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Pasadena, Calif.

Steve Young was not highly recruited coming out of high school. BYU legend is that he was once the Cougars' eighth-string quarterback.

"That's the truth," Young said.

In his first year in Provo, the coaching staff tried to turn him into a defensive back.

"Also true," he said.

BYU's current quarterback, Jake Heaps, was a highly recruited prep quarterback. And, while Young has nothing but praise for the soon-to-be sophomore, he's unconvinced that the kids recruiters drool over have really done all that well in college. And he's hoping to prove it as part of ESPN's "Year of the Quarterback" franchise.

"We want to track the last 30 years of the top 10-recruited quarterbacks out of high school and find out what happened to them," Young said. "And I think you will be shocked at how few of them actually make it."

Now an ESPN analyst, Young was the runner-up in the Heisman voting in 1983 and went on to be a two-time NFL MVP and MVP of Super Bowl XXIX. He's in both the college and pro football halls of fame. If identifying and grooming quarterbacks early is the way to go, his career flies in the face of that logic.

"That's why I want to do the study," said Young, who is getting the project off the ground at ESPN. "I'm not a big fan of what I see being taught to the 8- to 16-year-olds about what the position really is. I see a lot of philosophy from guys who didn't play saying, 'OK, this is how you do it.' "

Young believes that "quarterbacks in younger years self-select." That you need to have something more than just athletic ability.

"Everyone's trying to funnel really good athletes into being quarterbacks," he said. "I think that some guys have all the elements of what a quarterback is, but you can't coach it. At some level, you are or you are not.

"Young players are told how to hold it. How to throw it. But you can't tell me that you can just take a kid and make him a quarterback."

He doesn't discount the value of coaching in making a great quarterback. But Young doesn't believe prestigious summer camps that concentrate on the mechanics of throwing the ball are as important as some believe.

"I wasn't coached like that. As a young kid, I saw Dan Marino throw and thought, 'Well, that's how you throw the ball.' So that's how I threw it," Young said. "It wasn't until I joined the San Francisco 49ers in 1987 and watched Joe Montana throw that I realized you don't have to throw like Dan Marino. I was 25 years old, playing pro ball, realizing, 'Oh my gosh. I've been bound up by the thought of what I was supposed to do.' "

In other words, every quarterback is unique.

"That's what I told Tim Tebow," Young said. "You can change it on the margin, but it is what it is. And now, you go make a career out of that."

In another reality, Young thinks what made him a quarterback might have made him a center. Really.

"I was thinking to myself — why did I play quarterback?" he said, recalling his days in youth football "I wanted to be the one who called the play. If that was the center, I probably would have tried to play center, because that's part of the way I looked at life. I just wanted to run it.

"And I think the people who start playing quarterback kind of self-select, and then those who continue to play quarterback are selected."

We'll know more when ESPN completes the study.

Scott D. Pierce covers television for The Salt Lake Tribune. His column on sports on TV appears Wednesday. Contact him at spierce@sltrib.com .