Pete Golding says he didn’t meet Bray Hubbard the way most people would have expected.
He didn’t see the Alabama safety first as a defender, or even as a football-only prospect. He saw the kid from Ocean Springs High School on the Mississippi coast with a bandana on, shirt off, grinding through power cleans at 2:30 in the afternoon before catching that night in baseball.
“I got there early at school,” Golding recalled. “It’s 2:30 and the kid’s got his shirt off with a bandana on doing power cleans in the weight room. And he was catching that night.”
That image fits Hubbard as well as any scouting report ever could. Before he became a key piece for Alabama on defense, he was the kind of multi-sport force who could have gone a lot of different directions. He was committed to Southern Miss as a baseball player, and he had the kind of tools that had MLB scouts looking at him for center field even though he could handle shortstop and catcher, too.
But the baseball path never became the one he followed. The attitude, the versatility, the physical edge - all of that stayed with him.
Mark Hubbard, Bray’s father, compared him to a baseball utility man. “It’s like a utility player in baseball,” he said.
“He can play wherever coach Wommack wants him to play. He can play there and be good at it.”
That’s the version Alabama has gotten, too: a safety in title, but much more than that in practice. Former Ocean Springs coach and current Gulfport coach Blake Pennock called him “kind of a warm blanket for Kane (Wommack),” the kind of defender who can cover an outside receiver, slot receiver, tight end or running back, then turn around and blitz off the edge or fill a run gap.
NFL scouts have noticed. Hubbard’s ability to line up just about anywhere and still tackle, cover and hold up physically has given him a solid 2026 draft grade.
What makes that versatility even more striking is where Hubbard came from. He wasn’t built as a defensive back. He was a quarterback, and a really good one.
Pennock remembers a conversation with Mark Hubbard, who was then Ocean Springs’ athletics director, while Bray kept working nearby with a football in his hands. Mark asked whether his son could really play Division I football. Pennock laughed.
“He’s like, ‘Man, do you think he has what it takes to play Division I football?’” Pennock remembered.
“And I just start laughing at him. I’m like, ‘Man, this dude’s got it.’”
At Ocean Springs, Hubbard was the kind of athlete a program can center itself around. Pennock described him as a “super athlete,” and at 6 feet, 160 pounds, he was “nothing but elbows and shoulders.” The Greyhounds needed him at quarterback, and he delivered in every way.
A two-time Class 6A Mississippi Mr. Football award winner, Hubbard piled up 5,288 passing yards, 55 touchdowns and 10 interceptions in three seasons as a passer, completing 65.4% of his 587 attempts. He also ran for 4,044 yards and 52 touchdowns, averaging 7.9 yards per touch.
The wins followed, too. Ocean Springs went 32-5 with Hubbard at quarterback, and Pennock said he was a player who “ticks a little bit differently than your average high school athlete.”
His physical style made that obvious. Mark Hubbard said coaches had to rein him in because he wanted to run people over instead of playing with a quarterback’s usual caution.
“He was so physical as a quarterback, that we finally had to calm him down and tell him to slide, and to go out of bounds,” Mark Hubbard said. “Coach Pennock, he was very adamant about, ‘You got to play the next play. You want to run over people.’
“He didn’t have that quarterback mentality, that finesse. He just didn’t.”
That same edge is part of why Alabama wound up using him on defense, even if not everyone saw it immediately. Nick Saban didn’t either. Mark Hubbard said that when Saban first met Bray, the Alabama coach shifted the conversation away from quarterback entirely.
“He’s a receiver or he’s a defensive back. We’re just not sure which one,” Mark Hubbard remembers Saban saying. “Can you come back next week?”
Golding saw the same thing once he got Hubbard into camp and watched him cover real receivers. The question was never whether he was an athlete. It was whether he could handle man coverage in Alabama’s system.
“Then when we got him to camp and saw him cover real guys - that was always the question: could he play man-to-man in our system?” Golding said. “I always knew he had a really, really bright future.”
That future has shown up in a big way under Wommack. Wommack, who tracked Hubbard when he was at South Alabama, saw a player who fit the mold of the kind of athlete his father, Dave, always loved to coach: the best athlete on the field, instinctive, physical and able to see the game a step ahead.
Wommack also sees the quarterback background in how Hubbard plays safety. Hubbard understands passing concepts, reads the quarterback and can anticipate where the ball is going before it gets there.
“You can start to dictate to a quarterback where he has to throw the ball when you see a certain route concept,” Wommack said. “You may take away the deeper throw and then drive on the underneath throw because you know that’s where the quarterback’s going next with the ball.”
That’s the version of Hubbard Alabama has come to rely on. What started as a special teams role and an injury replacement for Keon Sabb midway through the 2024 season has turned into something much bigger. Over the past two seasons, Hubbard has put together 136 tackles, seven interceptions, four forced fumbles and eight pass deflections.
At Ocean Springs, Pennock saw only a small part of this. Hubbard did play some defensive back as a senior after committing to Alabama as a DB, and he intercepted three passes. But the full picture only became clear once he got to Alabama.
“There was no tape on it,” Pennock said.
Mark Hubbard didn’t need tape. When the best defensive back coach in the country offered his son a chance to play defensive back, that was enough to confirm what the family already believed.
“The best defensive back coach in the country offers you as a defensive back,” Mark Hubbard said, ”that kind of solidified … what we always thought was true.”
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