Former Tide QB Croyle preaches right, wrong gods and football
Former Alabama quarterback Brodie Croyle spoke to the River Region Quarterback Club on Tuesday. (Tim Gayle)
By TIM GAYLE
Brodie Croyle doesn’t follow his alma mater as closely as he did when he lived in Tuscaloosa, but the former Alabama and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback believes in Crimson Tide coach Kalen DeBoer.
“I’ve got two kids who play ball every day and we play on Saturdays, so going to (Alabama) games doesn’t happen,” Croyle said. “But I’m a big Coach DeBoer fan. I think there’s a story of perseverence there for this team, of overcoming (with) pretty much everybody writing you off pretty quick. You’ve kind of got to have that to have great teams. It’s hard to be praised all the time.
“I just remember coach DeBoer saying he really liked the character of this team. He said (when we talked in the spring) we’ll find out what kind of team we are but I really like the character of this team. To me, that’s what has shined through the most.”
Croyle, signed in 2001 as one of the most highly-rated high school quarterbacks ever recruited by Alabama, has watched a string of highly rated quarterbacks sign with Alabama in recent years, including Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Bryce Young and current Tide quarterback Ty Simpson.
“They all play the game their way, which is what makes a quarterback a quarterback,” Croyle said. “They’re all going to have their tendencies, their strengths they play to, their weaknesses they manage. But I really like our guy now, the way he goes about his business. That joker can rip it, he can run, he’s smart, he’s not going to put you in bad situations, he’s clutch. I don’t really know what else you’re looking for in a quarterback, but he’s got it all.”
Croyle was in town on Tuesday morning to speak to the River Region Quarterback Club, which meets every other week at Huntingdon College. Croyle, now in his 11th year as the chief executive officer of Big Oak Ranch, delivered a powerful message to the club as he mixed in humor, his football career and following in his father John’s footsteps of running a home for neglected, abused and abandoned children.
“It started in a farm house with five boys and that was 51 years ago,” Croyle said. “Fifty-one years later, almost 3,000 children have called Big Oak Ranch home. And it’s not an overly complicated model. We take a godly man and woman, put them in a home, we give them eight kids who don’t share their name, their blood, their past, but, man, they do share a joint future. And that future can be radically different from anything they’ve ever seen over and over and over again.”
The Big Oak Ranch currently has 15 homes for boys, 13 homes for girls, a college ministry in Birmingham to help children transition to an adult and an organization that will “help, plan or start 130 children’s homes in 34 different states that last year alone served 10,000 children.”
Croyle used his own experience, which included a goal he set when he was 11 years old of playing in the National Football League, as a cautionary tale to remind his audience of keeping their priorities in the proper order.
“Football makes for a great goal,” Croyle said, “but it makes for a terrible god. Our gods are anything that we spend our time, energy, resources and, most importantly, our thoughts more than we do anything else. I’ve learned along that journey that if God is not first on your list, then He’s not on your list. Even in my rebellion, even in my losing sight of what’s important, He was still shaping and molding me the entire time.”
Now the chief executive officer of an organization that employs approximately 200 fulltime staff members, Croyle learned a lot from his five years with the Chiefs.
“You don’t learn how to lead until you learn how to lead from a backup position,” Croyle said. “Because you don’t get any fame, you don’t get anybody chanting your name, but you have to work just as hard, if not harder, for somebody else’s name to be chanted on game day. It positioned me for what I now get to do.
“If you want to find your purpose, do an audit of your past and you’ll find things in your past that show you plays in your life that God was trying to use in that moment but instead of returning that gift to the giver, we took that gift and we used it for ourselves.”
The River Region Quarterback Club will meet again with its annual Iron Bowl meeting on Nov. 25, featuring Montgomery natives Charlie Trotman and Mike Brock. The former Jeff Davis standouts went their separate ways in college, with Trotman playing quarterback for Auburn (1977-79) and Brock playing guard at Alabama (1977-79), earning all-Southeastern Conference honors twice while playing on national championship teams in 1978 and 1979.