Clemson-turned-Missouri quarterback Kelly Bryant a big ‘what-if’ for Auburn

HOOVER — Kelly Bryant squinted so much that his eyes were nearly closed inside the main ballroom at SEC Media Days on Monday, adjusting to both the bright lights shining into his face and the 30 or so reporters that rushed to surround his table in the far-left corner of the room.

He talked about how long his first drive to campus was, and what the weather was like when he got there. He discussed what it was like to watch his former Clemson teammates dismantle Alabama to win the College Football Playoff National Championship game back in January, a feeling he described as both happy and bittersweet.

There is a world in which that was Auburn quarterback Kelly Bryant talking to reporters Monday, the new face of the Gus Malzahn offense. The Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, native admitted that it was one of the places he wanted to go to out of high school, when he was a three-star recruit in the 2015 class that saw Auburn sign Tyler Queen and Jason Smith at the position. It was the last school Bryant visited before announcing his decision on Dec. 4.

“But at the end of the day,” he said Monday, “something in me was telling me to go to Missouri.”

It represents maybe the biggest “what-if” of Auburn’s upcoming season. Because if he had chosen Malzahn’s Tigers (which were one of his five finalists along with Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi State and North Carolina), there would have been no spring competition between Joey Gatewood, Bo Nix, Malik Willis and Cord Sandberg to replace Jarrett Stidham as Auburn’s starting quarterback. At least, not a legitimate one.

The job would have belonged to Bryant, the immediately eligible graduate transfer who left Clemson after freshman phenom Trevor Lawrence replaced him as the team’s starter on late in September. He was a senior who started 14 games in 2017 for a team that went 12-1 and won the ACC Championship game before falling to the Crimson Tide in a national semifinal, and a dual threat who completed 65.8 percent of his throws for 2,802 yards and 13 touchdowns and rushed 192 yards for 665 yards and 11 more scores.

“Just jelling with Coach Malzahn and seeing the offense, I felt like he was going to cater to me,” Bryant said of his “great visit” to Auburn that concluded on Dec. 2, two days before his decision. “But I just wanted an offense that was going to challenge me as far as learning a whole new terminology.”

Bryant believes he found that at Missouri, which has an offensive coordinator with seven seasons of NFL experience (Derek Dooley) and a better history of sending quarterbacks to the next level — Blaine Gabbert (in 2011) and Drew Lock (this year) were both top-two round picks, and Chase Daniel (2009) has had a 10-year career as a backup. Before Stidham, Auburn hadn’t produced an NFL quarterback since Cam Newton in 2010 (Nick Marshall signed as an undrafted free agent as a defensive back).

“Coach Dooley’s been at the Cowboys; he has pretty much the same offensive staff, the terminology that they’ve had,” Bryant said. “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.”

So Auburn will take on a brutal schedule that begins Aug. 31 against Oregon in Arlington, Texas, with either Gatewood or Nix as its starting quarterback. The former is a redshirt freshman who has quarterbacked only one drive in his college career (in the fourth quarter of December’s Music City Bowl rout of Purdue), and the latter a five-star true freshman and program legacy (his father, Patrick Nix, was a quarterback for the Tigers in the early 90’s) in his first year on campus.

Malzahn expressed plenty of confidence in both freshmen when he named them the leaders of the competition over Willis (who has since transferred to Liberty) and Sandberg on May 1. Each performed particularly well during the Tigers’ A-Day spring game on April 13, with Gatewood completing 7 of 10 passes for 123 yards and two touchdowns and Nix 11 of 16 for 155 yards and two scores leading the first-team offense in the first half.

But the fact remains that whichever one of them wins the competition will be a first-time starter come Aug. 31, which is a first for Malzahn as a head coach. Quarterback remains the biggest question on an Auburn roster that is otherwise loaded with talent and experience across every other position.

It certainly makes you wonder what could have been if Bryant chose the blue-and-orange Tigers instead of the back-and-gold ones seven months ago.

“I enjoyed my visit to Auburn, as well. I meshed well with Coach Malzahn,” Bryant said. “But at the end of the day, I had one year to get it right, and I felt Missouri was the best position for me to be in.”

Josh Vitale is the Auburn beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. You can follow him on Twitter at @JoshVitale. To reach him by email, click here.