Before Bryce Young, Anthony Richardson were NFL Draft darlings, they starred in Netflix season that didn't air
Bryce Young and Anthony Richardson are used to the spotlight.
Before they were top-10 NFL Draft prospects and even before they were starting college quarterbacks, the two were the main subjects of the fourth season of “QB1: Beyond the Lights,” a Netflix documentary that followed three top high school recruits during their senior seasons.
The premise of the show is simple: It’s real-life "Friday Night Lights." The show, produced by Peter Berg’s Film 45, debuted in 2017 with Ohio State recruit Tate Martell, Georgia recruit Jake Fromm and Wake Forest recruit Tayvon Bowers as its subjects. In subsequent seasons, the show chronicled the lives of other highly ranked prospects like Justin Fields, Sam Hartman and Spencer Rattler.
Season 4 was poised to feature USC-turned-Alabama commit Young, the 2020 No. 1 Rivals-ranked dual-threat quarterback out of legendary Mater Dei High School in Southern California, and Richardson, who ranked No. 6 and committed to his hometown University of Florida in Gainesville. Deuce Hogan, a Grapevine, Texas native who at the time committed to Iowa and now plays for Kentucky, was the third quarterback on the docket.
Production crews spent close to six months embedded with the trio's respective families and schools and finished filming what they believed to be their best season.
Only, it never made it to streaming.
“It's a little heartbreaking when you know that you have this window into their life before they sprung onto the national scene,” showrunner Rachel Libert told Yahoo Sports. “There's this wonderful sort of archive of what their life was before, which would make people who are following their careers now appreciate them even more. To understand the roots, to understand the hard work that went into getting to where they are today. We'd love the world to see that.”
Editing and post-production wrapped up around early March 2020, weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt. Despite the show being effectively ready for release, Netflix (who licensed the rights from Complex Networks, who owns the show) axed the fourth season and eventually pulled the previous three seasons from its platform.
Netflix never completely explained to the showrunners or the families why the season wasn’t released and didn’t publicly give Yahoo Sports a comment. The network did confirm to Yahoo Sports that the viewership for Season 3 wasn't enough to warrant the release of Season 4 in 2020. People associated with the production say one of the reasons was related to the timing of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still, with NFL Draft in 10 days and both Young and Richardson expected to go in the top 10, it offers a fascinating look at the seminal moments of their early football careers. Young is a technical wizard in the pocket who won the 2021 Heisman Trophy and is currently the betting favorite to go No. 1, while Richardson broke multiple records at the 2023 NFL scouting combine and met with a plethora of teams with early draft picks.
Young and Richardson were on board. Their schools, not so much
Steve Clarkson, a personal quarterbacks coach from Southern California and co-creator of “QB1,” wanted to do something different for Season 4. The original idea was not only to follow Young at Mater Dei, but also D.J. Uiagalelei out of crosstown rival St. John Bosco. Uiagalelei, the 2020 No. 1 ranked pro-style quarterback, committed to and eventually played at Clemson before he recently transferred to Oregon State. He participated in the second season of "QB1" when he was the sophomore backup to Re-al Mitchell, one of the three featured players.
Clarkson convinced Mater Dei head coach Bruce Rollinson, but needed clearance from the school as well as Young’s parents, Craig and Julie. The Youngs quickly agreed, but Mater Dei took a little more convincing.
“It's kind of like a badge of honor. So if ‘QB1’ was documenting, that means you're one of the best. So I don't know if it was a goal of Bryce's, but I know that was something that was very flattering and he was into,” Craig Young told Yahoo Sports. “We were looking forward to seeing the portrayal of a strong, united, African American family that rallied around their son and his dreams without all the drama and some of those negative messages.”
The showrunners decided against an all-California season, though, having documented St. John Bosco two years earlier. They pivoted back to their board of potential subjects and landed on Richardson, a born-and-bred Floridian who was committed to his hometown Gators. Richardson played high school football at Eastside High five miles away from where Florida played at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, and attended classes at the Professional Academies Magnet (PAM) at Loften High School, where he was training to be a firefighter and EMT while earning his high school diploma.
“I just remember him smiling and just being like, ‘Why me?” said Cedderick Daniels, then the head coach at Eastside. “He just couldn't believe it.”
The show almost lost Richardson after the Alachua County school board initially declined the offer to be featured. The main reason: There were concerns about filming in locker rooms with students. But Richardson’s mother, LaShawnda Lane, saved the season after she created a Facebook group to rally the community. Alumni of the school and other residents called the school board throughout the months leading up to the first shoot asking it to reconsider.
Eventually, the board did.
“I was happy at the time because people actually rallied together to try to make this work for the young man,” Daniels said. “And, you know, it brought a positive spin on our community.”
'Tailor-made for Bryce Young'
The first thing to know about Young’s season is the commute. He lived in Pasadena, California, about 40 miles away from Mater Dei, and woke up between 4 and 5 a.m. every morning to make the trek to his local gym for a morning workout before practice. That meant the film crew showed up at the Young house at 3:30 a.m. to set up and prepare to document his morning routine before hopping in the car for the 80-minute drive.
Brian Cimagala, the senior producer for Young’s crew, quickly discovered that while the early mornings provided great visuals, Young was more focused on his workouts than talking to the cameras.
"The first workout we put a mic on Bryce, I was like, there's no point,” Cimagala told Yahoo Sports. “Like I think some workouts, people are chatty and talk about their day or even on ‘QB1,’ you know, the kids would like, talk about high school things. But Bryce — just not a lot of small talk, especially during those one-on-one personal training workouts.”
While this was a routine for Young and his parents, the “QB1” team filmed those early morning drives only a few times. The rest of the production schedule was mapped out by Rollinson’s daughter, Catherine Pedersen Rollinson, who is Mater Dei’s president of football operations. She laid out a weekly breakdown of times for the crew to document Young — in the classroom, at practice, in the weight or locker rooms, at games, at home, on the road, etc.
“[The show] was tailor-made for Bryce Young because he's very comfortable with the media,” Rollinson said. “He's extremely confident in himself that it didn't bother him to be mic’d up or [have] a camera in his face. I would talk to him and say, ‘Look, Catherine and I control this. If there's anything you don't want to do you're welcome to [stop] at any time. And he goes, ‘No, we're good.’ He never lost focus. He never felt the pressure."
The allure of Young’s season, apart from his status as a top quarterback recruit, was the prospect of a third consecutive national championship and an undefeated season for Mater Dei. The Monarchs cruised through the season with a 12-0 record and outscored opponents 616-192 but fell in the title game to St. John Bosco, whom they had beaten 38-24 earlier in the year.
The loss devastated Young, but the cameras didn’t capture his sadness. Cimagala noted Young’s grace and humility shone through in the wake of defeat.
“Bryce owned the loss,” Cimagala said. “He didn't blame anybody else.”
Another major milestone of the season was when Bryce de-committed from USC and enrolled at Alabama. While the crew didn’t capture the moment Young and his family made the decision, they did see the aftermath of the monumental decision.
“The next day we filmed practices and Craig is off sometimes at the sidelines watching practices. And I think my camera was just on Craig as he was fielding phone calls about the change,” Cimagala. “It was a funny practice where, you know, normally you're centered on Bryce. But I think I was spending a lot of time with Craig as he was like, fielding phone calls from media and from friends and family handling that storm.”
How Anthony Richardson was more mentor than star QB
Richardson’s charisma jumped off the screen the first time senior producer Dustin Nakao-Haider and his crew filmed the quarterback in August. His booming voice and imposing stature were obvious, but Nakao-Haider never felt Richardson was worried about being documented.
“I've filmed with a lot of teenage athletes and they can be pretty showy,” Nakao-Haider told Yahoo Sports. “But despite being a teen with seemingly a world of pressure on his shoulders, [Richardson] was always at ease with us. Never very performative, with a dry, generous and low-key goofy sense of humor. He was always trying to share the spotlight with his teammates and wanted them to shine as brightly as he did.”
His role as a mentor to his younger brother, Corey, also became a central thread of Richardson’s season. Richardson’s mother worked multiple jobs that included overnight shifts, so Richardson became the second caregiver for Corey. He picked his brother up and brought him to practice with him, helped cook meals and helped with homework. During Richardson’s practices, Corey would imitate the football drills he watched on the field.
“From my perspective, that was like a really big grounding force for him,” Nakao-Haider said. “And part of the reason why he probably did have to mature and had to grow up.
“There are just these great moments of him, like, helping his younger brother do homework and then Anthony doing his homework. He was always focused, he was always kind of locked in and the camera — we just happened to be there to observe his life.”
Richardson’s playing season derailed, though, when he suffered a right shoulder injury before halftime of Eastside’s 49-13 loss to North Marion on Oct. 3, 2019, more than midway through the season. He would miss the rest of the year, and his season arc switched from his football talent to his role as a leader and role model for freshman backup, Holden Johnson.
“It was pretty devastating,” Nakao-Haider said. “Like, he was really bummed, he was really frustrated. He just kind of had to shift all that energy toward Holden and trying to make sure that he was as prepared as he could be to try and lead the team. And Anthony was like an incredibly gracious mentor, just like he was with his brother, just sort of always with the headset on trying to help coach him through plays.”
Will we ever see 'QB1' season featuring Young, Richardson?
While Young and Richardson are headed to the NFL, their season of "QB1" and the show itself remain in limbo. Complex says it wants to release the season, but the company hasn’t found a home for it yet.
Craig Young said he tried to buy the footage of his son after he heard the season had been scrapped by Netflix. But he said he never heard back about that possibility.
“Talk about missed opportunities,” Craig said. “There was a time that we were very, very frustrated. Now I'm more sanguine about it. I just didn't even care. It just feels like there was an opportunity that was squandered and a colossal, monumental waste of time.
“You have this treasure trove of footage with someone who won a freaking Heisman Trophy and played for a national championship. And you have two guys that are gonna be top-five [draft] picks and you have footage and you're just sitting on it.”
