USC coach Lincoln Riley opened up about the death of former assistant coach Dave Nichol, who gave Riley his start in college football at Texas Tech.
It was Nichol who gave him his shot as a walk-on quarterback at Texas Tech and taught him the intricacies of the Air Raid offense. When Riley hung up his cleats to be a student assistant with the Red Raiders, it was Nichol who showed him the ropes, who answered his incessant questions, who taught him all that ithired as USC’s coach in November“Without him I really didn’t have any other ins into this business, and this business is hard to get into,” Riley said.
For Riley, Nichol was the one who first opened the door to a future in coaching. Yet no one had paved a similar path for Nichol. He fought his way through the ranks, working as a graduate assistant from one stop to the next, often for little to no pay. As an assistant at Cisco College, he painted lines on the football field and served as a pseudo-handyman, completing whatever minor repairs came up.
“I think a lot of people would have given up because those are hard years when you’re a GA,” Riley said. “You’re not making any money, you’re doing all kinds of different jobs and all kinds of different hours. And he knew what he wanted to do, and he told me the other day as we were talking that if he had it all over, he’d do it exactly the same way.”
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