georgia’s Jalen Carter could go before Anderson, and another quarterback could go in front of Young—they could go Nos. 1 and 2, in some order. On Young, I had one exec tell me earlier in the season, “He has everything you want, other than size.” On Anderson, it’s pretty much unanimous among scouts I talk to that it’s him and Carter vying to be the first nonquarterback taken.

2) One thing that does help give Young and Anderson the flexibility to play in the Sugar Bowl—being able to crush it at the combine is less of a pressing matter for them. Why? Well, they’re so highly regarded, they don’t even really need to work out at the combine. Plenty of prospects of their ilk don’t.

Conversely, the extra four to six weeks of combine training really would matter to a non-first-round prospect who’s invited to Indianapolis, whose stock would naturally be more volatile.

3) When Matt Rhule was at Temple and Baylor, he had good, heady quarterbacks that he and his staff developed—P.J. Walker at the former, Charlie Brewer at the latter—which probably informed his decision-making over the last three years, in trying to find a quarterback, rather than selling out to get one high in the draft. And you wonder whether now he’s learned from that in how he’s getting started at Nebraska.

The nation’s top recruit for 2024, Dylan Raiola, decommitted from Ohio State over the weekend. His dad is a Huskers legend and ex-Lions center Dominic Raiola. And after the decommitment, Rhule, through his Twitter account, was hinting as strongly as he could at how hard Nebraska was going to go after the legacy quarterback.

I don’t know whether Rhule will get him. But I think the former Panthers coach is pretty smart, even with all that happened in Carolina, and, if he learned from his time in Carolina, then good for him.

4) There are a lot of sleepy bowl games this week. So I’ll give you the one to watch, from a draft perspective: the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl (shout-out to you if you know what Radiance Technologies is). That one pits Louisiana against Houston, and the Cougars, as they have pretty consistently the last few years, will bring some NFL talent into this one Friday.

One is quarterback Clayton Tune, a 6'3", 220-pound fifth-year senior who checks the boxes physically to play in the league and has a ton of experience. He’s thrown nearly 1,500 passes as a collegian, 101 for touchdowns (against 41 picks), and also has shown skill as a runner, with nearly 1,200 yards rushing in his 46 games. The expectation is he’ll be an early Day 3 pick.

And one of the guys he’ll be throwing to might get taken higher than that. That would be Nathaniel “Tank” Dell, a 5'10", 165-pound stick of dynamite who’s had 193 catches over the last two years, and averaged 17.0 yards per punt return this year.

Both will be in Mobile for the Senior Bowl.

5) The case of West Point DE Andre Carter II is interesting—it’s not often that an Army player is draftable, let alone in the first-round discussion, as Carter has been. The House and Senate have passed the National Defense Authorization Act, and it is now awaiting President Joe Biden’s signature. The bill would mandate that athletes from the academies complete their service requirement before going pro (the current system allows them to turn professional immediately after their eligibility is exhausted).

So how good is Carter? I’ve gotten some pushback on the idea that he’ll be a first-round pick. One scout told me he thinks, “If he went to Kent State, we wouldn’t be talking about him as a first-rounder.” But he’s still plenty good and a worthy test case for a new rule that may or not be fair to talented athletes who’ve played their way into draft consideration at Army, Navy or Air Force.

“A backup pass rusher early in his career that will have to improve strength in order to have a role versus the run,” says the scout. “He plays hard and comes off with some burst, but he’s going to struggle to win off the edge consistently because he’s pretty tight turning the corner. Best trait is his effort, and he competes and he will get to the QB because of it. But if he doesn’t win with that first step, he’s going to get shut down consistently early on in his career.”

6) I’ve got a lot of admiration for what North Dakota State’s accomplished—with their win last weekend over upstart Incarnate Word, the Bison are headed to the FCS title game for the 10th time in their history, with all 10 appearances having come since 2011. They are, you guessed it, 9–0 in those games, as they go for a 10th trophy in 12 seasons.

It’s a staggering amount of success, and even more so when you consider it’s been maintained through three different coaches, from Craig Bohl (now at Wyoming), Chris Klieman (now at Kansas State) and Matt Entz (the current man in charge).

The Bison will play top-seeded South Dakota State for the title on Jan. 8 in Frisco, Texas.