Mizzou QB Kelly Bryant, a Clemson transfer, says he 'wasn't surprised' by Tigers' blowout of Alabama
Unlike much of the college football-watching world, Kelly Bryant wasn’t surprised by Clemson’s rout of Alabama in the national championship game.
Bryant opened the 2018 season as Clemson’s starting quarterback but transferred after four games when he was supplanted by Trevor Lawrence as the starter. Bryant, now at Missouri, was back in SEC country on Monday for media days and was asked about the 44-16 win for the Tigers.
“No, I wasn’t surprised at all because I knew those guys had a great game plan going into the game,” Bryant said Monday at SEC Media Days in Hoover. “Just talking to them, they felt good about it. It didn’t surprise me any that the game ended the way it did.”
Lawrence threw for three touchdowns in the win and enters the 2019 season as one of the two big Heisman favorites along with Alabama QB Tua Tagovailoa.
Bryant was Clemson’s starter in January of 2018 when the two teams had last met in the College Football Playoff. Alabama won that Sugar Bowl matchup and went on to beat Georgia in overtime for the national title.
Bryant’s transfer was the first high-profile exercise of college football’s new redshirt rules that allowed players to play in four games and still redshirt. By redshirting in 2018, Bryant was able to preserve his final season of eligibility and play elsewhere in 2019 as a graduate transfer.
He chose Missouri over schools like Auburn and Arkansas and stuck it out with the Tigers after they were slapped with a postseason ban for the 2019 season because of NCAA violations. And while Bryant’s exit from Clemson during the 2018 season might have been publicly awkward — he told a newspaper that he didn’t feel like he had gotten a fair shot — he said he still communicates with many of his former teammates on a regular basis.
“I talk to them every day,” Bryant said. “To this day we have group messages going, pretty much all the guys, couple guys who are in the league now. That’s just how the relationship we’ve built — just the game of football. That’s how we’ve always been, a family.”
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports
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