White is Sports Person of the Year
Brady White stayed.
He stayed when Memphis coach Mike Norvell left for Florida State after a historic 2019 season. He stayed when star tailback Kenneth Gainwell opted out before the start of the 2020 season. He stayed when star wide receiver Damonte Coxie did the same in the middle of this season.
He stayed when the football program endured a COVID-19 outbreak. He stayed once the Tigers fell short of a fourth-straight American Athletic Conference championship game appearance. And he stayed for last week’s bowl game.
The most prolific quarterback in school history stayed at Memphis through it all, and ensured the Tigers turn the strangest season anyone can remember into an exceedingly redeeming endeavor.
For that, White earned one last honor before he attempts to achieve his NFL dreams in the coming months. He has been named The Commercial Appeal’s Sports Person of the Year for 2020.
“My time here at Memphis has just been special,” White said last week after the Tigers’ capped off their 8-3 season with a Montgomery Bowl win over Florida Atlantic. “It’s a special city, a special program.” It had a special quarterback, too. This serves as both a career achievement award, as well as an acknowledgement of how well White played this season in the face of a pandemic that completely altered the way college football teams operated. White leaves Memphis with the most wins (28), the most passing yards (10,215), and the most touchdowns (90) of any quarterback to come through the program. All of those records were broken this season, a season in which he led gamewinning, fourth-quarter drives three different times.
He threw for a career-high 486 yards and accounted for seven touchdowns when the Tigers orchestrated the biggest comeback in program history to beat UCF for the first time since 1990. He was the driving force when Memphis erased a 13point deficit over the final 4:36 of regulation in a win over South Florida.
And then, in his final game at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, White marched Memphis down the field in just 28 seconds to set up the buzzerbeating field goal that gave the Tigers a 30-27 win over Houston.
“My actions have spoke for themselves. There’s numbers and statistics that you can’t argue against,” White said. “I won a lot of games while I was here and that’s what matters to me.”
That, by the way, is what made White’s journey to this point even more remarkable. His credentials as a starter, let alone his status as one of the greatest players in program history, were doubted as recently as the middle of last season.
White was in the same recruiting class as Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, and Sam Darnold, among others, and he was a prized Arizona State recruit when Norvell served as offensive coordinator there. But his two seasons in Tempe were marred by injury.
So White came to Memphis ahead of the 2018 season as perhaps the first graduate transfer with three years of eligibility remaining, hopeful a reunion with Norvell would put his college career back on track. The decisions worked out about as well as anyone could have predicted.
During a bumpy first year, in which White won a quarterback competition over David Moore that divided the locker room, he helped Memphis return to the AAC championship game. He found his stride in 2019, as the Tigers reached unprecedented heights with last year’s AAC
title and Cotton Bowl appearance.
That run confirmed White was the third-straight spectacular quarterback to filter through Memphis during its seven-year rise from the bottom of the Football Bowl Subdivision. But the past year, when a global health crisis threatened to cancel this college football season altogether, cemented his standing as an unforgettable figure in Tiger lore.
White, who had already earned an undergraduate degree from Arizona State and a master's degree at Memphis, began to pursue a doctorate in liberal studies. He transformed his diet in the offseason to be more mobile. He spearheaded another top-25 offense despite playing most of the year with new running backs, new wide receivers and an offensive line that had just one returning starter playing the same position as a year ago.
He became the face of the most successful team in Memphis in recent years and, along the way, he became “a legend,” coach Ryan Silverfield declared after the Montgomery Bowl.
All because he stayed.
“I'll bleed blue the rest of my life,” White said. “I'm a Memphis Tiger forever.”
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter: @mgiannotto