Fine may make NFL doubters pay
North Texas passer has tall task at the next level due to his short stature
When the 2019 college football season begins, the active Football Bowl Subdivision leader in career passing yards will be a small quarterback from an appropriately tiny town who received a single FBS scholarship offer coming out of high school.
That North Texas bothered to recruit Mason Fine at all in January 2016 owes itself to a conversation between Seth Littrell, the Mean Green’s incoming head coach, and Matt Hennesy, Fine’s high school coach in Locust Grove, Okla.
The two men had been friends for years, and Hennesy knew Littrell needed a quarterback. He had just the guy. This was “a once-in-a-lifetime kid” who was the only two-time Gatorade Player of the Year in Oklahoma history. He had elevated a doormat program to a state title contender, notched pinball numbers in the same Air Raid offence Littrell runs and yet he had accrued zero major recruiting interest aside from an invitation to walk on at Oklahoma State.
Sounds great, Littrell thought. What’s the flaw? “He’s short,” Hennesy said. Short, in Fine’s case, is fivefoot-10, a figure that for generations has frightened colleges and stood as a death knell to NFL dreams. Even now, after amassing 9,407 passing yards and back-to-back seasons with a completion percentage above 63 at North Texas, and leading a college most people outside the state barely associate with football to a 9-4 record, Fine is bracing himself to be overlooked once more when he exhausts his eligibility next year.
“It’s harsh, but it’s the way it is, and the way the league is,” Fine said during an interview before Saturday’s New Mexico Bowl, where North Texas lost 52-13 against Utah State. “I’ve been told I can’t do something my whole life.”
For his part, Littrell isn’t concerned. He has “an extreme amount of confidence” that Fine compares favourably to established NFL quarterbacks.
“He is just as good as (the Philadelphia Eagles’) Nick Foles and is just as good as (Chicago Bears starter) Mitch Trubisky,” Littrell said. He should know. Before coming to North Texas, he coached Foles at Arizona and Trubisky at North Caroli- na. “At this time in his career, maybe better as a player overall.”
Fine was born in Peggs, Okla., an unincorporated town of 813 too small for even a welcome sign. He took up football in the fourth grade when his father, Dale, signed him up for a youth league in a neighbouring town. Neither father nor son knew what he was doing — “I remember showing up for the first day of practice, and my pads and my pants were upside down,” Fine said — but the boy threw well enough to be slotted in at quar- terback.
The next year, his father drove him 2 hours to Norman, where Oklahoma held a youth football camp. Fine remembers hanging on every word Josh Heupel, then the Sooners’ quarterback coach, told the crowd about quarterback mechanics.
When his senior season ended, Fine resigned himself to accepting Oklahoma State’s walkon offer or playing for a school in the lesser Football Championship Subdivision. Then Littrell took Hennesy’s advice and compared Fine’s film to the rest of the quarterbacks on his shortlist. He saw enough to take a chance.
“Game for game for game, it wasn’t even close,” Littrell said. “It just felt like: ‘Why not? We don’t have anything to lose.’ ”
Fine broke fall camp as the backup to Alec Morris, a transfer from Alabama. That’s where he figured to stay, until Littrell abruptly inserted him into the fourth quarter of North Texas’s first game that season. Fine led a touchdown drive and was named the starter the following week. Three years later, he has broken virtually every team passing record and has led the Mean Green to their best twoyear win total since the 1970s.
But the burden of proof is higher for smaller quarterbacks in the NFL, even as players such as Baker Mayfield and Russell Wilson experience success. This year’s Heisman Trophy winner, Kyler Murray, figured to be a point of contention among draftniks were he not already signed to play baseball for the Oakland A’s. The challenge is especially true for quarterbacks leading the Air Raid offence, the fast-paced, wideopen college scheme that is only beginning to gain a foothold in the NFL.
Fine, whom the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders have placed on their negotiation list, will have to prove he has enough accuracy, athleticism and smarts to make up for his supposed height deficiencies.
“He’ll end up making the team as a backup, he’ll sit there and be that backup guy that doesn’t get a ton of reps,” said Hennesy, who doesn’t hide that he wants to see Fine prove his doubters wrong again. “But when his number’s called, he’s never leaving the field again.”
“I’m just going to laugh and sit back and watch,” Littrell said.