NETFLIX: The Testimony of Vince Young

A Confession With an Asterisk

There’s a moment in Netflix’s Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young when you want to reach through the screen and shake the man. Not out of anger — out of frustration. Because for all the soul-baring, all the vulnerability, you get the sense that Vince Young is still negotiating with his own story. Owning some of it. Sub-leasing the rest.

Let’s rewind the tape.

The Rise Was Real

Nobody needs to be reminded of January 4, 2006. Fourth-and-5, 19 seconds left, Rose Bowl, and Young simply took the football and outran USC to the pylon. Texas 41, USC 38. It remains, for my money, one of the single greatest individual performances college football has ever produced.

The Titans took him third overall that spring, largely because owner Bud Adams — the man who moved the franchise out of Houston — wanted Houston’s favorite son wearing two-tone blue. Head coach Jeff Fisher, by his own account in the documentary, was never enamored with the pick the way Adams was. Remember that. It matters.

Young rewarded the faith early, winning AP Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2006. But the foundation was cracked before the concrete dried. Less than two months after drafting him, Tennessee traded Steve McNair — Young’s mentor, his surrogate father figure — to the Ravens. For a kid raised without a dad, who leaned on McNair the way most of us lean on family, that loss was seismic.

The Mistakes Were His

Here’s where the “own it all” part gets murky. The missed meetings — reported by The Tennessean back in 2006, when sources said Young was late returning from taking McNair’s sons to a school breakfast and skipped another session that same week. The 2007 “60 Minutes” swagger — “Can’t nobody tell me nothing” — words that aged like milk in the summer sun. The benchings. The bankruptcy. The DWI arrests. The final ugly scene in November 2010, when Young hurled his jersey and shoulder pads into the stands after a loss to Washington and stormed out of LP Field for the last time as a Titan.

Young admits in the film that he came to view Fisher as “my enemy on the same team in the same facility.” Teammates Bo Scaife and LenDale White largely back his version — White oftentimes in a very profane way. But an enemy doesn’t hand you the keys to an NFL franchise, and plenty of quarterbacks have survived coaches who didn’t love them. The great ones make it impossible to sit them.

The Fisher Fracture

The Fisher relationship is the documentary’s edge, the dark heart. Fisher sat for the film, so give him credit for that. Yet the head ball coach who spent 16 season along the Titans sideline flat out refuses to accept even a sliver of responsibility for Young’s demise. “He showed weakness,” Fisher says of Young. That’s it. That’s the eulogy.

And then there’s the letter. Young, working at the University of Texas in 2013, mailed Fisher a written apology — an olive branch from a man trying to grow up in public. Fisher never responded. His explanation, first given to reporter Paul Kuharsky of The Tennessean and revisited in the documentary: his name was misspelled, and the letter came from the Texas athletic department, so he couldn’t be sure it was really from Vince. He kept the letter. He just never answered it.

Read that again. A grown man, a career head coach, received a handwritten apology from a broken former player and filed it away over a typo. THAT, is a dick move, one that seems to fit Fisher well. If Young’s humility in this film is measured, Fisher’s is nonexistent.

Where He Is Now

Today, at 42, Young is back home in the Texas athletic department, where he’s worked as a special assistant since 2021 after an earlier stint with the university ended badly in 2019 after an arrest for drunk driving in Fort Bend County. He talks in the film about God walking him through the wreckage so he could handle what comes next, and about being present for his kids — determined to be everything his own father wasn’t. His wife Candice, his high school sweetheart with a Vanderbilt MBA, may quietly be the star of the documentary.

Is it full accountability? No. Young still hedges, still frames, still leaves a few mistakes at the door like soily shoes he’d rather not track through the house. But it’s more testimony than we’ve ever gotten from him. And after twenty years of everyone else telling his story, maybe a flawed confession in his own voice is worth the price of admission.

Just don’t expect Jeff Fisher to write back.

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