If there’s a mold for the stereotypical Alabama quarterback, as I’ve argued before, then Jalen Hurts breaks it in pretty much every way: His mobility has fundamentally changed Bama’s offensive identity, completing the Tide’s gradual evolution from a methodical, pro-style scheme to a full-fledged spread-option buzzsaw. Through 12 games, the Hurts-fueled attack is still on track to finish as the highest-scoring offense in school history, at 39.4 PPG, and only a few yards off the record pace for total yards; Alabama is as overwhelming a favorite to repeat as national champ as it has ever been in Nick Saban’s decade of dominance.

Beyond his game-changing skill-set, though, by far the most revolutionary aspect of Hurts’ ascendance is his youth, to an extent that might not be fully appreciated. Back in August, when it was just starting to become clear that the vague pro-Hurts chatter coming out of preseason camp had real traction, I wrote that it was almost inconceivable that Saban, of all people, would dare put the fate of the nation’s No. 1 team in the hands of a true freshman QB, in part because that so clearly diverged from the blueprint Saban had followed up to that point.

Because if there’s anything we know about quarterback competitions at Alabama (or thought we knew) it was that the older guy always wins over raw talent: Greg McElroy over Star Jackson in 2009, AJ McCarron over Phillip Sims in 2011, Blake Sims over Jacob Coker in 2014, Coker over Cooper Bateman in 2015 — this was a safe assumption. The position on Saban’s watch was a straight line of succession in consistent favor of the veteran. Dues-paying members only.

But the initial skepticism wasn’t just specific to Saban being Saban: True freshman quarterbacks never top the depth chart for serious national contenders, and if they do the team in question soon ceases to be a serious contender. In this case, never is not hyperbole; literally, there’s not a single example of a team led by a true-freshman QB playing for a national title in the past 30 years, or even coming that close. Almost by definition, rookie quarterbacks go hand-in-hand with “rebuilding,” when the emphasis shifts to the future and the inevitable growing pains can be written off as the cost of progress.

In the BCS/Playoff era, only three redshirt freshmen have made it as far as the national title game, and two of them (Michael Vick and Jameis Winston) went on to become the No. 1 overall draft pick. It’s just not the kind of thing that happens at programs that know how to recruit and develop quarterbacks with championships in mind. Until Jalen Hurts, in 2016.

With Hurts’ emergence, the name “Jamelle Holieway” has bubbled to the surface lately as the answer to the trivia question: Who is the only true-freshman quarterback to win a national championship? But that answer comes with caveats. Holieway wasn’t the starter throughout Oklahoma’s 1985 title run — he took over a month into the season for the injured Troy Aikman — and in many ways he belonged to a different era, completing a grand total of 24 passes in the regular season. In a wishbone offense, opposite a defense that held opponents at or below 14 points in all 11 of the Sooners’ wins that season, it was possible for a raw athlete to get away with that.

Hurts can’t afford to be anywhere near that one-dimensional — he has matched Holieway’s ’85 output as a rusher while also completing 209 passes, third-most in the SEC — or even to lean that heavily on his own dominant defense week-in and week-out. (As unyielding as the Bama D has been recently, recall that earlier in the season it gave up 40 points at Ole Miss and 30 at Arkansas, which happen to be Hurts’ best games as a rusher and passer, respectively.)