Collier11
9/4/2010, 08:29 AM
http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20100904/GW/309040001/MSU-football-Nichol-lands-at-receiver-after-long-journey-home
EAST LANSING – It started with Keith Nichol, his dad, his brother and a couple of friends. Up at 7 a.m. twice a week, driving through the dark and snow to throw the football around a neighbor’s horse barn.
The crowd was nearly two dozen before long. This is how Nichol and his Lowell High football team responded to a miserable upset playoff loss to Hudsonville in 2005.
They started getting ready for the next season – 10 months before it started.
“Imagine getting 20 teenage boys to go anywhere at that time of day,” said Nichol’s father, Gary, “much less a cold, dirty barn.”
Stories like these are what come to Gary’s mind when he tries to put into perspective the human pinball journey his son has taken over the past few years. It has been marked by disappointment, but also by Nichol’s refusal to wallow in it.
Now, perhaps Nichol has finally found a home. At Michigan State and at the receiver position, where he’ll play today when the Spartans host Western Michigan in the season opener.
“Yeah, I think he has,” MSU coach Mark Dantonio said of Nichol. “I think he’s happy. Every football player and that is what he is, a football player wants to see the field. And wants to see the field on a regular basis. Wants to have his time to make plays.”
That’s all Nichol has wanted, he swears, since he started playing youth football in fourth grade. He didn’t choose to play quarterback, it was chosen for him.
“I’ve always been an athlete who played quarterback,” said Nichol, who switched to receiver to help MSU’s depleted roster in last season’s Alamo Bowl – after it was clear he had lost the quarterback competition to Kirk Cousins – and who has spent the past several months working to become an impact player at the new position.
“I’ve seen great things,” MSU senior receiver Mark Dell said of Nichol’s potential as a pass catcher.
‘A LONG ROAD’
Nichol may not have chosen quarterback, but he did it well. And he became obsessed with it. Soon after he started football, he told his parents he was giving up his dirt bike.
No need to risk injury, Nichol figured.
“He set aside everything for football,” Gary said. “The kid throws 1,000 footballs a week for over half of his life. At some point you say, ‘Wow, this game matters to this kid.’”
Nichol played quarterback so well, he was one of the nation’s most coveted recruits in the class of 2007. He had committed to MSU – the alma mater of his mother, Patrice, and his lifelong school of choice -- and John L. Smith after his sophomore season. A few days before Nichol’s high school career ended with a playoff loss to Muskegon, Smith was fired.
So began the bumpy ride.
“Sometimes I look back and say, ‘Man, it’s crazy how I got here,’” Nichol said. “It’s been a long road, you know?”
Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops pushed hard while MSU searched for a replacement. Nichol switched his commitment to the Sooners and received so much abuse from MSU fans, his parents and school administrators were hiding mail from him.
“When you get mail and there’s no return address,” Nichol said, “something’s not good.”
He pressed onward and battled a redshirt freshman named Sam Bradford for the starting job in the fall of 2007. He lost. He was looking at a career as the backup to Bradford, who was the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft in April.
“It wasn’t his best day,” Gary recalled. “He bet it all, in the most literal sense for an 18-year-old kid. He was all in. And it didn’t go his way, and it wasn’t his best day.”
But he responded. He got a 4.0 grade-point average that fall, got bigger and stronger in the weight room and started to look around for another spot.
Dantonio and MSU were waiting, and some of the fans who had spewed venom at Nichol assumed he would be their quarterback and savior starting in 2009, after sitting out the NCAA-required year.
Instead, Cousins prevailed and Nichol was left mostly on the sidelines as a 6-6 season came to an end.
“He bet it all a second time,” Gary said. “When you spend half your life on this Earth working toward a goal and it doesn’t happen, it’s not your best day. It’s not what you planned. But he took it all in stride, he manned up and he said, ‘OK.’”
NEXT CHALLENGE
He accepted Dantonio’s request to play receiver in the Alamo Bowl, filling in for several MSU regulars suspended in light of the fight at Rather Hall. He caught a couple passes, delivered a crushing block, scored on a trick-play quarterback draw in MSU’s loss to Texas Tech.
Then he went about learning a position he had never played.
Just like that barn in Lowell, Nichol made the MSU weight room and the MSU film room his sanctuaries.
Just like when he started playing football, he accepted the position given to him, and today he’ll use his speed and power on MSU’s punt, punt coverage, kickoff and kickoff return teams.
He said his grasp of the receiver position is “light years” from where it was in the spring, and the same might be said of his relationship with Cousins.
Fierce-yet-supportive competitors a year ago, they can now pool their talents.
“What he’s thinking, I’m thinking,” Nichol said. “What he sees, I see.”
Just the other day, they had a conversation about a route adjustment against a blitz that gave Cousins pause.
“It was interesting because a normal receiver wouldn’t have had that same perspective,” Cousins said. “You can’t really underestimate that quarterback perspective, I think it will help him at receiver.
“Now we’ve just got to get him the football.”
That might just top the list of what people want to see today at Spartan Stadium.
EAST LANSING – It started with Keith Nichol, his dad, his brother and a couple of friends. Up at 7 a.m. twice a week, driving through the dark and snow to throw the football around a neighbor’s horse barn.
The crowd was nearly two dozen before long. This is how Nichol and his Lowell High football team responded to a miserable upset playoff loss to Hudsonville in 2005.
They started getting ready for the next season – 10 months before it started.
“Imagine getting 20 teenage boys to go anywhere at that time of day,” said Nichol’s father, Gary, “much less a cold, dirty barn.”
Stories like these are what come to Gary’s mind when he tries to put into perspective the human pinball journey his son has taken over the past few years. It has been marked by disappointment, but also by Nichol’s refusal to wallow in it.
Now, perhaps Nichol has finally found a home. At Michigan State and at the receiver position, where he’ll play today when the Spartans host Western Michigan in the season opener.
“Yeah, I think he has,” MSU coach Mark Dantonio said of Nichol. “I think he’s happy. Every football player and that is what he is, a football player wants to see the field. And wants to see the field on a regular basis. Wants to have his time to make plays.”
That’s all Nichol has wanted, he swears, since he started playing youth football in fourth grade. He didn’t choose to play quarterback, it was chosen for him.
“I’ve always been an athlete who played quarterback,” said Nichol, who switched to receiver to help MSU’s depleted roster in last season’s Alamo Bowl – after it was clear he had lost the quarterback competition to Kirk Cousins – and who has spent the past several months working to become an impact player at the new position.
“I’ve seen great things,” MSU senior receiver Mark Dell said of Nichol’s potential as a pass catcher.
‘A LONG ROAD’
Nichol may not have chosen quarterback, but he did it well. And he became obsessed with it. Soon after he started football, he told his parents he was giving up his dirt bike.
No need to risk injury, Nichol figured.
“He set aside everything for football,” Gary said. “The kid throws 1,000 footballs a week for over half of his life. At some point you say, ‘Wow, this game matters to this kid.’”
Nichol played quarterback so well, he was one of the nation’s most coveted recruits in the class of 2007. He had committed to MSU – the alma mater of his mother, Patrice, and his lifelong school of choice -- and John L. Smith after his sophomore season. A few days before Nichol’s high school career ended with a playoff loss to Muskegon, Smith was fired.
So began the bumpy ride.
“Sometimes I look back and say, ‘Man, it’s crazy how I got here,’” Nichol said. “It’s been a long road, you know?”
Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops pushed hard while MSU searched for a replacement. Nichol switched his commitment to the Sooners and received so much abuse from MSU fans, his parents and school administrators were hiding mail from him.
“When you get mail and there’s no return address,” Nichol said, “something’s not good.”
He pressed onward and battled a redshirt freshman named Sam Bradford for the starting job in the fall of 2007. He lost. He was looking at a career as the backup to Bradford, who was the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft in April.
“It wasn’t his best day,” Gary recalled. “He bet it all, in the most literal sense for an 18-year-old kid. He was all in. And it didn’t go his way, and it wasn’t his best day.”
But he responded. He got a 4.0 grade-point average that fall, got bigger and stronger in the weight room and started to look around for another spot.
Dantonio and MSU were waiting, and some of the fans who had spewed venom at Nichol assumed he would be their quarterback and savior starting in 2009, after sitting out the NCAA-required year.
Instead, Cousins prevailed and Nichol was left mostly on the sidelines as a 6-6 season came to an end.
“He bet it all a second time,” Gary said. “When you spend half your life on this Earth working toward a goal and it doesn’t happen, it’s not your best day. It’s not what you planned. But he took it all in stride, he manned up and he said, ‘OK.’”
NEXT CHALLENGE
He accepted Dantonio’s request to play receiver in the Alamo Bowl, filling in for several MSU regulars suspended in light of the fight at Rather Hall. He caught a couple passes, delivered a crushing block, scored on a trick-play quarterback draw in MSU’s loss to Texas Tech.
Then he went about learning a position he had never played.
Just like that barn in Lowell, Nichol made the MSU weight room and the MSU film room his sanctuaries.
Just like when he started playing football, he accepted the position given to him, and today he’ll use his speed and power on MSU’s punt, punt coverage, kickoff and kickoff return teams.
He said his grasp of the receiver position is “light years” from where it was in the spring, and the same might be said of his relationship with Cousins.
Fierce-yet-supportive competitors a year ago, they can now pool their talents.
“What he’s thinking, I’m thinking,” Nichol said. “What he sees, I see.”
Just the other day, they had a conversation about a route adjustment against a blitz that gave Cousins pause.
“It was interesting because a normal receiver wouldn’t have had that same perspective,” Cousins said. “You can’t really underestimate that quarterback perspective, I think it will help him at receiver.
“Now we’ve just got to get him the football.”
That might just top the list of what people want to see today at Spartan Stadium.