Tech's Nesbitt: Tough, quiet - and successful

There are plays that can't be scripted - plays that are unrelated to film study or practice reps, born outside football's obsessive-compulsive culture.

When a Florida State linebacker scooped up a fumbled pitch and started running the other way, threatening to take the game with him, Georgia Tech's Josh Nesbitt had no programmed response. Quarterbacks don't practice ripping the ball away, essentially becoming defenders themselves. That was pure Hensley Road instinct at work that October night.

Hensley Road is where Nesbitt "was taught to be a football player, not just be a quarterback" said one of the main figures in Nesbitt's childhood, his cousin Rodricus Monford.

All those games back in Greensboro, Ga., where neighborhood kids would play out on the road until being herded home for dinner, form the base upon which Nesbitt has built one of the best quarterbacking stories of this college football season.

That was a place where if somebody took the ball from you, you took it back.

At 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds, Nesbitt still plays like the youngest and smallest kid, trying to wrest respect from the big boys on Hensley Road, some 75 miles east of Atlanta.

And, now just like then, if you get home intact, that's a bonus.

"We didn't cut him any slack," said Mike Nesbitt, another older cousin who helped install the grit in Tech's triggerman back on the assembly line. He and Monford took on the task with relish, bringing the boy along for all their games and throwing him in without mercy.

"I always was always walking in the house needing stitches, or with bumps and bruises. It was always something," Josh remembered with genuine fondness, like he earned emergency room rewards points in the process.

"I'd watch my cousins play, and I just wanted to be out there with them. When I played with them, those kids used to hurt me all the time, so I learned that I had to be fast enough they couldn't catch me.

"I was always the smallest one; I never played with kids my own age. I always had to stand my ground and let them know they had to respect what I do. It taught me not to shy away from anything."

That's how he explains everything that has followed, in more words than the almost radically non-verbal junior invests in most answers.

That is just Nesbitt by nature. You can run at him from all angles on the field and he'll just get up and John Wayne it back to the huddle. Or you can surround him with the most sensitive electronics and pick up not a single breezy sound bite.

Coaches have tried to draw him out a little more, to build on the vocal aspect of leadership. But, "I feel that's just not me," he said. "I've had people I've looked up to in the past where they did a lot of talking and not enough action on the field. I didn't want to be one of those people who did all talking and never went on the field and did it."

Nesbitt's play, however, has been covered in exclamation points this season.

Quarterbacks – the pretty ones, anyway – don't make the kind of play he did to preserve this season's game in Tallahassee. "Not often you see one fighting like that for the fumble," said Tech coach Paul Johnson. "That's where his competitiveness kicks in.

"He's just a tough kid."

When the Simon Cowell of coaching calls you tough, consider the compliment earned.

Hardly the world's most picturesque passer, nor its most elegant leader, Nesbitt operates on a more visceral level.

Where just a season ago he was struggling to adapt to a new coach and his triple option, anything-but-pro-style offense, Nesbitt is now the catalyst of an ACC champion and prime-time Orange Bowl team.

Recruited by Chan Gailey in another era, Nesbitt was nobody's pick to run this offense. His cousins will tell of voices back home that told him last season, when Johnson came along, to take the next shuttle out of Tech.

No one could guarantee the transition would work.

"He made a huge transformation," said Tech quarterback coach Brian Bohannon. "Here was a young man who had never taken a snap under center (he ran out of the shotgun throughout high school), who never had taken a drop. And that's before even talking about running the option. You're talking almost square one."

But Nesbitt didn't transfer, even as his head spun and his body ached and the game he had grown up playing seemed like a foreign language.

"I'm an athlete, and I'm a winner," he said. "I feel like I had a chance in this offense and I was going to give them a chance to prove that it works."

"That (learning) process has probably gone faster than I expected," Bohannon said. "It takes time for anybody, especially if you haven't bought into it from the beginning. I have to give him a lot of credit. He has taken a beating. He has taken some shots, and he has learned how to play."

The blur that was Tech football gradually slowed to some kind of recognizable form. Last year against Miami, coaches said, was an ah-ha moment in which Nesbitt seemed to truly grasp the rudiments of Johnson's offense.

Here's real progress: Following Nesbitt into next season will be whispers of a possible Heisman candidacy. "He can put himself in that position," said Bohannon. "If we can get the same (improvement) from Year Two to Year Three that we got from Year One to Year Two, the sky's the limit."

It might be asking a lot, but Heisman voters will have to look beyond the raw data to the underbelly of Nesbitt's game. See past the numbers to the blue-collar reality of what it takes to drive this 18-wheel offense.

They will have to recognize in Nesbitt the many forms of toughness he brings to a position that often is defined by flair.

The physical toughness is obvious. He already has proven himself capable of getting pounded on like a six-penny nail for the bulk of an afternoon without bending. Just keep giving him the ball. He already has 259 carries this season – more than one-third of Tech's total.

(Dealing with the punishment of such a workload brings up another example of the elemental Nesbitt. For all the medical technology at his disposal, the treatment he trusts above all others is the one passed down from his grandmother. "Soak in a hot tub with Epsom salts 20 to 30 minutes the night before a game, you're good to go," he said. "It will take care of all your aches and pains.")

When an honored quarterback from Tech's past looks at Nesbitt, he picks up on another facet of toughness.

Joe Hamilton knows how difficult it is to get hit, get hit again and keep getting up to call the next play and take the next snap. "You don't know how hard it is to get knocked on your back like that, and you've got 45 seconds to get up and organize the next play." Nesbitt has "gotten beaten up every game. That's a lot of mental toughness," Hamilton said.

It was Hamilton's team records for single-season and career rushing by a quarterback that Nesbitt broke over the course of this 11-2 season.

When the season rides on a one-yard gamble, you let your money ride on Nesbitt's stout legs. Johnson may have looked like the one with the big, brass, ah, playbook when he went for the win instead of the tie in overtime vs. Wake Forest. But it was Nesbitt, gaining the needed yard when everyone in the ACC knew he would be toting the ball, that was the real measure of moxie.

"Never a doubt he'd make it," said Monford, a police captain back in Greensboro. He had seen too many other examples of his cousin making himself large in a game.

Nesbitt's impact comes in many forms. He would run the tightrope of the sidelines for 39 yards and the winning touchdown against No. 4 Virginia Tech. And while his passing efficiency remains at the top of his to-do-better list, it was a money third-and-11, 39-yard completion against Clemson (first game) that set up the winning field goal.

In sum, Hamilton embraces Nesbitt as a handy example for his next youth quarterback clinic.

"A lot of guys see (quarterback) as a glamour position," he said. "They know (Peyton) Manning and (Drew) Brees. Josh Nesbitt lets guys know that it's not all in the air. A quarterback's gotta win, and that can be done in a variety of ways."

Almost as many ways as can be invented by a little kid with a ball in his hand and a neighborhood in hot-blooded pursuit.

Charting Nesbitt's progress

Passing

2007: 11 Games, 0 Starts. 5-for-13 (38.5 percent); 93 yards; 2 Int.; 1 TD; 93.17 efficiency rating.

2008: 11 Games Started. 54-for-123 (43.9 percent); 808 yards; 5 Int.; 2 TD; 96.32 efficiency rating.

2009: 13 Games Started. 73-for-153 (47.7 percent); 1,689 yards; 4 Int.; 10 TD; 156.78 efficiency rating.

Rushing