Is it 2023 yet? Malachi Nelson and the task of making good on 8th-grade offers

May 2024 · 12 minute read

LOS ANGELES — From what Eric Nelson remembers, that Saturday morning last June started off fairly routine.

It was early, so everyone in the family was home. His son, Malachi Nelson, was beginning one of his final days as an eighth grader by playing Fortnite.

Six months earlier, Nelson had quarterbacked the Garden Grove Bulldogs to the Pop Warner Super Bowl in Florida. As far as eighth graders go, Nelson had a pretty high profile, with Pop Warner success that put him on a lot of people’s radars. He had trained with one of the nation’s most prominent quarterback developers in Danny Hernandez, and later that month, news stories would be written about which high school Nelson decided to attend.

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The next milestone came during that game of Fortnite. The phone rang and on the other end of the line was Auburn offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Kenny Dillingham.

By the end of that conversation, everything had changed. The world of college football recruiting, the one Nelson says he hadn’t thought about too much, had arrived right at his doorstep in the form of an offer to play quarterback for the Tigers.

“I was young and wasn’t expecting it at that point,” said Nelson, now nearing the end of his first year at Los Alamitos High School. “It wasn’t real until I got that offer.”

“I’ll never forget it, man,” Eric Nelson said. “You start breaking it down, ‘Wow, my little son, this little 5-year-old kid who was running around with flags is now, you know, a ‘national recruit.’ You feel so proud as a dad. Proud of him. You see how hard he works.

“Then you see it’s Auburn, an SEC school. You’re thinking, ‘Man, this is the first one?’ What does this kid’s future hold? How good can he be?”

Nelson, who threw for 883 yards, eight touchdowns and five interceptions as a freshman for Los Alamitos last fall, can’t officially sign with a program until December 2022 at the earliest. He hasn’t yet gone through an entire season at the high school level as a starter, so the true answer to Eric’s last question remains to be seen.

But Ohio State, Alabama, LSU, USC and the handful of other schools that have followed Auburn in offering Nelson are betting on the 2023 prospect’s ceiling being pretty darn high. And so far the 6-foot-3, 180-pound Nelson has given them plenty of reason to believe.

Malachi was coached by his father throughout his entire youth football career. The way Eric Nelson saw it, there were two routes he could take.

“You’re either hard on your son and don’t want to see (that he may be good),” he said, “or you think he’s special at 3.”

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Although Eric didn’t see his son as some sort of football prodigy at a young age, he could tell Malachi had a pretty good football IQ. At practice, Malachi lined players up in their proper spots and generally understood what everyone’s assignments were. People still point to Malachi’s maturity in conversation these days.

A lot was thrown at Malachi at a young age. He and his father watched film together. He would listen in on game plan discussions and eventually became as passionate about football as his father was. In turn, Eric and his fellow coaches put a lot on Malachi’s plate because they believed kids were smarter than most people thought.

“It sounds crazy but he was calling audibles at 9 years old,” Eric said. “Coaches at that level weren’t complex with their blitzing or anything like that. So we’re like, ‘If our quarterback could see these things coming and check into a call that would beat that, man how great that would be?’ … He would stop and start changing the play, changing lineman calls and all that stuff.”

Nelson’s natural throwing motion grabbed Hernandez’s attention, as did his arm strength, which made each throw look effortless. But what was upstairs stood out to Hernandez, too.

“I’d give him something new and he could always handle it,” Hernandez said. “There was nothing overwhelming, whether I was giving him something with a concept, something with certain footwork. … He could process that information. I’d give him the explanation after, but I could tell he could understand where I was going with a lot of that stuff so outside of the elite arm talent, clean mechanics, I think those are the things that stood out to me.”

Nelson joined Hernandez’s ever-growing list of southern California blue-chip quarterback pupils as an eighth grader. Alabama quarterback Bryce Young, Clemson quarterback D.J. Uiagalelei, and the state’s top three 2021 QBs — five-star USC commit Jake Garcia and two four-star prospects, Notre Dame commit Tyler Buchner and Miller Moss — have all trained under Hernandez.

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Young received his first college offer as an eighth grader. So did Buchner and Maalik Murphy, who will be one of the top quarterbacks in the 2022 cycle. Nelson made it four consecutive years that an eighth-grade quarterback training under Hernandez had received an offer, a streak since extended to five years. Making Nelson’s first offer more impressive was its source: Young’s first offer came from Texas Tech and Murphy’s first came from Indiana, respectable Power 5 programs but not recruiting powers on the same tier as Auburn. And the trends set by Young, Uiagalelei and the crop of 2021 quarterbacks have helped line up a path for Nelson.

“When a coach is talking to me and they’ll say, ‘Hey, where does he compare to some of these guys?’ with all honesty, I can say he’s this much better than those particular guys in these areas at this age,” Hernandez said, “That’s pretty impressive. So if you take a look at the path those guys went on so far, you say, ‘OK, those guys have done a good job with producing on the field and staying out of trouble, being good kids, being good teammates, being good leaders and all those kinds of things.’ I think it’s pretty safe to say when you look at a guy like Malachi, I think he’s going to follow that same path. He probably even in certain areas has potential to be better than those guys in a lot of things he’s doing.”

Los Alamitos coach Ray Fenton knew what the perception would be at the news an eighth grader who already had an SEC offer was being brought into his program.

“You know, he’s going to come in and be a diva,” Fenton said. “Reality is he’s nothing like that.”

The Griffins returned their starting quarterback, Cade McConnell, from a team that went 9-2-1 in 2018, so the Nelsons fully expected Malachi to sit behind the hard-nosed senior for a valuable sideline education as a freshman. That plan was scrapped three weeks into the season, as the offense struggled. Nelson was inserted into the lineup against Long Beach Poly and made his first start the next week against Carson.

Nelson split time with McConnell for the remainder of the season, gaining valuable experience from the opportunity to walk into the huddle as a freshman and lead a group of seniors.

“Going from a Pop Warner team to Friday nights under the lights against Long Beach Poly surrounded by really driven football players, it’s a different world than what you’re used to,” Fenton said. “It was fun to watch him adapt and change. It wasn’t a 3:15 p.m. game at the park on Saturday. It was the real deal in front of a great crowd. To watch him grow and settle down and mature was amazing. It was fun to be a part of something like that.”

Throughout the season, people would walk up to Eric and tell him how great his son looked, and although the talent was evident, he contends he didn’t recognize the quarterback he saw on the field last fall.

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Nelson digested what he was seeing from opposing defenses just fine, according to Fenton, but he still had to adjust to the speed of the game and calm down a bit. Nelson was displaying better anticipation this offseason before the spring of his freshman year was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hernandez’ harshest criticism of Nelson’s first year of high school ball: He thought the freshman forced too many throws into tight windows. Hernandez doesn’t want Nelson to be gun-shy, but he does want him to take more calculated risks. The two have also spent a lot of time on off-platform throws this offseason.

“The game is going to go back to being so slow to him because he’s been there before,” Eric Nelson said. “The fact they threw him to the wolves and he didn’t get eaten I think is a great experience for him.”

Malachi has plenty of room to grow. He and everyone close to him admits that. But he displayed enough promise as a true freshman that by the end of the season, several high-profile college programs had followed Auburn’s lead.

Within an eight-day span last October, Nelson received offers from Oregon, Georgia, LSU and Alabama. Ohio State joined the party a couple of weeks later.

The family was a bit overwhelmed at one point last season when they realized five of the top six teams in that week’s AP poll that week had offered Nelson, but it’s fairly clear he is an early priority for several of these programs. According to 247Sports, he’s the only 2023 prospect Ohio State has offered, and he’s the only quarterback in the class who’s been offered by Alabama or USC. Dillingham has since left Auburn and assumed the role of offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Florida State, and he offered Nelson again last month.

“It’s a blessing for me to be that one guy,” Nelson said. “Some of these schools are saying they’re not going to offer another 2023 quarterback before you say yes or no. If they want me to be there, they’re showing me love.”

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“(Coaches) see his maturity,” Hernandez added. “They’re able to talk ball with him. He knows what he’s talking about. Mechanically, he’s very clean for his age right now. I think really the only question is that the kid stays healthy, keeps going in that direction obviously and puts on a little weight as he gets older. He’s tall enough. He has the arm strength. He has the smarts. He (just) needs to keep going in that direction.”

Brian Stumpf, who holds a president title at high school event organizer Student Sports, has been involved with The Opening and Elite 11 events long enough that he knows early offers like the ones sent Nelson’s way can be a blessing and a burden.

“It really does put a target on the back of a young kid who might not necessarily be ready for that, who might still be cutting his teeth with his high school coach and earning that full-time job,” Stumpf said. “We’ve seen a lot of cases where guys aren’t quite ready for that, now you have people gunning for you who you didn’t even know had you in their sights, so to speak.”

Stumpf got a look at Nelson’s skill set last month when the Elite 11 made its annual regional stop in southern California. The focus that day wasn’t necessarily on Nelson. It was on the 2021 quarterbacks — Garcia, Buchner and Moss — who were battling for invites to the Elite 11 Finals.

Still, Nelson wanted to prove he belonged with the upperclassmen.

“You see some guys come in and be playmakers and really good players as underclassmen now a bit more than normal but they don’t always necessarily have the physical tools, but Malachi, like I said, his arm talent is there,” Stumpf said. “He’s already been working at this from the standpoint of building his quarterback skills and training in the offseason, so he’s not quite as raw as you would expect a still sort of gangly 6-foot-3 freshman to be. From the standpoint of his footwork, and how kind of refined he already is with his technique and things like that and mechanics. So you love where he’s at currently and he was able to sit there and match definitely all the top 2022 guys throw for throw.”

Eric watched Malachi from the stands at Cerritos College that day. After coaching Malachi for so long, Eric is trying to take a more relaxed approach to watching his son. Once the event had wrapped, Eric was ready to acknowledge something he wasn’t when he first started coaching Malachi.

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“He’s pretty good,” Eric said. “I can honestly say that. Before, you just never really know.”

Now isn’t necessarily the time for complacency. The offers are nice, but Eric and Malachi haven’t lost perspective.

“It means nothing,” Eric said. “It’s great and it’s good but even he really believes and he understands it’s nothing at this point. He has to go out and perform. He’s motivated because he understands all of that. I tell him, every camp you go to, every time you throw a football, there is somebody there trying to pick you apart. You’ve got these offers (and) everybody wants to say this kid’s overrated.”

After the offers came in from Ohio State and Alabama, a switch flipped for Malachi. He has three years left of high school and plenty of time to improve, but he has a sense of urgency.

He wants to prove he’s one of the best quarterbacks regardless of his grade. He also has something else on the agenda: “I want to prove all the offers are there for a reason.

“I feel like this is my season, so I want to show everybody what I can do.”

“We’re not going to take on that approach, ‘Oh, it’s my sophomore year. I’ve got three years to do this,’ ” Hernandez says. “No, let’s be the guy right now.”

What Nelson displays this season, or whenever football resumes, will provide more insight into what all these schools are betting on.

(Photo: Antonio Morales)

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