Getty Image
Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young just hit Netflix.
Of course, you can’t make a documentary about Vince Young without revisiting the 2006 Rose Bowl game against USC, arguably the greatest college football game of the BCS era. For Longhorn fans, watching Young glide into the end zone on 4th and 5 with seconds remaining to bring down an undefeated USC juggernaut will never get old. We’re all chopped 40-somethings now, but I’ll never forget watching it with my buddies, hunkered around a TV at home on winter break during my sophomore year.
Young’s legacy in college football from that National Championship-winning season is undeniable. His No. 10 burnt orange hangs retired at Texas Memorial Stadium. He’s enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame, and though he finished second to Reggie Bush in a stacked Heisman race, nobody in Austin ever held it against him. Texas forever, and all that jazz.
When I caught up with Young on the phone last week, we talked plenty of college ball. But what really got him going was the chapter the documentary leaves in the shadows. Twelve years after leaving the league, he is finally ready to challenge the narrative that has followed him for nearly two decades.
Young’s Tennessee years are often remembered for how they ended, not for what came right before. The reality is, Vince Young became a good quarterback in the NFL. But because his turbulent relationship with Titans coach Jeff Fisher dominated every storyline, almost no one in the football world actually noticed.
For the better part of two decades, the book on Young’s football career has read the same: He was a bust.
But on paper, his football resume was remarkable: First-round pick, Rose Bowl legend, Offensive Rookie of the Year. Yet he was also a cautionary tale of star college quarterbacks who couldn’t cut it in the NFL pressure cooker.
Vince tells me he’s heard it long enough.
“A lot of people [were] saying I was a bust or whatever in the league,” Young tells BroBible in an exclusive interview.
He wasn’t alone. The leap from college superstar to NFL starter is one of the cruelest in sports. From 2000 to 2014, 11 Heisman-winning quarterbacks came into the league and busted.
Young’s case is more complicated. “One of the things that is very important to me that we didn’t really get the chance to showcase is how I got better and better as a quarterback,” he tells BroBible on a phone call.
Winning Was Never The Problem
The official record backs him up.
Young went 30-17 as an NFL starter. In 2006, he won NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year.
2009 was a turning point. Tennessee opened 0-6 with an aging Kerry Collins at quarterback. The Titans handed over the offense to Young and won eight of their last ten games. They became the first team in NFL history to win five straight after an 0-6 start, offering a glimmer of hope amid a rocky season in Nashville.
Most famously, Young capped a 99-yard drive against Arizona in Week 12 with a game-winning touchdown to Kenny Britt as time expired.
Tennessee didn’t qualify for the playoffs, but Young still made the Pro Bowl. He won Sporting News Comeback Player of the Year.
via Netflix
“Save some people’s jobs,” Young said of that stretch. An 0-6 team that rallies to 8-8 tends to keep a coaching staff employed. Read into that what you want.
“Every time I played, I was always winning,” Young said. He’s not wrong.
Vince Young Learned To Throw In The NFL
Young’s passing record in the NFL is the part that gets him going. Everyone said he couldn’t throw. Over the final ten games of that 2009 run, his completion rate climbed and his passer rating jumped more than 15 points, into the mid-80s.
“I really worked hard to be a better passer in the pros because that’s what was being said about me,” Young said. “Those two years before I left Tennessee, I was doing pretty good in the passing game, and I was excited about that.”
The numbers back him up. In 2010, his final season in Tennessee, Young threw 10 touchdowns against just three interceptions and posted a 98.6 passer rating, the best of his career, before a thumb injury ended his year. If you set that next to his rookie season, when he completed barely half his passes with 13 picks, you see how he did, indeed, improve as a quarterback as he matured in the NFL.
Then he oversells it.
“I was number one quarterback completion rating, at the top of the charts over the Peyton Mannings and the Tom Bradys,” Young said.
I had to fact-check that one, and I’ll cut him some slack. Memory gets generous when it’s your own legacy on the line, and everybody talks their own book, as the saying goes. Shooters shoot, sales guys sell. Vince is selling a version of history that the official box score doesn’t back up.
In 2009, Drew Brees, Peyton Manning and Philip Rivers all finished well ahead of Young’s mid-80s rating. Even in his best year, that 98.6 in 2010, Brady and Rivers finished comfortably ahead (for the record, Brady was at 111 in 2010, Rivers 101). Technically, he did edge out Manning on rating in 2010, whose passer rating was 91.9. Ol’ Peyton The Gunslinger threw 17 picks that season, but also threw for 4,700 yards and 33 TDs that season.
Young had a fraction of the attempts.
But the point Young was trying to make to me on the phone holds up. Football fans collectively memory-holed him as a runner. Over his last two seasons in Nashville, Young evolved into a real NFL passer. The story was already written, so nobody went back to fix it.
When you zoom out and think about Young’s career, this subtext is under the stat line. Young isn’t asking for a statue; he just wants football fans to watch the tape as honestly as he’s overanalyzed it himself over the years.
“You want to get better every year as a quarterback, and just seeing the numbers go in the right direction, I was very happy just for myself,” he said.
This is the tension the doc lives in. Untold reopens the whole debate over who Young really was, and Young sits there and takes it, finally getting to offer his side. He’s honest enough to own his mistakes, over and over.
But the film also pulls toward humanizing Young’s NFL career disappointment, and once you weigh his career and everything that might have been in Tennessee, pure disappointment was never the whole story.
“Now the time has come for me to get the story out,” Young said. “Let people know, from my words, what really happened. And I’m taking accountability for a lot of it.”
He’ll own most of it. The comeback is the part he’d like remembered.
Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young is out on Netflix now.