Scouting KJ Lacey at the State Finals

Texas fans were pleasantly surprised over the weekend when Steve Sarkisian locked up a quarterback for the 2025 class in K.J. Lacey. The young Alabaman is immediately drawing a lot of comparisons to Bryce Young, whom Sark recruited to Alabama but only coached for a year as Mac Jones‘ back-up before departing for Texas.

Lacey is coming off a breakout sophomore season in which he helped lead Saraland high school to a 14-1 record in which their sole loss was a 27-26 defeat against Theodore they avenged in the playoffs 21-6.

Having known as little or less about Lacey before the weekend as anyone else, I took the chance to watch his State Championship performance, a 38-17 victory over Mountain Brook, to get a closer look at the young signal-caller.

Lacey at the helm of a bell cow offense

The 2022 season will not be the last great one by Saraland. In addition to fielding Lacey they had another pair of big time sophomores at running back and wide receiver in Santae McWilliams Jr and Ryan Williams. Here was their statistical breakdown:

McWilliams had 253 carries for 1,484 yards at 5.9 ypc with 16 rushing touchdowns.Williams had 88 catches for 1,641 yards with 24 receiving touchdowns AND 57 carries for 700 yards at 12.3 ypc with 15 rushing touchdowns.Lacey completed 200 of 314 passes for 3,177 yards at 10.11 ypa with 40 touchdowns and five interceptions.

Lacey, who’s generously listed at 6-foot-1, 180 pounds, had negative rushing yardage on the season but did score four rushing touchdowns. As you can surmise from the above stats, the name of the game for the Saraland offense was to run the ball and get it into the hands of Williams by any means necessary. He was a big play and touchdown machine.

In this contest, that was certainly the gameplan.

Williams caught seven balls for 84 yards and a touchdown (also drew a few DPIs) and ran it 15 times for 188 yards at 12.5 ypc with three rushing touchdowns. McWilliams had 27 carries for 158 yards at 5.9 ypc while Lacey was 12-22 for 131 yards at 6.0 ypa with a touchdown and zero interceptions and three carries for 19 yards, including a 28-yard scamper to convert 3rd-and-a mile.

In this game Lacey’s most impactful move was often to line up at quarterback only to motion out to receiver to make room for Williams to operate their Wildcat offense. However, he also had a job to do in feeding Williams the ball through the air and made a handful of plays which suggest his upside down the line is extremely high. That Ryan Williams fellow is likely to be very, very good as well.

Finding Williams in the air

The Saraland passing game was fairly Williams-intensive all season (he had just under half of the catches) but certainly in this game they wanted to feed him the ball. They had a few different personnel packages but often played a 12 personnel set which was routinely deployed in spread formations but involved a pair of bigger, blocking-oriented players shifting around to set up Williams and the run game.

One of their favorite plays for this game was this play, designed to try and break the bracket on Williams.

That’s a Sark-like design, using motion from a unique formation to encourage the defense to check into something predictable the play is designed to attack. In the first clip they catch Mountain Brook in a 2-match scheme where the corner would ideally like to slide under the corner route but has to honor the flat route because there’s no linebacker to help in all of that space.

Lacey shows his advanced play here by selling the flat and then zipping in the corner route. On the second clip Mountain Brook chases the motion with a different defender to keep a cornerback on Williams but the spacing is what it is, they can’t cover it.

You can see the quick release and ability to find Williams on this play as well:

Mountain Brook needed to make something happen by this point in the game but I would not blitz this team for the next two years unless my pressure scheme involved a bracket on Williams.

Lacey’s ability to know what he’s looking for and make snap decisions is the real story with this prospect. His arm strength and ability to quickly fire throws down the field is special, no doubt, but there are a number of highly rated quarterbacks who have that capacity. What’s rare is the guy who can see opportunities within a narrow window of time AND fire the ball into the right spot on the field for his guy to go get it. Most strong-armed quarterbacks, especially high school sophomores, will lean on their arm strength and mobility like a crutch and wait to see a play break open before letting it fly. Lacey sees it quickly and doesn’t waste time trying to take advantage.

Making things happen

In addition to executing scripted shots to Williams, or otherwise finding his co-star in big moments, Lacey had a few moments in this game where he made something happen on his own.

Mountain Brook was determined not to allow Lacey to do the back-breaking routine where he scrambles for time and then hits a receiver on the move down field, preferring to force Saraland to score the hard way by moving the chains consistently and finishing drives. Saraland mostly leaned into the run game and Wildcat in response but Lacey did make a few key plays underneath the coverage with his potent mobility/off-platform throwing ability.

It’s notable their State Final opponent was determined not to allow the passing game to beat them, did a good job of keeping receivers in front of them even though the star runs a 10.49 100m (Williams), and were still taken down by a substantial margin.

The big story from this game was the explosive playmaking of Williams, but while that certainly stood out, it’s normal for a star athlete to be able to dominate a high school game playing in a good system with multiple avenues for feeding him the ball. Go watch Aledo or another strong Texas program and you’ll see them rotate their top athletes into the Wildcat in a similar fashion to dominate big games.

What’s less normal is for a young quarterback to have this level of skill and knowhow in the passing game. This tandem is going to be interesting to check on for the two years, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more dominant quarterback/receiver pairing at the high school level. Then maybe we’ll see what Sark had in mind for the Bryce Young era at Alabama once Lacey arrives at Texas.

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