The Brigham Young football team began its 2019 spring camp in the midst of a quarterback battle. Zach Wilson, the strong-armed sophomore who had thrown 182 passes as a freshman, was trying to hold off Jaren Hall, the graceful 20-year-old redshirt freshman who was also the starting center fielder on the Cougars baseball team.
The BYU coaches called for a competitive scrimmage that March 19: Wilson would quarterback one team, Hall would lead the other, and the scoreboard would show a winner and a loser at the end of it.
Hall threw a touchdown pass at the end of the scrimmage to beat Wilson's team, and then he was gone. The BYU baseball team was playing Utah Valley five miles away. Hall drove over there and entered a tie game in the ninth inning. In the top of the 10th, his single drove in the go-ahead run. The Cougars won 14-13.
"He's just a great competitor," BYU offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick recalled. "He's just a dude, and that was one of the coolest things ever."
The football coaches picked Wilson, who would hold the job for another two years before the Jets took him second overall in the 2021 draft. They made the choice in part out of concern Hall would wear out playing two sports; it wasn't until he dropped baseball in 2021 that he became the starter. But the competition with Wilson confirmed to him, and reminded his coaches, he wouldn't be frightened by the stage.
During Wilson's accolade-filled 2020 season, Roderick said, "I think the light really clicked on for Jaren like, 'Hey, I can do this, too.' He never said those words to me, but I think he thought, 'I'm just as good as this guy, and I can do this.' "
Hall's first NFL start, after the Vikings drafted him in the fifth round in April, will ask him to meet an even higher quarterbacking standard with less time to prepare. He faces the Falcons in Atlanta a week after Kirk Cousins was lost for the season because of a torn right Achilles tendon. The Vikings won four of their five games in October to return to .500 with Cousins doing some of his best work; Hall will become the first Vikings rookie to start at quarterback since Teddy Bridgewater in 2014. The Vikings, though, are hoping they can craft a plan to support Hall and count on the 25-year-old's calm demeanor to get them through it.
"It's going to be different," coach Kevin O'Connell said. "I've tried to spend a lot of time with Jaren, not just this week but since he's arrived here, to learn more about him. I was watching him real closely the other day [in Green Bay] when he went in the game: how he came off, how he was on the sideline. All that led me to believe Jaren's ready for this moment."
Hall is not guaranteed a long run as the starter. The Vikings acquired Joshua Dobbs from the Cardinals in a trade-deadline deal and could get Nick Mullens back from injured reserve as soon as next week, provided he has recovered from the low back injury that has kept him out the past three games.
Even with Cousins' injury, the Vikings decided not to trade away pending free agents like NFC defensive player of the month Danielle Hunter this week, retaining a core of veterans that had told General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah they wanted to pursue a playoff berth together. It stands to reason that the Vikings won't play quarterbacks for developmental purposes; if Hall is going to make a second start, it will likely be because he performs well enough to keep the job.
Those who believe he is ready for the job cite his poise as the chief reason for their confidence.
"I think I'm a very chill individual, but when it comes to the game of football and being prepared, I think it's taking it little by little," Hall said. "You take the small things until you build up to game day, and I think that's where the confidence and calmness comes from."
The way he leads
Those same traits caught Roderick's attention during a 7-on-7 passing camp, when Hall was a sophomore at Maple Mountain High School in Spanish Fork, Utah, and Roderick was an assistant at the University of Utah.
"He took a team that wasn't that good all the way to the championship game, and I just followed him around all day," Roderick said.
Hall's clean, compact mechanics helped make up for his lack of size (he's now listed at 6-0 and 207 pounds), and his accuracy impressed Roderick.
"What I noticed that day was the way he was leading his team," he said. "It just comes natural to him. I think sometimes leaders try too hard. He has found that fine line between being able to speak up when something needs to be said, but he's not a guy who's beating his chest and drawing attention to himself."
Roderick was unsuccessful in recruiting Hall to Utah, but he became the passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach at BYU in 2018, the same year Hall returned from a mission in California with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The two quarterback competitions Roderick oversaw between Wilson and Hall, in 2019 and 2020, were close enough the staff didn't settle on a starter either year until the week before the first game. Wilson had "just a little edge over Jaren, because Zach was all football and Jaren was kind of spread thin," Roderick said, but he continued to talk to Hall about how much more he could do if he spared his body the grind of a baseball season.
The year after Wilson left for the NFL, Hall threw for 20 touchdowns and ran for 307 yards on a BYU team that finished 10-3. The Cougars were 8-5 a year ago, when Hall threw for 3,171 yards and 31 touchdowns against six interceptions while running for another 350 yards.
"Everybody thought we weren't going to be as good because we had lost the number two pick in the draft," Roderick said. "Jaren went out and played at a very similar level to what Zach did for two years. He's smart. And he's a super athlete. He's got great balance, he's got a really strong lower body, and he just never seems to be in bad body position when he's throwing."
'He's got nothing to lose'
Roderick was working on his game plan last Sunday for BYU's matchup with West Virginia when he got a text from his son that just said: "Jaren's in."
He turned on the Vikings' game against Green Bay just in time to see Hall's inauspicious start: taking over for Cousins in the fourth quarter, backed up deep in Vikings territory and preparing to throw on third down just as Preston Smith jarred the ball loose for a strip sack. The Packers failed to score on the turnover, and with the score still 24-10 when the Vikings regained possession with 4:46 left, Roderick wondered if O'Connell would just play it safe with run calls.
But the coach had Hall throw on second and third down, and Hall's 16-yard third-down connection with T.J. Hockenson helped the Vikings run another two minutes off the clock. If O'Connell's call showed some confidence in Hall, the sequence helped him build some trust with the Vikings offense.
"He took control of the huddle, and that's what you need out of a rookie quarterback," Hockenson said. "You can't be quiet. You can't be stuttering. You've got to be confident and just understand we're all listening to you. That's something he did really well when he stepped in. He's got nothing to lose. There's nothing on the line. There should be no nerves, no nothing. It should be one of those things where he can just go out there and sling it, and trust his guys."
O'Connell has told him the same, using his own experience with the Patriots in 2008 as a cautionary tale. As a rookie on that team, he said, he was too worried about what each snap meant for his career prospects to simply go play.
"I remember feeling like I had to win the game on every play sometimes," he said. "Maybe because you were fighting for a job, or you felt like you were stepping in and needed to show what you can do. It's about doing your job every single play. The times I did that, good things happened. And the times that I didn't, very rarely did good things happen.
"I did have people tell me that, but I wish they would have made me tattoo it right there on my arm so I could be reminded of it."
Though Hall ran some West Coast concepts in BYU's spread scheme, Roderick said, an NFL offense has probably "triple the checks" of a college scheme. That's where the Vikings could feel the biggest difference between the rookie quarterback and Cousins, whose 12 years of experience gave him tremendous latitude to make changes at the line.
"We put a lot on Kirk Cousins, because we knew he could handle it," Vikings offensive coordinator Wes Phillips said. "It won't be to that extent with Jaren, but there's still a lot on any NFL quarterback. It's like cramming for a test, so he'll have his work cut out for him, but we'll do our part to help him."
Hall might not get a second start without showing some competence against a Falcons defense ranked eighth in the league against the pass.
Those who know him, though, don't seem worried he will lack composure.
"You can't look at one game or one opportunity like it's your last," Hall said. "I'm just focused on being as prepared as I can for these guys. They've grinded so much the last few weeks and come back from so much adversity, I just want to do my best and focus on this game."
