The Cincinnati Bearcats didn’t play the first two weeks of this football season, which gave coach Tommy Tuberville the chance to play couch potato.
Remote in hand, he traversed across the college football landscape for hours watching games. The player who stood out most to him?
Notre Dame quarterback Everett Golson.
“Gosh almighty, he’s good, now,” Tuberville said. “He’s real good. I think he’s made the most improvement. He’s got the team on his back.”
The first time Tuberville (or anyone) laid eyes on Golson in a game since the 2012 season was during Notre Dame's season opener against Rice. It was his initial game back since being booted out of school and missing the 2013 season for cheating on a test.
The night after Golson tore up Rice for 336 yards of total offense and five total touchdowns, he and a large group gathered at TGI Friday’s in South Bend for a celebratory dinner. (In South Bend, that’s about as high-end as the restaurants get.) Golson’s roommates, defensive tackle Sheldon Day and offensive tackle Ronnie Stanley, were there, along with their families. And so were some people who formed something of a lifeline for Golson in his semester away from Notre Dame.
There was Mickey Wilson, Golson’s coach at Myrtle Beach (S.C.) High School and his wife. And there was Ivan Simmons, Golson’s cousin from Chicago, and his wife. They had been with him through the dark times, and they were thrilled to share his return to the joyous side of life as a football celebrity.
“We had a great time,” said Wilson, after he watched his first game in Notre Dame Stadium that day. “We had a bunch of people up from Myrtle Beach, and we had a lot of laughs.”
Said Simmons: “To climb out of the adversity he faced, it felt good to see that smile back on his face.”
There was a lot to celebrate. Golson had left Notre Dame as a boy and come back as a man. He also had left as a pretty good quarterback and come back as a really good quarterback.
"He's grown exponentially as a person in terms of his maturity, his leadership, his ability to communicate on a day-to-day basis, take responsibility," Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly said. "I could go on and on. He's a man. Again, he had to go through some tough times to get to that point.
"As a football player, he's evolving. He's getting better. He can make plays, as you can see, out on the field. But he's got a ways to go, too. He'll tell you that. I love the fact he's a pretty good player right now and he's only going to get better."
Kelly is grading on a hard scale, but Golson’s current passer rating of 164.6 is the best by a full-time starter in Notre Dame's exalted history. His 311.5 yards per game of total offense are the most for an Irish player since Brady Quinn's 334 yards per game in 2005. He did throw two interceptions in Notre Dame's 31-15 win over Syracuse on Saturday – first picks thrown since Jan. 7, 2013 – but he also had a career-high 362 yards and four touchdowns. And he completed 25 consecutive passes from the second to the fourth quarter, obliterating the previous Irish best of 14 and coming within one of the FBS record.
The upgrade in Golson’s play since 2012 is directly related to his lack of time spent moping or in denial about what happened to get him kicked out of Notre Dame.
"He was disappointed, embarrassed," Wilson said. "But once he got through that, he realized he wanted to stay at Notre Dame, see it through, fix what he had done."
Golson owned up to his mistakes and, at Wilson’s suggestion, made a public statement accepting responsibility. In the statement he declared that he would return to Notre Dame. Then he went about the business of improving himself.
For about a month after he left Notre Dame, Golson stayed with Simmons in Chicago. The cousins had a lot of long talks, but they kept coming back to the same general theme: It’s not the mistake that would define Everett, it would be his response to the mistake.
“He started getting up at 7 a.m.,” Simmons said. “He was going to the gym, hitting the weights, running hills. He realized it’s not high school anymore. He still had that high school mentality a little bit, and he had to become a more mature young man.”
When Golson wasn’t at the gym, he was staring at his iPad, dissecting all his games from 2012. From Chicago, he went to California to work with renowned quarterback guru George Whitfield.
Arm strength and athletic ability have never been issues. Wilson, who started Golson at quarterback when he was a freshman at Myrtle Beach High, knew he had a special talent in those areas right away.
“At some point in time during the week or practice or during a game, there was always a moment when he’d make a throw and you’d just kind of shake your head,” Wilson recalled. “He’d have one or two throws a week that only one or two people in the country could make.”
Those attributes and a winner’s mentality helped him somewhat surprisingly grab the Notre Dame starting job as a redshirt freshman, and his progression as a reader of defenses was evident as that special 2012 season unfolded. But Kelly was never going to throw that team on Golson’s shoulders – the defense was too strong, and the quarterback was still too raw.
So Whitfield still had some work to do with Golson to make him more of a finished product. Footwork, release, using his 6-foot-1 frame to its fullest to avoid being dwarfed in the pocket – those were all points of emphasis. But so was coaxing the leadership skills out of a quiet and reserved guy.
“Working with George transformed him,” Simmons said.
Kelly took note. At Notre Dame’s media day he said Golson is punctual for every meeting and function now, leading by example. And he’s starting to find his leadership voice as well.
During the Irish’s inconsistent victory over Purdue on Sept. 13, Golson at one point brought the offense together to “make sure everybody had a sound mind, make sure everybody wasn’t dropping off the bandwagon.” It wasn’t quite the Gettysburg address, but it came at an important time in the game and the team responded.
“It turned the game around,” receiver Corey Robinson said. “We were down and he pulled us together and said, 'Look, guys, we need to pull together, not for anyone else, for us as a team.' “
Everett Golson has pulled Notre Dame together this year, after pulling himself up off the floor. He’s both a better quarterback and a better man because of it.
