EL PASO, Texas -- It took Mitch Trubisky until his fourth year at North Carolina to earn the starting job. It took him one year of playing college football to make himself a possible top-10 pick in the 2017 NFL Draft.

That's who he is and how he got to this point.

The Mentor grad declared for the draft on Monday and is projected by many analysts to be the first quarterback taken. But that's not often how paths go for players in this position, and you can take that part of Trubisky's resume however you'd like to. Certainly, making just 13 college starts will be something that NFL teams evaluate as part of their Trubisky analysis.

Trubisky was 8-5 as a starter. Notre Dame's DeShone Kizer was 12-11 in 23 starters. Clemson's Deshaun Watson, entering Monday's National Championship, is 31-3 in 34 starts.

On one hand, Trubisky waited his turn and earned his job. On the other hand, if he's the best college quarterback in the nation now, how was he not the best quarterback at his own school for three years?

"He's a leader and he's someone that has great confidence in himself and someone who is very patient," Ryan Switzer, North Carolina's leading receiver and Trubisky's roommate, told cleveland.com after the Tar Heels ended their season with a loss to Stanford in the Sun Bowl. "He waited his time and a lot of people don't do that in life. They feel they're entitled to stuff. But he continued to work for what he has and was patient and he trusted the process. Now he put himself in a great position to go in the first round."

North Carolina football writer Andrew Carter of the Raleigh News & Observer detailed Trubisky's four-year rise to the starting spot for the Tar Heels in an interesting story from August. The coaching staff redshirted Trubisky in 2013 but considered putting him in for the final five games after an injury to starter Bryn Renner.

Trubisky then thought he'd be the starter.

"I thought I was going to maybe come in and compete right away," Trubisky said. "Come in, compete with Bryn ... compete and then hopefully win the job my redshirt freshman year."

Instead, Marquise Williams beat out Trubisky for the next two years, with North Carolina trying a brief QB rotation.

Here are their stats, with North Carolina's record, over the last three years:

* 2014, Williams: 270 for 428, 63.1 percent, 3,068 yards, 21 TDs, 9 INTs; 193 carries, 788 rushing yards, 13 TDs; 6-7 record

* 2015, Williams: 219 for 357, 61.3 percent, 3,072 yards, 24 TDs, 10 INTs; 158 carries, 948 rushing yards, 13 TDs; 11-3 record

* 2016, Trubisky: 304 for 446, 68.2 percent, 3,748 yards, 30 TDs, 6 INTs; 93 carries, 308 rushing yards, 5 TDs; 8-5 record

So North Carolina won without him, with good quarterback play. Then Trubisky, with everyone knowing 2016 would be his year, got his chance and did his thing.

"It was one of the best experiences of my life, for sure," Trubisky said of this season after the Sun Bowl. "You go to the first game at Georgia and you don't know what to expect. And then you get your feet wet and you learn from the mistakes and grow through the season.

"And the best part about it is, each and every game through the season, I just continued to do my job and lead these guys and I could see how they started to believe in me more and more and put their trust in me more and more. And then I stepped up to be a leader each and every single week, and I'm grateful to play with these types of guys, and they really shaped me into a whole new quarterback from what I was the previous year."

That whole new quarterback went from waiting to leaving. Just like he went from completing 24 of 40 passes for 156 yards in a 33-24 loss to Georgia in the opener to completing 31 of 38 passes for 405 yards in a 37-35 win over Florida State, the No. 12 in the nation, a month later.

"We just took it week by week," Trubisky's father, Dave, said after the Sun Bowl. "We knew he would finally get his time to start. We knew he would do well. We didn't know he'd do this well."

"We knew he was good, we knew he was talented, we knew he worked hard," said his mother, Jeanne.

"We didn't expect the whirlwind," Dave said.

"You can't be ready for this," Jeanne said.

Now they're ready for what's next. Trubisky, on a conference calls with reporters who covered North Carolina, said that he reached his decision on Friday. According to Tar Heel Illustrated, which provided a transcript of the interview, Trubisky said he did waver.

"It was definitely back and forth pretty much the whole time up until the end when I just really felt strongly about and felt really good about making my decision," Trubisky said. "There would be some days where I would feel like I was leaving and I'd wake up the next day and be like, 'Maybe I need to come back, I want to come back.'"

The NFL won out. Cleveland or San Francisco or Chicago or New York should be Trubisky's next football home. He's done at North Carolina.

"It's a wonderful family and he's a great kid," North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham told cleveland.com at the Sun Bowl. Cunningham also spent much of the pregame talking with the Browns' Sashi Brown, who was there to scout Trubisky.

"You want to have more guys like him. We have a number of them," Cunningham said, "but you can never have enough."

Even if you only see them start for one season.