QB chaos reigns all over the SEC West, but not with Bryce Young and Alabama football | Goodbread

The Alabama football coaching staff is surveying a host of position battles on the offensive side of the ball as preseason camp enters its second full week, everywhere from the line to the backfield to wide receiver.

Competition pretty much in any direction returning quarterback Bryce Young looks.

There is much to be settled and plenty of time to settle it, but in returning a Heisman Trophy winner behind center, coach Nick Saban at least doesn't have to deal with the dreaded double-Q: quarterback questions.

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Nothing looms over a preseason like uncertainty at the most important position on the field, and Saban has been there before. Entering 2011, the preseason competition between AJ McCarron and Phillip Sims took up plenty of oxygen. A Saban press conference didn't go by without at least one query about the McCarron-Sims horserace. In the 2018 preseason, and with a lot more national attention, Tua Tagovailoa and Jalen Hurts vied to defend a national championship they both played a hand in the previous year. At this time four years ago, nobody in Tuscaloosa was talking about anything else.

Between the high degree to which quarterback play determines games and the leadership demands that are intrinsic to the position, uncertainty behind center is unsettling from locker room to luxury box.

Young gives Alabama the surest thing in the college game.

Meanwhile, quarterback chaos hangs in the sky all over the SEC West.

Over in Oxford, coach Lane Kiffin is juggling Luke Altmyer and Jaxson Dart, who is one of umpteen transfer-portal additions for Ole Miss. Unfortunately for Dart, it won't come down to who has the better name for a passer.

Down on the Plains, it's a battle fronted by T.J. Finley and Zach Calzada, and it's anyone's guess who will emerge. As if Bryan Harsin doesn't face enough pressure as the coach who miraculously survived a bizarre internal investigation this offseason, he's yet to identify the quarterback he'll need to extend that survival.

Nothing is sure at Texas A&M, either, where Haynes King, Max Johnson and rifle-armed freshman Connor Weigman are jockeying to lead a season of high expectations for the Aggies.

Then there's LSU. Left behind by the transfer exits of the aforementioned Finley and Johnson, new coach Brian Kelly is evaluating transfer Jayden Daniels and a young Garrett Nussmeier to lead his first Tigers team. Any or all of these races could drag on until Week 1, when coaches finally have to show their hands. Until then, they're being as coy as possible. Whatever it takes to quell the anticipation.

"We haven't decided on the quarterback after today, so you can hold those questions," Kelly told reporters at the beginning of LSU camp.

Sorry, coach, the questions won't stop until your starter gets tapped on the shoulder. And it will be no different this month at Ole Miss, Auburn or A&M.

That's a lot of upheaval for one division.

And that makes Young's presence all the more reassuring at Alabama.

Reach Chase Goodbread at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Alabama preseason spared quarterback chaos elsewhere in SEC West