
It’s easy to see why Van Dyke has his fans, even when only looking at his physical skills, which include a big arm, impressive touch and good mobility. One early NFL mock draft from ESPN, meanwhile, has Van Dyke going 10th overall next April to the Giants, who have quarterback Daniel Jones in precarious position as he enters his fourth season of what has been a middling-at-best career.
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Van Dyke was named to this year’s watch list for the Maxwell Award, given each year to college football’s best player, and Pro Football Focus likes his value to win the Heisman Trophy at 30-1 odds. “I expect a big season from him in 2022, and he could rise even higher.” Stroud on his big board of 2023 draft prospects.
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“Van Dyke can stick the ball into tight windows with accuracy,” wrote Kiper, who ranks Van Dyke 12th overall and the third-best quarterback behind Alabama’s Bryce Young and Ohio State’s C.J. Van Dyke zipped a 14-yard throw to receiver Charleston Rambo’s back shoulder despite the cornerback’s blanket coverage. He is a big (and mobile) quarterback with a tremendous arm.” Kiper noted one particular touchdown pass against Duke last season. Mel Kiper, the longtime NFL Draft analyst for ESPN, said the former Suffield (Conn.) Academy standout “really impressed me once he took over as the Hurricanes’ starter. Less biased opinions don’t differ by much. Hurricanes coach Mario Cristobal, whom Miami hired away from Oregon in December in an effort to rebuild a once storied football factory that had rusted away like the remnants of the Orange Bowl, said after getting the job and watching film of Van Dyke, “There’s not a better quarterback in the country.” Tyler Van Dyke is 21 years old now, Miami’s 6-foot-4, 225-pound redshirt sophomore quarterback and a projected first-round NFL draft pick, whenever he turns pro.

Then she sat back down to finish the exam before making it to the hospital in time to give birth to her first child, a baby boy. She called her doctor, her husband, Bill, and her mother, Cathie. Six months before Dorsey and the Hurricanes took the field with arguably the greatest college football team of all time and embarked on what remains their last national championship season in 2001, Amy Van Dyke’s water broke halfway through the Connecticut bar exam.

Getty Imagesīut Tyler Van Dyke, a Connecticut native with the type of size, arm and maturity that plays well on Sundays, is on the verge of ending that dry spell. Jim Kelly led a run of standout quarterbacks at the University of Miami throughout the 1980s. Ken Dorsey went in the seventh round in 2003 to the 49ers and Brad Kaaya in the sixth in 2017 to the Lions, and they produced forgettable NFL careers. Though the Hurricanes are tied with Alabama for the most consecutive years (14, stretching from 1995-2008 in Miami’s case) of having at least one player go in the first round only twice in the past 20 years have they had a quarterback get drafted at all.

The drought in Miami has been long and severe. In a single decade, the powerhouse football program produced future Hall of Famer Jim Kelly, along with Bernie Kosar, Vinny Testaverde and Steve Walsh, all of whom spent at least a decade in the NFL taking teams to the playoffs or, in Kelly’s case, Super Bowls.īut it’s been more than 30 years since the Hurricanes had a quarterback taken in the first round of the NFL Draft, the last being Walsh, whom the Cowboys selected with a supplemental pick in 1989. The University of Miami was once known as Quarterback U, and for good reason. Meet the Connecticut kid slinging his way from a local prep school to a Miami revival to a sleeper NFL top-10 pick
