05-17-2023, 11:28 PM
Quote: @StickyBun said:Here ya go, had to break it into two parts because of the post size limit here:
This is at The Athletic, but supposedly is a very good story on Hall. Not sure if anyone here subscribes?
https://theathletic.com/4522816/2023/05/...u-vikings/
part 1:
Why rookie QB Jaren Hall is a perfect fit for the Minnesota Vikings
They were tired of the meetings. Meetings to discuss compliance rules. Meetings to introduce team obligations. The BYU football players had attended these sessions for hours one day at the beginning of fall camp in 2021, and yet they were not finished.
BYU offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick had prepared his talking points for an offense-specific forum: Arrive on time, be prepared and make no excuses. He planned to move quickly through the details to keep the players’ attention. Before he entered the room, though, one of the players approached him.
“Coach!”
Roderick discerned the voice. It was Jaren Hall, then a redshirt sophomore quarterback who had been at the school for three years but never started.
“Can I just have a minute to talk to the team either before or after you?” Hall asked.
“Sure,” Roderick said. “You go first.”
Hall stepped into the room and stood before his teammates.
“All right, listen up,” Hall said. “This is how we’re going to operate.”
The quarterback mentioned the importance of timeliness. He spoke directly to the older players, explaining how much the team needed to embrace its youthful talent. Hall even cited the importance of the “Holy War,” the rivalry between BYU and Utah, declaring: “We’re going to punch them in the mouth, and we’re going to keep punching all night.” (At the time, BYU had lost nine straight games to Utah.)
“I’m looking at the players while he’s talking,” Roderick recalled recently, “and all eyes were on him. It was the best player speech I’ve ever heard in my career.”
It was not Hall’s words so much as the gravitational pull of his presence that Roderick remembers.
The coach thinks the value is in the why behind it — why Hall, who had never been BYU’s starter, had the cachet to captivate the entire room. Peel back the layers, Roderick believes, and you will further understand the qualities that intrigued the Minnesota Vikings enough to add the 25-year-old Hall to their quarterback room.
Let’s start on an airplane.
It was 3 a.m. one September morning in 2020, and Roderick unbuckled his seatbelt and headed down the aisle toward the restroom. Hours before, BYU had beaten Navy 55-3. The team was flying back west.
Roderick expected most of the players to be asleep, but the white glow of an iPad screen caught his attention. Roderick noticed that the team’s starting quarterback and future first-round pick, Zach Wilson, was awake and watching game film of his football hero: Aaron Rodgers. This was the Wilson that Roderick had become accustomed to coaching: a QB who sought any tiny tidbit of information that could help, at times to a fault.
Hall, Wilson’s backup that season, may not have downloaded Rodgers’ film and watched it at 3 a.m. He did, however, share Wilson’s willingness to improve his football understanding.
But that’s far from the only thing Wilson and Hall had in common.
The two quarterbacks’ teams played against each other in high school. Wilson attended Corner Canyon, while Hall went to Maple Mountain. Hall is actually a year older than Wilson, but Wilson joined BYU’s football team a year earlier because Hall served a two-year mission in California.
Because Wilson was familiar with the team’s offense and Hall needed time to knock off rust after serving his mission, the younger Wilson beat out Hall for the team’s starting quarterback job in 2019.
“It was a really competitive battle,” Roderick said. “As close as it could be. We decided on Zach the week of the first game.”
Hall could have resented Roderick for the decision. In this era of college football, many would have transferred. Instead, Hall supported Wilson through the ups and downs of a 7-6 season.
The next year, Hall pushed Wilson again for the starting job. Once again, Wilson got the nod during the week before the first game.
“The main reason we chose Zach was that at the time Jaren was still playing baseball,” Roderick said. “Zach was all (foot)ball all the time. And yet, in spite of that, Jaren kept the competition super close.”
Again, Hall could have complained or transferred. But even Dustin Smith, cofounder of QB Elite, who has coached Hall privately since he was in eighth grade, said that Hall never expressed disdain for Wilson. In fact, Smith said Hall never mentioned the idea of playing elsewhere.
Roderick was not the only one who took note of the way Hall handled the decision — Hall’s teammates were aware of the way he reacted, too.
“People gained confidence in him because they knew what to expect,” Roderick said.
Of course, it helped that they also knew how Hall could operate on the field.Jaren Hall would go on to lead BYU to a 10-3 record in 2021, his first season as the Cougars’ starting quarterback.