Quinton Flowers was sitting at his coach’s dinner table, listening quietly as a conversation unfolded around him that would change his career.
It was September 2015. The South Florida quarterbacks and running backs were meeting at head coach Willie Taggart’s two-story Spanish-style villa three and a half miles from campus, trying to figure out how to keep the Bulls’ 1–3 start from spiraling into a fourth-straight losing season. Flowers, a sophomore, had struggled to assert himself under center, but running back Darius Tice knew that the quarterback was capable of much more.
The two players had squared off for rival teams in the Miami area, where Flowers, then considered one of the better athletes in the state—he had offers from Alabama, Florida and Texas—put up video-game numbers, throwing for 6,042 yards and rushing for 2,002 at Miami Jackson Senior High.