Link
https://theathletic.com/442208/2018/07/3...-arkansas/
PITTSBURGH — Even Ricky Town is a little surprised he ended up here at the University of Pittsburgh, on this sweltering July morning, sitting inside the Panthers’ football team meeting room. He’s wearing his new gear and a serious expression on his face as he begins speaking about the latest chapter of an unexpectedly winding college football career.
“College has been a little bit of — this isn’t what I was thinking college football was going to be,” Town tells The Athletic. “It’s been different, but I know God’s got a plan for everyone. And so, I know this is my plan, and it’s the right plan.”
Town’s plan has led him on a significantly more peripatetic path than expected for a can’t-miss prospect who was at one time the top-ranked recruit of the 2015 class. Town — who at one time in high school was ranked ahead of current NFL quarterbacks Sam Darnold and Josh Rosen — originally committed to Alabama before signing with nearby USC. He enrolled early but left in the middle of his first fall camp and transferred to Arkansas, where he redshirted and spent one season as a reserve, though he never saw playing time. Last fall, he played at Ventura (Calif.) College, a junior college in his hometown that plays its games on the same field where he starred in high school.
And now, after a fortuitous call and a whirlwind visit last December, Town has landed here with two seasons of eligibility left. He says Pat Narduzzi is the best and most honest head coach he’s ever been around. He raves about the program and its facilities, and how cool it is that he can watch Ben Roethlisberger practice a couple of hundred yards away from him. He gushes about offensive coordinator Shawn Watson’s QB school and the intelligent conversations that regularly take place in his meeting room.
Now 22, Town knows he’ll likely open this season as the backup quarterback behind sophomore Kenny Pickett. But he doesn’t mind. The 6-foot-3, 215-pound redshirt junior quarterback feels like he’s finally where he’s supposed to be.
“The biggest thing that I’ve learned is the importance of failure,” Town says. “If you’re perfect all the time, if you never fail at anything, you don’t progress. I think that’s been a big thing this whole college career of mine, just learning from my mistakes, and fessing up, like, ‘Yeah, OK, I messed that up. How can I get better?’ I was constantly failing and progressing.
“If you fail, it’s not really failure if you’re learning from it. But if you don’t progress from it, then, yeah, that’s failure.”
Watson rummages around in his office and comes back out into his quarterbacks meeting room with what he calls his “textbook.” It’s a binder he updates at least twice a year — after a season ends and after spring ball — and hands to each quarterback under his tutelage. It’s a combination of notes and diagrams and tips, all accumulated over the 28 years that Watson has spent coaching quarterbacks and prompted by a mentor and neighbor — Weeb Ewbank, the former Baltimore Colts and New York Jets coach whom he got to know when Watson coached at Miami (Ohio).
Watson puts every quarterback he coaches through his QB school every winter and every training camp, no matter if everyone coming back has already been in his system. That’s not the point; the point is teaching the foundation. “It’s just like a classroom,” he says.
Town’s first session took place back in January, right after he moved in at Pitt.
“When you think of the phrase ‘QB school,’ you’d think throwing a football, throwing routes, the offense,” Town says. “We started with defensive fronts. We literally work our way up to how a defense works, and then we go into what type of coverages there are. We spent almost a month on just defensive football. We don’t even touch the offense.”
From there, QB school delves into situational football and game management. Then, all of the intricate parts of the offense.
This particular room is one where Town spends a lot of time. As any quarterbacks coach will tell you, if you get this room right, you get your team right. And these four walls, this table and these chairs have taken on a special meaning for Town: This is where he earned his scholarship offer to Pitt. With those markers and that dry-erase board, Watson asked Town to diagram a specific play that he knew and teach it to him as he would a quarterback.
“He knows the West Coast system like a pro,” Watson says. “It was impressive. When he drew it, he didn’t draw it like a kid; he drew it like a coach. It was in his blood. He knew it. Then, he articulated it. I’m sitting there going, ‘Shoot, he could put on a uniform. He could coach this.’ That really caught me. … He’s just got football in him.”
Watson calls what he put Town through an NFL-style interview. He wanted to know what his potential quarterback knew — what kind of offensive terminology he used, how his mind worked. With his right hand, Watson drew up a play that Pitt runs; later in the interview, he asked Town to re-draw it from memory … left-handed.
Then, Narduzzi popped in — an unusual move for a defensive-minded head coach on a quarterback visit — and started talking defense. “We were both trying to stump him and trying to see if we could get him to flinch, and he didn’t flinch,” Watson says.
Says Narduzzi: “I just started drawing up some coverages, and showing him why we do the things we do, and what we’re looking for. I think that impressed Ricky just because I don’t think another head coach or defensive guy had ever sat down with him. By the time that was over, and lunch, he was ready to be a Pittsburgh Panther.”
During those conversations, the Pitt coaches were clear and straightforward: Pickett is the top quarterback. He’d started as a freshman at the end of last season, leading the Panthers to their upset of then-No. 2 Miami in the season finale. But as good as Pickett was, Pitt wanted to find someone capable of both providing depth and pushing him.
“I’ve never had a year that we haven’t played two, in some cases three, quarterbacks; it’s been hard,” Watson says. “What I found to be true, what kept ringing to me, was his humility. He wasn’t looking for anything to be handed to him. He wasn’t looking for easy. He was looking for what was best for his life, which is really what drew me to him.”
Town didn’t have any other FBS offers. He’d only taken visits to Indiana State and Stephen F. Austin prior to a half-day trip to Pittsburgh. Pitt needed a last-minute quarterback addition after two upperclassmen left.
“He came across as such a great team kid,” Watson says. “He got it, understood it, knew it — because he’s had to live it. He had a little bit of a volatile past. He’d been at USC. He’d been at Arkansas. Now, he’s at Ventura. We’re like, ‘Whoa.’ But he has learned so much along the way, it was unbelievable. When he came in here and talked to us, we knew we were getting a great person who is very mature, who had a real in-depth understanding of football and was really looking for a situation where he knew he was going to be treated fairly.”
Steve Mooshagian first met Ricky Town because, frankly, it would have been hard not to. The two shared a hometown and even a playing field. Mooshagian, the head coach at Ventura College, used it with his team, and Town, the star quarterback at St. Bonaventure High, used it on Friday nights with his.
Mooshagian — “Moose” to pretty much everyone — had a front-row seat to what happened next. He watched a talented and smart quarterback find himself in the eye of a hurricane of hype, expectations and potential. He saw a high school junior deal with a coaching change (his third in three years) and a knee injury. Mooshagian noticed what changed around him, and what didn’t, and he saw Town’s production slip.
“Once you put that label on you and you’re the No. 1-ranked quarterback, you’re gonna have 100 new critics,” Mooshagian says. “That means every mom and dad that’s sitting in the stands, your own parents, your opponent’s team’s quarterback’s parents. Everybody is gunning for you, trying to prove that they’re better than the No.1-ranked quarterback. Every time that he played against a team, people were thinking, the defensive guys, everything that’s there, ‘Hey, we’re gonna go. Let’s go mess this up for him.’ It’s an extra motivation tool (for his opponents).
“He never wanted that. He really didn’t want that. It was a lot easier to be Sam Darnold, coming in being that, whatever the 15th or 28th-rated quarterback, than it is to be the No. 1 guy. And then everybody’s there. The media’s there looking at you, and I think he put a lot of self-imposed pressure on himself. Ricky isn’t that type of guy. He doesn’t need that extra noise.”
Town’s father, Ricky Town Sr., told Bleacher Report in 2014 that his son received 125 letters from coaches the first day that schools were allowed to recruit him. And everyone was telling him different things, various feedback that could be overwhelming.
“Imagine trying to take golf lessons from dozens of different coaches a year, each with their own ideas on how to create the perfect swing,” Town Sr. said then.
“Now that I think back on it, being on that kind of platform, being so young — I didn’t realize how young I was,” Ricky Town Jr. says. “I see pictures of myself, and I’m like, ‘I was a little kid.’ … It’s definitely crazy, but I think I was blessed to see a lot of places and get to go to the U.S. Army All America game and all that.
“It’s a good pressure — I think. But it’s definitely crazy that kids like that are being scrutinized.”
Town prefers not to discuss his brief tenure at USC, and the way that Mooshagian describes the fit (or lack thereof) of Town with the Trojans is “somebody that wanted dark chocolate got milk chocolate instead.” He believes the system at Arkansas was far better suited for Town, until he got caught between too many other quarterbacks on the roster.
The cumulative effect of Town’s first two collegiate stops was this: He hadn’t gained any in-game experience over the course of three years. His timing was off. He was rusty. He was even a bit gun-shy, to pull a phrase from Mooshagian, tentative to the point of trying not to make mistakes.
“It was good for me to just get back and get a fresh start, and get some confidence back and just start playing again,” Town says. “The biggest thing was Coach Moose just wanted me to just relax and have some fun and go play football. That’s what I did.”
Says Mooshagian: “During his first semester here, he put a ton of pressure on himself. Like, ‘This is my last chance. If I don’t do it, I could be done.’ I wanted him to have fun again, I wanted him to smile, to laugh. … During his experience at Ventura, I think it kind of renewed his love for football.”
Ventura College has become something of a magnet for those wishing to revive their major-college careers. Seven quarterbacks have been what Mooshagian terms “bounce-backs” — Division I to junior college back up a level, to either the FBS or FCS. Town is one. Jake Luton (from Idaho to Oregon State) and Jake Constantine (from Boise State to Weber State) are others.
Last fall, Town and Constantine split reps, with one (Town) a more pro-style quarterback and the other (Constantine) a true spread-style signal-caller. At Ventura, Town threw for 1,160 yards and 12 touchdowns to go along with five interceptions in nine games. He worked off a great deal of his rust out of the spotlight, without incessant scrutiny and with his family nearby for support — just the way he wanted it. At the end of the season, Town won a coaches’ award for how he handled himself through it all.
“He’s gotten to that point to where he can take a deep breath now and say, ‘You know what? I overcame all this, and now I’m who I am. And now I’m just gonna go do my thing. And if they call me to play, I’m gonna play and not worry about all the expectations. Whatever happens, happens,’ ” Mooshagian says.
When Town started looking for landing spots last December, he decided to do so alone. He told his parents, who in the past had accompanied him on recruiting trips, “I need to pick this one for me.” He talked to them about his thought process but figured he needed to be the one to figure out where he could live, where he could grow and whom he could trust.
That someone turned out to be Narduzzi, whom Town calls the best head coach he’s ever played for. Narduzzi is nothing if not blunt, and he prides himself and his staff on honesty.
“You don’t have to walk down the hallway and look the other way because you can’t look a kid in the eye, because you lied to him,” Narduzzi says. “That’s a miserable way to coach and, really, to treat your players. Because, you know what? You treat one player like that, and he tells someone else: ‘Hey, Coach told me this, but he did that.’ … and then, all of a sudden, you start to have a revolt on the football team. That’s when the kids don’t play for you.”
Ricky Town Sr. and his wife, Mimi, both respectfully declined to be interviewed for this article but said in a text message, “We are both very happy because Ricky seems very happy” at Pitt.
Town doesn’t dwell on what-ifs or focus on the paths his peers have taken that differ from his. He doesn’t keep in touch with Rosen or Darnold, but he watched the draft and said “it’s awesome” that they got picked early. He appreciates that he’s been challenged in a way that’s unexpected, that he has learned and progressed from each setback.
“I wouldn’t change anything,” Town says. “I think I’ve had a great path. I’ve met a lot of people, been a lot of places, seen a lot of different schemes and terminology, and I think it’s going to make me a better player overall, at the end of it.
“This is my path, so I love it, and we’ll see what happens at the end of it. But I think I’m going to have a great story to tell when it’s all said and done.”
Perhaps some of the most important chapters won’t even take place on the football field. Watson shares a story of a conversation that he overheard between Town and a recruit who was visiting campus. Town told the recruit: “You need to make decisions not based on necessarily the school. You need to make them based on people.”
“That’s really cool,” Watson says, “because he’s really found out what I think is one of the major secrets to life.
“It’s people.”
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‘This is my path’: After years of twists and turns, Ricky Town finds comfort at Pitt
