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Alts for the game against ND.
OFFICIAL 2021 COLLEGE FOOTBALL OFFSEASON THREAD
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by Bobby Layne,
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Alts for the game against ND.
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USC vs UNC
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Details on ASU investigation:
sports.yahoo.com
Yahoo Sports exclusive: Dossier reveals extent of NCAA allegations against Arizona State football
In totality, the breadth of the evidence and potential investigative leads given to the NCAA will provide significant building blocks for a case against ASU.
sports.yahoo.com
dacomeup
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So Bubba Chandler is about to be a first round pick in baseball?
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This doesn't include the fact that many kids transfer down to lower levels for various reasons but the fact that only 25% of power 5 transfers end up at another power 5 school is pretty jarring.
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Frost
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Probably a good time for Moos to get out as Nebraska football is 9-21 in conference their last 30 games and basketball is 10-48 in their last 58.
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Moos and Frost: We want to play!
Big 10: OK here’s Ohio State and Wisconsin.
Moos and Frost: We want to play not them!
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Frost
I think frost will have at least 2 more years. Remember he’s supposed to be their “big hire” to save the program, similar to Harbaugh at Michigan when they hired him
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Wonder why he’s leaving
NVM, forgot Justin Flowe was there
Last edited:
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They should move the little Sewell to edge, or at least use him in a Donta Hightower role.
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He’s the best player on the team
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Yikes. I’m not sure how coach O survives all of this
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Already better than Thib?
The little Sewell looked good against the run, but I worry about him getting picked on in coverage.
I’m biased tho, because I’ve always thought he could be a elite edge guy and his talents are being wasted at ILB.
aepps20
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Coach O has to go if true.
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Thib definitely does one thing at an elite level and is killing the PAC so I wouldn’t argue with you if you think he’s their best guy. Sewell makes plays all over the field, can cover, and as you mentioned would probably be an elite edge guy too. He stood out to me in almost every game they played.
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Sewell was EVERYWHERE. Could not believe what I was seeing so early in his career
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Phil Steele power rankings
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The Elite 11’s most interesting QB? ‘Unicorn’ Luther Richesson, who epitomizes ‘team before self’ … and has no social media
Most of the quarterback finalists at this week’s Elite 11 finals in Southern California will arrive in college next year with a ready-made robust social media following to leverage as college football embraces the potential of name, image and likeness. For example, Quinn Ewers, an Ohio State commit from Texas, has 22,000 followers on Twitter and 75,000 on Instagram.
But then there is Luther Richesson, another quarterback competing at the finals, whose online footprint is almost nonexistent: no Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or TikTok. He barely has a Twitter account, and that only came at the suggestions of his high school coaches to help open up another potential line of communication with recruiters. He’s tweeted three times: his Hudl film, a “Pro Day” script video touting several of his teammates at Nashville’s Lipscomb Academy, and a retweet of his coach, Trent Dilfer, about the former NFL quarterback’s late son Trevin, who died 18 years ago.
“I’d say we’re kind of old school in the way that we do a lot of things,” Luther said. “I know there’s a lot of good things that can come from social media but there’s also a lot of time that you can waste, looking at stuff that you probably don’t need to be looking at or following people you don’t need to follow. I just said I want to invest all my time into something that I want to be great at, and cutting out that social media time was a big thing for me.”
Roughly a third of Luther’s 351 Twitter followers are college football coaches or staffers. Almost 10 percent of that number are coaches at Michigan State and Cincinnati. One of Luther’s coaches at Lipscomb said it’s not uncommon for a college recruiter to ask them, “Can I get a response back from your QB?”
The response is always: “He doesn’t check it often like most quarterbacks do.”
“It’s a fascinating case study on if you spend all of your time on football stuff, not social media,” said Joey Roberts, a former ESPN staffer who is now the chief of staff at Lipscomb Academy and the director of scouting for the Elite 11 in the offseason. “He’s removed that distraction from his life.
“Having been around the Elite 11 for a decade, you’d notice as the years have gone on, the downtime that should be spent building relationships face to face or learning concepts, formations, defensive tendencies and the nuances of the position of quarterbacks has been turning into their heads being buried in their phones on social media. And, maybe only about 20 percent of what they do on social media is gonna help these kids get from where they are to where they want to go from a knowledge and wisdom standpoint.”
So who, then, is Luther Richesson?
Quarterbacks, more than any other position in sports, are products of their pedigree. Sons of quarterbacks or of coaches often have such a distinct advantage having grown up around the game and benefitted from unique insight and perspective into the job and the game of football. Few, though, have a pedigree like the 6-foot-3, 210-pound Richesson. His dad, Luke, a former Kansas linebacker, was a longtime NFL strength coach who helped the Denver Broncos win a Super Bowl, which enabled then-12-year-old Luther to have a front row seat watching how Peyton Manning practiced and led his team.
“There was a lot of greatness on that team,” Luther told The Athletic. “Peyton was really great to me as a kid. He would throw the ball with me in between stations and talk to me. I was just too young to fully understand it, but being able to see how he led and what leading looked like, how everyone listened to him when he talked and when he broke down the weight room every time — everyone gathered around him and there’s a lot of great lessons to be learned from him.”
Richesson’s mom, Anita, is a former Olympic swimmer who set a world record in the 200-meter breaststroke when she was 15 years old. Being raised by parents whose careers have been so rooted in diligence and discipline certainly can create quite the framework for an aspiring quarterback.
“Growing up, discipline actually wasn’t a thing that my parents mentioned a lot,” Richesson said. “It was more about, if you’re going to go for something, you better go like hell and go get it. They didn’t care if that meant being a doctor, being someone in sports, being a teacher, being a veterinarian. They just said: ‘One, if you want to go to college, you’ve got to get it paid for. Two, if you’re going to go for something, go all in.’ They also taught me that your word is everything. Don’t ever let someone question your word.”
Dilfer spent the better part of the last decade after retiring from the NFL helping groom future first-round quarterbacks through his Elite 11. He’s seen all aspects of their development, from the good to the not-so-good, which includes the role the QB’s family plays.
“I think pedigree is a big thing,” Dilfer said. “I tell parents this when we’re talking, that they’re as big a piece of the puzzle as the kid is. What they hear when they get into the passenger seat or, in Luther’s case, when he walks 100 yards across the street to his house — those are important conversations. Dad and him walk home every day after practice and I feel really good putting my head on the pillow knowing that that 100-yard walk, as well as the dinner table, as well as sitting around watching TV with Pops before they go to bed, that that’s going to be a reinforcement of the messaging that he’s received all day. (That includes) the hard times, and there were times in (his) sophomore year when he really struggled. When we struggled.
“It was easy to have honest conversations about embracing the struggle because I knew Luther and Luke weren’t leaving going, ‘Aw, Dilfer’s an idiot.’ He’s asking you to do things you can’t do. It was a reinforcement of, ‘Hey, trust it, son. This sucks, and this is hard, but look what’s in his office: Do hard things. Be uncomfortable. Those are things those are the things are gonna make you great one day.’ I’ll have great families, but I’ll never have another family like (the Richessons).”
The Richessons came to Tennessee from Colorado so Luther could be coached by Dilfer at Lipscomb and receive a private Christian school education.
“I wasn’t happy at my first high school,” Luther said. “It wasn’t the experience I wanted. We had looked everywhere. We looked where my dad was from, where my mom was from, even other places in our hometown. Nashville wasn’t even on the radar at first.”
They were watching a special on TV about the Elite 11 and noticed Dilfer’s involvement, harping on not just the physical components of being a quarterback but also the emotional and mental parts. They found an article that reported the former NFL quarterback had just taken a job at Lipscomb Academy and then fired off an email to the school. (The Richessons were also looking for a high school for Luther’s younger sister Sunni, a gifted soccer player.) Dilfer later learned that he and Luke had a lot in common with their post-NFL life perspectives, and the midlife questions they asked themselves about whether they were giving back enough.
The email sent to Lipscomb’s admissions department was eventually forwarded to Dilfer. Before long, Dilfer had spoken to several of his old NFL contacts who raved about Luke. Dilfer, who inherited a Lipscomb program that had won just three games in the previous two seasons, was trying to implement an NFL system offense, with so much loaded on the quarterback — essentially the complete opposite of what Luther had previously played.
“Head-spinning is a good way to put it,” Luther said. “I came from a really simple offense. It was Air Raid, and there was like a handful of plays, and we threw, like, 60 times a game. It was a whole different deal when I came here, and it’s made me so much better because of it. There’s a lot of learning, a lot of writing plays, and then rewriting them 100 times over. It took a lot, but it was a challenge. I really enjoyed it. It taught me a love for the process.”
Luther beat out two other quarterbacks in the program who each now have FBS scholarship offers: Kenny Minchey, who has been offered by Tennessee, and Jake McNamara, who is committed to Colorado State.
“The easy thing with Luther is that you never have to worry about whether he’s going to do the lonely work,” Dilfer said. “I’ve got to live this idealistic 11-year quarterback development journey through Elite 11, where we get them for a handful of days, and we tell them all the things they should do — and realistically, they don’t do them all. Well, now I got the kid that actually does it all. He has the greatest work capacity I’ve ever been around, so it’s been easy to pour gasoline on this development, because I don’t have to worry about a lot. It’s really a phenomenal process to see what we dreamed about for 11 years with all these kids we coached and then to get to live it with a kid that does it all.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, coach and quarterback had spent hundreds of hours on Zoom, according to Dilfer: “Through that process, I really saw his mental development. I just kept challenging mentally, he kept answering the bell.”
In season, Dilfer revised the team’s playbook by Monday at noon, incorporating some 25 new formations and 10 to 15 new concepts, he said, and giving it to Luther after sixth period. By Wednesday, Luther would have it all down pat.
Luther threw 26 touchdowns and eight interceptions and completed 67 percent of his passes last season. FBS programs took notice. Charlotte first offered. Appalachian State, Cincinnati, Central Michigan and Michigan State followed, as did Memphis and Middle Tennessee. Luther said Cincinnati has probably recruited him the hardest to this point.
A personnel director for one Power 5 program said Luther’s film is very impressive. “He can make accurate throws under duress, has the athletic ability to win and make first downs with his feet, is extremely tough, will finish runs with his shoulder down, doesn’t back down or shy away from contact and will strain for the extra yard,” the coach said. “You can tell he has some moxie and an ‘it factor’ to him. I love his upside.”
Luther is rated as the No. 56 quarterback in the country and a three-star recruit, per 247Sports composite. Those numbers would probably be higher, but Luther hasn’t camped anywhere, which, like his almost nonexistent social media profile, makes the young quarterback something of a unicorn these days. The only program he’s visited is Cincinnati, when he attended the Bearcats’ midnight madness earlier this month.
Luther discussed the plan with his high school coaches: “Do we want to go get exposed now? Do we want to go get in the college scene and start traveling?”
“The big thing it came down to was, we want to win a state championship,” Luther said. “We want to go 14-0. We want to be the best, and to do that, I had decide, do I want to spend some time here? Or, do I want to spend some time away from my team, focusing on myself? I decided to stay here, and we’ve been all in.”
Dilfer said he encouraged Luther to go to some camps, believing his quarterback would get offered anywhere he went once staffers saw him compete and spent time around him.
“I now know the game that’s played in recruiting,” Dilfer said, “so I just tried to educate him on the game. (I said) I think you should go. But they came back with their reasons why they’re not going to. And, it’s like a dream. It’s like, thank you for disagreeing with me. It’s better for us. If I just put my head coaching hat on, it’s a dream situation, that your quarterback that could get a bunch of stars and go chase all the sizzle and go chase all the offers, is choosing instead to work out twice a day, sit and watch film with me. … It’s almost kind of freaky.
“It has been some maintenance on me because I’m the one having to talk to all these college coaches who wonder why Luther isn’t coming. But it’s been a really quick transition to where they’re actually appreciating that — like there’s some genius in this, because they flip the narrative to the (Jeff) Monkens and (Luke) Fickells and all these coaches, like, ‘We’d love to see him, but kind of admire what he’s doing. It tells a lot about his character.’ It tells a lot about him, the team above self approach. How many kids do this? Nobody, right? Nobody. Nobody anymore.”
Initially, Dilfer thought Luther, by keeping such a low profile, would hurt his recruiting. But Dilfer has done a 180 on that line of thinking.
“He is going to be so desired when he plays,” Dilfer said. “His tape will speak volumes. His Elite 11 experience will speak volumes. He will have enough exposure through the Elite 11 week and through his tape, that the eye in the sky don’t lie, and the old school coaches that still adhere to that principle — that the eye in the sky doesn’t lie — and when they realize he’s memorized 70 formations and knows an NFL playbook like the back of his hand.”
Luther did make one quick trip to Indianapolis in early May before the NCAA dead period ended for an Elite 11 regional, where he qualified for this week’s finals after an impressive showing.
“Physically, he checks all the boxes and he’s very efficient in the way he operates,” said Justin Hoover, an Elite 11 coach. “The thing that really caught my attention the most was his consistency.”
Luther getting selected for the Elite 11 means that Dilfer or Roberts won’t be allowed to work the event this year because it takes place during the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association’s dead period, which prohibits coaches from instructing their athletes during that time.
“I am thankful to even be there and for them to let me go over them,” Luther said. “That means a lot to me.”
Asked what he’s hoping to gain from his week in California among the nation’s top high school quarterbacks, Luther said he wants to win the competition, but also that he looks forward to being part of a brotherhood that he has taken note of from the Elite 11 documentaries he’s watched.
As for the potential bigger exposure? That didn’t seem to rank high on his list.
“I think if it comes, it comes, but I think really where exposure is going to come is when people see how we play this fall,” said Luther.
But then there is Luther Richesson, another quarterback competing at the finals, whose online footprint is almost nonexistent: no Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or TikTok. He barely has a Twitter account, and that only came at the suggestions of his high school coaches to help open up another potential line of communication with recruiters. He’s tweeted three times: his Hudl film, a “Pro Day” script video touting several of his teammates at Nashville’s Lipscomb Academy, and a retweet of his coach, Trent Dilfer, about the former NFL quarterback’s late son Trevin, who died 18 years ago.
“I’d say we’re kind of old school in the way that we do a lot of things,” Luther said. “I know there’s a lot of good things that can come from social media but there’s also a lot of time that you can waste, looking at stuff that you probably don’t need to be looking at or following people you don’t need to follow. I just said I want to invest all my time into something that I want to be great at, and cutting out that social media time was a big thing for me.”
Roughly a third of Luther’s 351 Twitter followers are college football coaches or staffers. Almost 10 percent of that number are coaches at Michigan State and Cincinnati. One of Luther’s coaches at Lipscomb said it’s not uncommon for a college recruiter to ask them, “Can I get a response back from your QB?”
The response is always: “He doesn’t check it often like most quarterbacks do.”
“It’s a fascinating case study on if you spend all of your time on football stuff, not social media,” said Joey Roberts, a former ESPN staffer who is now the chief of staff at Lipscomb Academy and the director of scouting for the Elite 11 in the offseason. “He’s removed that distraction from his life.
“Having been around the Elite 11 for a decade, you’d notice as the years have gone on, the downtime that should be spent building relationships face to face or learning concepts, formations, defensive tendencies and the nuances of the position of quarterbacks has been turning into their heads being buried in their phones on social media. And, maybe only about 20 percent of what they do on social media is gonna help these kids get from where they are to where they want to go from a knowledge and wisdom standpoint.”
So who, then, is Luther Richesson?
Quarterbacks, more than any other position in sports, are products of their pedigree. Sons of quarterbacks or of coaches often have such a distinct advantage having grown up around the game and benefitted from unique insight and perspective into the job and the game of football. Few, though, have a pedigree like the 6-foot-3, 210-pound Richesson. His dad, Luke, a former Kansas linebacker, was a longtime NFL strength coach who helped the Denver Broncos win a Super Bowl, which enabled then-12-year-old Luther to have a front row seat watching how Peyton Manning practiced and led his team.
“There was a lot of greatness on that team,” Luther told The Athletic. “Peyton was really great to me as a kid. He would throw the ball with me in between stations and talk to me. I was just too young to fully understand it, but being able to see how he led and what leading looked like, how everyone listened to him when he talked and when he broke down the weight room every time — everyone gathered around him and there’s a lot of great lessons to be learned from him.”
Richesson’s mom, Anita, is a former Olympic swimmer who set a world record in the 200-meter breaststroke when she was 15 years old. Being raised by parents whose careers have been so rooted in diligence and discipline certainly can create quite the framework for an aspiring quarterback.
“Growing up, discipline actually wasn’t a thing that my parents mentioned a lot,” Richesson said. “It was more about, if you’re going to go for something, you better go like hell and go get it. They didn’t care if that meant being a doctor, being someone in sports, being a teacher, being a veterinarian. They just said: ‘One, if you want to go to college, you’ve got to get it paid for. Two, if you’re going to go for something, go all in.’ They also taught me that your word is everything. Don’t ever let someone question your word.”
Dilfer spent the better part of the last decade after retiring from the NFL helping groom future first-round quarterbacks through his Elite 11. He’s seen all aspects of their development, from the good to the not-so-good, which includes the role the QB’s family plays.
“I think pedigree is a big thing,” Dilfer said. “I tell parents this when we’re talking, that they’re as big a piece of the puzzle as the kid is. What they hear when they get into the passenger seat or, in Luther’s case, when he walks 100 yards across the street to his house — those are important conversations. Dad and him walk home every day after practice and I feel really good putting my head on the pillow knowing that that 100-yard walk, as well as the dinner table, as well as sitting around watching TV with Pops before they go to bed, that that’s going to be a reinforcement of the messaging that he’s received all day. (That includes) the hard times, and there were times in (his) sophomore year when he really struggled. When we struggled.
“It was easy to have honest conversations about embracing the struggle because I knew Luther and Luke weren’t leaving going, ‘Aw, Dilfer’s an idiot.’ He’s asking you to do things you can’t do. It was a reinforcement of, ‘Hey, trust it, son. This sucks, and this is hard, but look what’s in his office: Do hard things. Be uncomfortable. Those are things those are the things are gonna make you great one day.’ I’ll have great families, but I’ll never have another family like (the Richessons).”
The Richessons came to Tennessee from Colorado so Luther could be coached by Dilfer at Lipscomb and receive a private Christian school education.
“I wasn’t happy at my first high school,” Luther said. “It wasn’t the experience I wanted. We had looked everywhere. We looked where my dad was from, where my mom was from, even other places in our hometown. Nashville wasn’t even on the radar at first.”
They were watching a special on TV about the Elite 11 and noticed Dilfer’s involvement, harping on not just the physical components of being a quarterback but also the emotional and mental parts. They found an article that reported the former NFL quarterback had just taken a job at Lipscomb Academy and then fired off an email to the school. (The Richessons were also looking for a high school for Luther’s younger sister Sunni, a gifted soccer player.) Dilfer later learned that he and Luke had a lot in common with their post-NFL life perspectives, and the midlife questions they asked themselves about whether they were giving back enough.
The email sent to Lipscomb’s admissions department was eventually forwarded to Dilfer. Before long, Dilfer had spoken to several of his old NFL contacts who raved about Luke. Dilfer, who inherited a Lipscomb program that had won just three games in the previous two seasons, was trying to implement an NFL system offense, with so much loaded on the quarterback — essentially the complete opposite of what Luther had previously played.
“Head-spinning is a good way to put it,” Luther said. “I came from a really simple offense. It was Air Raid, and there was like a handful of plays, and we threw, like, 60 times a game. It was a whole different deal when I came here, and it’s made me so much better because of it. There’s a lot of learning, a lot of writing plays, and then rewriting them 100 times over. It took a lot, but it was a challenge. I really enjoyed it. It taught me a love for the process.”
Luther beat out two other quarterbacks in the program who each now have FBS scholarship offers: Kenny Minchey, who has been offered by Tennessee, and Jake McNamara, who is committed to Colorado State.
“The easy thing with Luther is that you never have to worry about whether he’s going to do the lonely work,” Dilfer said. “I’ve got to live this idealistic 11-year quarterback development journey through Elite 11, where we get them for a handful of days, and we tell them all the things they should do — and realistically, they don’t do them all. Well, now I got the kid that actually does it all. He has the greatest work capacity I’ve ever been around, so it’s been easy to pour gasoline on this development, because I don’t have to worry about a lot. It’s really a phenomenal process to see what we dreamed about for 11 years with all these kids we coached and then to get to live it with a kid that does it all.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, coach and quarterback had spent hundreds of hours on Zoom, according to Dilfer: “Through that process, I really saw his mental development. I just kept challenging mentally, he kept answering the bell.”
In season, Dilfer revised the team’s playbook by Monday at noon, incorporating some 25 new formations and 10 to 15 new concepts, he said, and giving it to Luther after sixth period. By Wednesday, Luther would have it all down pat.
Luther threw 26 touchdowns and eight interceptions and completed 67 percent of his passes last season. FBS programs took notice. Charlotte first offered. Appalachian State, Cincinnati, Central Michigan and Michigan State followed, as did Memphis and Middle Tennessee. Luther said Cincinnati has probably recruited him the hardest to this point.
A personnel director for one Power 5 program said Luther’s film is very impressive. “He can make accurate throws under duress, has the athletic ability to win and make first downs with his feet, is extremely tough, will finish runs with his shoulder down, doesn’t back down or shy away from contact and will strain for the extra yard,” the coach said. “You can tell he has some moxie and an ‘it factor’ to him. I love his upside.”
Luther is rated as the No. 56 quarterback in the country and a three-star recruit, per 247Sports composite. Those numbers would probably be higher, but Luther hasn’t camped anywhere, which, like his almost nonexistent social media profile, makes the young quarterback something of a unicorn these days. The only program he’s visited is Cincinnati, when he attended the Bearcats’ midnight madness earlier this month.
Luther discussed the plan with his high school coaches: “Do we want to go get exposed now? Do we want to go get in the college scene and start traveling?”
“The big thing it came down to was, we want to win a state championship,” Luther said. “We want to go 14-0. We want to be the best, and to do that, I had decide, do I want to spend some time here? Or, do I want to spend some time away from my team, focusing on myself? I decided to stay here, and we’ve been all in.”
Dilfer said he encouraged Luther to go to some camps, believing his quarterback would get offered anywhere he went once staffers saw him compete and spent time around him.
“I now know the game that’s played in recruiting,” Dilfer said, “so I just tried to educate him on the game. (I said) I think you should go. But they came back with their reasons why they’re not going to. And, it’s like a dream. It’s like, thank you for disagreeing with me. It’s better for us. If I just put my head coaching hat on, it’s a dream situation, that your quarterback that could get a bunch of stars and go chase all the sizzle and go chase all the offers, is choosing instead to work out twice a day, sit and watch film with me. … It’s almost kind of freaky.
“It has been some maintenance on me because I’m the one having to talk to all these college coaches who wonder why Luther isn’t coming. But it’s been a really quick transition to where they’re actually appreciating that — like there’s some genius in this, because they flip the narrative to the (Jeff) Monkens and (Luke) Fickells and all these coaches, like, ‘We’d love to see him, but kind of admire what he’s doing. It tells a lot about his character.’ It tells a lot about him, the team above self approach. How many kids do this? Nobody, right? Nobody. Nobody anymore.”
Initially, Dilfer thought Luther, by keeping such a low profile, would hurt his recruiting. But Dilfer has done a 180 on that line of thinking.
“He is going to be so desired when he plays,” Dilfer said. “His tape will speak volumes. His Elite 11 experience will speak volumes. He will have enough exposure through the Elite 11 week and through his tape, that the eye in the sky don’t lie, and the old school coaches that still adhere to that principle — that the eye in the sky doesn’t lie — and when they realize he’s memorized 70 formations and knows an NFL playbook like the back of his hand.”
Luther did make one quick trip to Indianapolis in early May before the NCAA dead period ended for an Elite 11 regional, where he qualified for this week’s finals after an impressive showing.
“Physically, he checks all the boxes and he’s very efficient in the way he operates,” said Justin Hoover, an Elite 11 coach. “The thing that really caught my attention the most was his consistency.”
Luther getting selected for the Elite 11 means that Dilfer or Roberts won’t be allowed to work the event this year because it takes place during the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association’s dead period, which prohibits coaches from instructing their athletes during that time.
“I am thankful to even be there and for them to let me go over them,” Luther said. “That means a lot to me.”
Asked what he’s hoping to gain from his week in California among the nation’s top high school quarterbacks, Luther said he wants to win the competition, but also that he looks forward to being part of a brotherhood that he has taken note of from the Elite 11 documentaries he’s watched.
As for the potential bigger exposure? That didn’t seem to rank high on his list.
“I think if it comes, it comes, but I think really where exposure is going to come is when people see how we play this fall,” said Luther.
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