I guess there's no way to avoid rehashing things somewhat, unless I just don't respond so here goes.Again, love Jalen, but Tua was better. Tua should have been elevated to starter sometime during the 2017 season because he was more capable. Tua offered Alabama the best chance to win.
I'll start with this. I believe if you just swapped out Daboll and the Locksley/Enos combination for 2017 and 2018 respectively, and kept the same starters throughout, Alabama probably wins two championships. I'll break that down as a way to explain the complexities of the situation.
In 2017, Daboll simply was a bad fit for Hurts. That was one reason for the "revolt". He wasn't capable of drawing up plays for Hurts, he had to have someone else do it, and he was never the right guy for Hurts. He was, willfully or not undercutting Hurts. The fact that Hurts performed noticeably better the following season, under the guy who had to kind of try to make Daboll's offense work for Hurts mind you, is proof enough of that. If it was Locksley, focused on his job, as he would have been in 2017 drawing up the offense for Hurts (with Enos providing support in his development) there's no question in my mind we'd have seen better performance from Hurts. The proof lies in what we saw last season.
However, and I said this at the time actually, Daboll was the better fit for Tua! We saw some proof of that when Tua faced tougher offenses. Daboll had a more pro-style offense with more expertise in going against top tier (NFL) defenses. I don't think Daboll would have struggled as much against Clemson, especially considering he likely wouldn't have lost focus as well.
We can't avoid the fact that Tua's QBR against Georgia was 29.2 and 58.8 against Clemson. In his much lamented performance against Auburn, Hurts had a QBR of 78.6 and against Georgia in 2017 he was 49.2. So, when both were bad they were bad in similar fashion. Not only did Hurts struggle mightily against Georgia (the first time, second time under Locksley he was amazing), but Tua struggled mightily against Clemson. On the flip side, Tua was 90.4 against Georgia in 2017 and Hurts was 99.4 against Georgia 2018!
What we can take away from that, is that under similar circumstances we saw similar performances! It's just that a lot of the trouble was with the offensive coordinators. Yes, Tua still is a better passer, but as you can see his on field performance wasn't always better and in the biggest games the differences shrunk considerably.
That gets into the choice of who to start. I don't care who the receivers wanted, that's irrelevant. Saban's job is to win championships. If you could watch Tua in the Clemson game and not realize deficiencies in his game, you're not paying any attention. He didn't perform better than a true freshman Hurts against Clemson in 2016. In fact, he performed worse (Hurts had a 60.5 QBR and put his team in the lead late) The notion that a younger, less experienced Tua than the one we saw struggle considerably against Clemson was demonstrably better than Hurts is not supported by anything substantive. This isn't pro potential, this isn't abilities to make throws in practice, we're talking about winning games.
Saban chose Hurts because he was the guy to get Alabama to the championship game. There's simply no guarantee that a true freshman Tua could have done that. Tua also offered Alabama more chances to lose, because he took risks Hurts never took.
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