College football is going to miss Quinton Flowers, Ahmad Bradshaw, and Taylor Lamb

The last time we saw Quinton Flowers in the regular season, he was doing everything he could to will USF to an upset of UCF. He rushed for 125 yards (not including three sacks) and threw for 500, and he engineered what should have been a game-winning drive, only to watch UCF return the ensuing kickoff for a touchdown to steal the win.

He then began the Birmingham Bowl in miserable fashion. In USF’s first five possessions against Texas Tech, he rushed five times for 11 yards and completed just three of 13 passes for 31 yards. The Bulls only trailed 10-3 because the defense was holding up, but that probably wouldn’t last.

After Tech shanked a punt late in the first half, Flowers found himself. He connected with Tyre McCants for a 21-yard score to tie the game at halftime, and his final half was memorable for all the right reasons: Despite some sketchy short-yardage play-calling in the third quarter, he rushed eight times for 91 yards and completed 13 of 20 passes for 259 yards and three touchdowns. Despite the slow start, the teams put on the most scintillating bowl game of the postseason thus far.

Both teams held the lead twice in the last five minutes. Tech was up 27-24 when Flowers and Marquez Scantling connected for a 64-yard score with 4:26 left. Tech drove 85 yards in eight plays and took the lead on a wide open 25-yard strike from Nic Shimonek (who had a game himself: 416 yards, three touchdowns, two picks) with 1:31 left.

USF didn’t score too quickly this time. Flowers completed two short passes, rushed for 13 yards into Tech territory, then tightroped the sideline for 21 yards to the Tech 26. And with 16 seconds left, it was Flowers-to-McCants again for the game winner.

Flowers committed to USF in October 2013, when Willie Taggart was in the middle of a first-year mess. His inaugural Bulls squad went 2-10, a year after going just 3-9 under Skip Holtz. Taggart is a hell of a recruiter, but it took a leap of faith.

As a true freshman, Flowers helped to engineer one of USF’s four wins, throwing for 105 yards and rushing for 33 in a 14-13 win over lowly SMU. And as a sophomore, he was the catalyst for a change that altered both his career and Taggart’s.

“At first it was, well, let’s just run West Coast, but see how it looks in the ’gun,” Taggart said. “And then it got intriguing, because we started seeing all the options available that we didn’t have under center. And then we started running all the practice reps, Quinton in the ’gun, spread out, but with the shifts and motions. And it was like … wow.”

USF began 2015 just 1-3, but Flowers threw for 259 yards and rushed for 55 in a 45-24 win over Syracuse. He rushed for 299 yards in wins over UConn and SMU, then produced a 173.4 passer rating during a four-game win streak to end the regular season.

After the first month of his sophomore season, USF would go 28-6 over the rest of Flowers’ career. The Bulls’ success got Taggart the Oregon job (which he parlayed into the FSU job a year later).

And Flowers, the man who lost both parents before age 18 and lost a brother before his first career start, graduates with 8,130 career passing yards, 3,672 rushing yards, and a combined 112 touchdowns. He nearly averaged a 2,000/1,000 season despite only playing five games as a freshman. He was incredible.

When Ahmad Bradshaw signed up to play for Army, Jeff Monken was taking over — to mix service academy metaphors — a sinking ship. In the 17 seasons between 1997 and 2013, Army had been mostly destitute, winning three or fewer games 13 times. The Black Knights had eked out a bowl bid in 2010 under Rich Ellerson but couldn’t sustain momentum and went just 5-19 in Ellerson’s last two seasons. They hadn’t beaten Navy since 2001.

Monken had seen success at Georgia Southern, going to the FCS semifinals three times and beating Florida without completing a pass in 2013. But this was a nearly impossible task. And Bradshaw was signing up for it too.

Bradshaw didn’t play in 2014 and was briefly suspended while West Point investigated charges of sexual assault. (They were determined to be “unfounded.”)

He started seven games and rushed for 468 yards and five scores during a miserable 2-10 campaign in 2015, and he was reported to have quit the team before the 2016 season, just as it came time to commit to five years of service.

He stuck it out and crafted a completely different story. He rushed for 826 yards and threw for 703 that fall, leading the Black Knights to eight wins, their first win over Navy in 15 years, and their second bowl in 20. And in 2017, he was the catalyst for only Army’s second 10-win season ever. (Army would have won 10-plus games plenty of times in the 1940s had the Cadets played 10 games.)

Assuming 2017 was Bradshaw’s final season, he finished in incredible style. He scored the game-winning touchdown in Army’s second straight victory over Navy, and he helped make the Armed Forces Bowl more memorable.

Army couldn’t even pretend to corral SDSU’s Rashaad Penny. The incredible Aztec senior needed only 14 carries to put together his fifth consecutive 200-yard rushing effort. San Diego State averaged 9 yards per play and returned a kickoff for a touchdown to boot.

With no chance of stopping SDSU, Army played keep-away. The Knights snapped the ball 91 times to SDSU’s 31 and held the ball for an incredible 46 minutes. They had scoring drives of eight, 10, 23, 13, and 15 plays, and they had non-scoring drives of 10 and 20 plays.

Penny scored on rushes of 81, 32, 49, and 4 yards, but his bursts were almost counterproductive — they simply allowed Army to hog the ball even more. The cadets had as many first downs as SDSU had total snaps.

And they still needed a perfect 15-play, five-minute drive to win. Down 35-28, Bradshaw engineered a perfect possession; he rushed nine times for 42 yards and overcame a second-and-17 with two keepers. He set the table for Darnell Woolfolk’s 1-yard score, then pitched to Kell Walker for the game-winning two-point conversion. Elijah Riley picked off a final-play lateral and took it back for one last score in a 42-35 win.

USF-Texas Tech was only the best game of bowl season for about three hours.

As Appalachian State’s starting quarterback for four seasons, Taylor Lamb’s job was a little bit different. He wasn’t asked to run option keepers 20 times per game like Bradshaw, and he wasn’t tasked with carrying a 2,000/1,000-style load like Flowers.

But he damn near averaged four 2,500/500 seasons instead, throwing for 9,786 career yards and rushing for 2,009. More importantly, Appalachian State won 37 games in the process.

When Lamb signed with App State, the Mountaineers were in a time of transition. Jerry Moore had just retired after nearly a quarter-century in charge, and the program was moving to FBS just as it was beginning to downslide at the FCS level. They went 8-4 in each of Moore’s final two seasons, then went 4-8 in their last pre-FBS season, during which Lamb was redshirting.

It seemed like App State’s timing was all wrong. The Mountaineers lost their first official FBS game by 38 points (to Michigan), and when Lamb stepped into the lineup in Week 3, they lost four straight.

As with USF’s 2015, App State took an in-season leap. Lamb threw for 397 yards in an otherwise discouraging 55-48 loss to Liberty to drop the Mountaineers to 1-5. From that point forward, they would go 36-9.

With Lamb, App State’s FBS transition has been a rousing success. And his career ends with a prototype win. The Mountaineers’ defense frustrated the hell out of a previously awesome Toledo unit, App State’s go-to back rushed for 100-plus yards (Jalin Moore had 22 carries for 125), and Lamb made the plays when asked.

On the Mountaineers’ second scoring drive, he rushed for 7 yards on third-and-5, then completed a 23-yard strike to Ike Lewis. Moore took it from there. On the first scoring drive of the second half, Lamb converted a fourth-and-1 sneak, then hit Lewis for 16 yards to set up Moore’s 31-yard score. And the final completion of his career, a 26-yarder to Lewis once again, set up the game’s final points, a 3-yard rush by Malik Williams.

Lamb was never App State’s star; he fit far more into a “game manager” role than the prolific Flowers or the ball-carrying Bradshaw. But he made App State a more certain program. That’s a legacy and a half.