Bryant gears for only year at Missouri
People my age remember Kelly Bryant as Arkansas’ secretary of state, seven times elected, mostly for turning on Christmas lights at the state Capitol each holiday season. Like Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee, Bryant was born in Hope, the watermelon capital of Arkansas, but lacked either former governor’s political savvy and settled for counting election results, one of his office’s requirements.
Another Kelly Bryant, this one a football player, made the news last fall. After three years at Clemson in his native South Carolina, Bryant was essentially a quarterback for hire in 2018. University of Arkansas fans, suffering through the first 10-loss season in program history, fancied Bryant wearing a red jersey with a razorback painted on the helmet. Bryant’s October visit to Fayetteville for a game with Tulsa effectively overshadowed one of the Hogs’ two victories last year.
Connor Noland, who quarterbacked the Arkansas game Bryant witnessed, is no longer in the football program, choosing baseball, which may be his ticket to the major leagues. Bryant is in Missouri, replacing Drew Mock, drafted by the Denver Broncos, where quarterback auditions have been frequent since Peyton Manning retired.
Arkansas fans have been quiet about Bryant’s decision, though that may change before Missouri plays the Razorbacks on Thanksgiving Friday at Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium. With a team projected sixth or seventh (no higher) in the Southeastern Conference Western Division, Arkansas people aren’t looking much past the Aug. 31 Fayetteville opener with Portland State and seeing which of six prospective quarterbacks second-year coach Chad Morris chooses.
When Bryant was making a list and checking it twice last year, the thought here was that Bryant, a prospective NFL quarterback, would not burden himself with trying to revive a program (Arkansas’) at a 60year low. We now learn that if Bryant had had his druthers out of high school, he would have gone directly to another SEC school with the same mascot as Missouri. The Auburn Tigers went in another direction, though they came back to Bryant last fall.
“They weren’t one of the first schools that contacted me; it was probably like three or four weeks after I announced,” Bryant said Monday at SEC Media Days in Hoover, Ala. “That was one of the schools I wanted to go out of high school.”
Bryant checked out Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi State and North Carolina before visiting Auburn in early December, two days prior to making his transfer decision. Talk was that Bryant wanted to play for Gus Malzahn and was headed to Auburn; Arkansas’ chances were thought good because Morris recruited Bryant out of high school while an offensive aide at Clemson.
“I seriously considered (Auburn) because that’s actually where I wanted to go to school out of high school, so now I had the opportunity to go there as well,” Bryant said Monday. “… Initially, I was going to go to another school, but I decided to take a visit to Auburn, just jell a little with coach Malzahn, just seeing the offense — I feel like he was going to cater to me.”
Bryant’s decision may come back to haunt Malzahn, who enters his seventh season on the Plains with a quarterback quandary. (I find it interesting that ex-Razorback aide Tim Horton left Malzahn’s Auburn staff to coach running backs at Vanderbilt, which lately has had rival Tennessee’s number. Then again, I was surprised that Rhett Lashlee, whom Malzahn quarterbacked at Shiloh Christian High School, left Auburn, where he was offensive coordinator, to take a similar position at Connecticut; Lashlee, only 36 but considered a comer in the profession, one whose name came up in Bret Bielema’s last
days at Arkansas, is now offensive coordinator at SMU, Morris’ former school. Strange world.)
In the end, Missouri offensive coordinator Derek Dooley (son of Vince, the legendary former Georgia head coach and himself a former Tennessee head coach), with his previous NFL connections, swayed Bryant’s Missouri migration.
“For me, it was like OK, I have one year, and I want to put myself in a position to be able to have a chance to get to the next level,” Bryant said. “I looked at Missouri, coach Dooley’s been at the Cowboys [also with the Dolphins]; he has pretty much the same offensive staff, the terminology that they’ve had. So, now having to learn a whole new offense at the pace they do in the NFL, I’m up for that challenge, see where I can be at the end of the day.”
Missouri in late January received NCAA sanctions including a postseason bowl ban for the 2019 campaign, thus Bryant’s lone season in Columbia may end in Little Rock. CBS, which annually televises the Arkansas-Missouri game and last year was stuck with a 38-0 snoozer, can only hope that Arkansas is in the bowl picture come late November. Missouri hasn’t played in Little Rock since 1963. Arkansas’ secretary of state then? Kelly Bryant.