Update: Despite No. 1 Coffeyville Community College’s 42-39 loss to fellow junior college power Butler on Saturday night, former Tennessee quarterback Riley Ferguson threw for six touchdowns and 491 yards against third-ranked Butler, bringing him to 31 touchdown passes and more than 2,500 passing yards this season.
***** EARLIER *****
Nearly two years after walking away from the Tennessee football program, Riley Ferguson sometimes still wears his Big Orange gear around his new athletic home – Coffeyville Community College in Kansas.
“A couple of shirts and pairs of shorts,” said Ferguson, the starting quarterback of the nation’s top-ranked junior college team. “I still like Tennessee. It was a great place. Looking back, I wish I would have stayed.”
Until the final three minutes of last weekend’s first half against Georgia, at least a few Vols fans were probably also wondering what would have happened if Ferguson had stuck it out in Knoxville. Especially given his 25 touchdown passes and 2,096 passing yards (with just four interceptions) heading into Saturday night’s showdown with another Kansas community college, third-ranked Butler.
With UT down 24-3 to Georgia, those stats probably looked really good to those growing restless with junior quarterback Josh Dobbs, who was also in Ferguson’s recruiting class in 2013. But then Dobbs almost single-handedly led UT’s stunning 38-31 comeback win over the Bulldogs, with his 430 combined rushing and passing yards and five touchdowns good enough to win several national player of the week awards.
Quarterbacks Riley Ferguson, front, and Justin Worley sit on the sideline near the end of the Volunteers’ 45-10 loss to Alabama in 2013.Even Ferguson’s father, Don, said Saturday, “I think the fans are probably a lot happier with Dobbs now.”
But in May 2014, with his final exams completed, the younger Ferguson decided he wasn’t happy enough with Vols coach Butch Jones and his staff – Riley had originally committed to Derek Dooley, Jones’ predecessor – to return for his sophomore year in Knoxville.
“We were playing golf the day after he got home,” Don recalled. “Riley said, ‘Dad, I’m done. I’m not going back.’ I said, ‘You do what you have to do, but if you leave, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.'”
Yet Ferguson’s mind was made up. He was going to transfer to nearby UNC-Charlotte – he had come to Tennessee from Butler High School in Matthews, N.C., a suburb of Charlotte – and its fledging program, which started by competing in the Football Championship Subdivision in 2013 and ’14 before transitioning to the Bowl Subdivision and Conference USA this year.
“But it didn’t work out,” Ferguson said of his hopes of joining the 49ers. “I thought my football career was over.”
He behaved as if he thought college was over. He got a job detailing cars. He moved from there to working for an aluminum fence company.
“I started out cleaning them,” he said. “Then I moved on to painting them. The process is called powder-coating. It wasn’t a bad job.”
But then Coffeyville offensive coordinator Angelo Mirando called. He wondered if Ferguson would consider restarting his career with the Red Ravens. Though he’d often considered the driving time of 3 hours and 45 minutes from Charlotte to Knoxville too long, Riley decided to make the 15 1/2-hour drive to southeast Kansas, to a community of 10,000 so small that, in Don’s words, “It doesn’t even have a Chili’s or Applebee’s.”
But it did have an opportunity for young Ferguson to prove he still had the makings of an elite football talent.
“Riley’s doing a great job both on and off the field for us,” said Coffeyville head coach Aaron Flores, who added that Ferguson has already received offers from Arkansas State, Iowa State and Temple, as well as interest from Arkansas and Auburn.
“He’s been a great team leader. Very positive. A very hard worker. We’ve got good receivers and a strong offensive line, but Riley’s a big part of why we’re 7-0 (going into the Butler game). He just has a great arm. Probably the only thing we’ve worked with him on is his footwork, especially at the end of the throw. Just trying to get him a little more balanced on his feet.”
Said Ferguson: “If I’m balanced, the ball will always be right on point.”
Whatever coaches have done, the 6-4, 190-pound Ferguson is completing 83 percent of his passes while ringing up more than 10 yards a completion. He has even run for three touchdowns.
“Riley’s going to wind up getting a lot of offers,” Flores said. “If he wants to, he’s not going to have any trouble playing again for a Power Five conference school.”
Ferguson still keeps up with the Power Five school he left behind.
“I talk to my old roommate, Malik Foreman, a lot,” he said. “I talked to Dobbs before the first game. I really liked the poise he showed in the Georgia game. I talk to Josh Smith and Von Pearson. I still have lots of friends there. I watch them play whenever I can.”
Ferguson also wants to be clear that he left UT on his own, that the coaching staff didn’t force him out.
“Coach Jones is just a good overall guy,” he said. “There’s a real family-type setting there. He really cares about his players. He tried to get me to stay, and when I didn’t, he wished me the best of luck.”
It also took Ferguson a while to realize that, as with most Southeastern Conference schools, you have the best of everything at Tennessee.
“Everybody’s great at Coffeyville, everybody tries so hard, I can’t complain,” he said. “But it’s not exactly like Tennessee. You don’t have steak for dinner. You eat in the cafeteria with everybody else. The best meal is probably chicken tenders and fries. I remember when I was at UT and some folks from the Dallas Cowboys came by one day. They said we had better facilities than they did. You don’t understand that until you don’t have it anymore.”
Instead, Ferguson now plays in a 6,500-seat stadium for Red Ravens home games, which don’t usually sell out. The games are streamed over the Internet, but there’s no junior college network televising the games nationally.
“But I understand the game of football more than I did,” he said. “I’ve changed a lot. Now I just focus on football. No outside distractions.”
When a 6-4 quarterback with a howitzer for an arm starts putting up numbers like Ferguson’s, the recruiting distractions will come soon enough for a player with two years of eligibility left. And far-fetched though it may seem, at least one member of Riley’s family isn’t ready to rule out a possible return to the Big Orange.
“If Coach Jones called,” Don said, “I think he’d go back there.”
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com