This is a cautionary tale. One that began in Oregon and flatlined in Mississippi and should have raised a big, fat red flag.
Only it hasn’t. For all involved.
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I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: hourly Twitter media updates about a student’s academic progress, or the idea that a player who hasn’t stepped a foot on campus is going to take over the most important position on the field after all of two weeks of practice.
“There’s so much more that goes into that deal that you just can’t see,” says Houston Nutt.
Vernon Adams, meet Jeremiah Masoli. Different circumstances, same idea: walk on the field and become a difference-maker, or you’re a failure.
Nutt went through this ordeal with Masoli in 2010 for all the same reasons. While the circumstances were different — Masoli was kicked off the team at Oregon; Adams was desperately needed at Eastern Washington — the thought process is identical. Take a player who knows no one on a team of 105, plop him in the one position where you absolutely cannot fail, and ask him to be, in no certain order:
— A leader.
— A playmaker.
— A stabilizing force in the locker room.
— And finally, a winner.
Masoli arrived at Ole Miss in the first week of August and worked with his new teammates, grew with his new teammates, the entire fall camp. He was cleared to play by the NCAA the day before the season opener against FCS Jacksonville State.
Less than 24 hours later, he was on the field for the Rebels. Soon after that, Ole Miss lost to the Gamecocks in overtime. Days later, Ole Miss was in the middle of a quarterback controversy.
By the end of the season, the team that won 18 games the previous two years won four in 2010.
Now here we have Adams, who by all accounts was a model student-athlete at Eastern Washington, a player who set records and played his best in the big moment. In two games against FBS opponents, Adams threw for 886 yards and 11 TDs and 0 INTs in a last-second victory over Oregon State and a seven-point loss to Washington.
He, like Masoli, wanted to use the NCAA graduate transfer rule to play his final season elsewhere. In this instance, he not only wanted to play up at the FBS level — he wanted to do it at one of the top five programs in the nation.
Now, the hiccup: Adams didn’t graduate in the spring. He didn’t graduate in the first summer semester, and needed to pass an exam to graduate in the second summer semester — which meant he’d miss the first week of fall camp.
In this middle of this, we give you new-wave media, citing sources of when Adams will take the test, where he’ll take the test, when it will be graded and how long it will take to be graded — and following Adams’ every move like his very existence on the Oregon team translates to a championship.
“I’m only going to talk about the players who are here,” Ducks coach Mark Helfrich said when camp opened last week.
The problem is, everyone else has been talking about Adams since he decided this spring that he would try to play for the Ducks. So throughout practice, throughout summer conditioning and 7-on-7s, the whiff of what could be has hung over the Oregon program and, like it or not, its ability to build and create valuable chemistry with projected starter Jeff Lockie — the one guy who has been with the program all along.
It’s rare when graduate transfers arrive at a new program and develop into stars. It’s almost impossible for a quarterback.
Jake Coker last year transferred from Florida State to Alabama — with FSU coach Jimbo Fisher’s declaration that he could start for any team in the nation — and couldn’t beat out a guy who was playing wide receiver the year before.
The last — and maybe only — quarterback to transfer as a graduate student and have elite success was Russell Wilson.
“But he was a unique, one of a kind player,” says Arkansas coach Bret Bielema, who coached Wilson at Wisconsin after Wilson transferred from NC State. “It absolutely can be done, but the determining factors are just as big, if not bigger, off the field. Building trust and chemistry, and compressing all of those things that take months and sometimes years to build, into a few short weeks, isn’t easy.”
Yet here we are, 20 days from the start of the season, chasing a test score.
Maybe Adams will be the rare player who makes it work. Maybe Oregon will find a way to cohesively use both Adams and Lockie and find a way to win the Pac-12 again.
Or maybe a Week 1 game against a highly motivated FCS opponent ends in disaster, just like it did for Masoli and Ole Miss. That Week 1 opponent, you ask?
Eastern Washington.