If it weren’t for Dave Nichol, Lincoln Riley will tell you, he might not have made it as a college football coach.
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 it meant to be a coach.
It was Nichol who first believed in him, and Riley would never forget that. When he was hired as USC’s coach in November, there was no doubt in Riley’s mind he’d ask Nichol to join the staff.
“Without him I really didn’t have any other ins into this business, and this business is hard to get into,” Riley said. “I look back on it now and think, ‘Man, had Dave not taken a vested interest in some no-name walk-on coming in there, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.’ So myself, my family, we really owe everything to the guy.”
Nichol, 45, died Friday after a battle with cancer, leaving behind a trail of coaches and players whose lives he’d touched along the way. That legacy would live on not only in Riley, but in so many other coaches Nichol met through a coaching career that took him to every corner of the country, from Lubbock, Texas, to Greenville, N.C., and finally to Los Angeles, where he’d spent the last four months as USC’s inside receivers coach.
Mike Stoops, who coached at Arizona with Nichol, remembered him on social media as “one of the purest I’ve ever known.” Mike Leach, who coached Nichol and hired him at Texas Tech, wrote that he “meant a lot to me and countless others.”
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,…
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