Navy senior quarterback Ricky Dobbs thought long and hard about transferring to Georgia Tech when coach Paul Johnson left. (AP photo)
Annapolis Capital sports scribe Bill Wagner is profiling many of Navy’s seniors in the lead up to this Saturday’s Army-Navy game. He profiled do-everything-quarterback Ricky Dobbs, who will be included on a short list of Navy’s greatest all-time players. What’s most interesting in Wagner’s piece, though, is how close Navy came to losing the “Magic Man.”
You can read the whole article here, but these are some of the highlights:
• Dobbs didn’t start at quarterback when he enrolled at the Naval Academy Prep School. Coaches played him at first at fullback, and Dobbs wasn’t happy. Navy was the only Division 1 school to offer him a scholarship, but Dobbs thought he was offered a false bill of goods.
“I’d been a quarterback all my life and suddenly I’m trying to learn a position I’d never played. I was like, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for.’ I had to think long and hard about whether or not I wanted to even go to the academy,” Dobbs told Wagner.
Not until his last game for the NAPS football team did coaches start him at quarterback.
• Dobbs wanted to transfer when Paul Johnson took the head coaching position at Georgia Tech.
“All it would have taken was for Coach Johnson’s number to show up on my phone and I was going to go. I would have been on the first plane to Atlanta,” Dobbs told Wagner. “Fortunately, God had it in his plan for me to stay here. Coach Johnson didn’t return my call, and I believe it was for a reason.”
• Despite a sometimes contentious relationship, offensive coordinator Ivin Jasper called Dobbs the best option quarterback he has ever coached. Consider he’s coached some great option quarterback such as Dobbs’ predecessor Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada and that’s a weighty compliment.
“I told Ricky last week that he is, by far, the best quarterback I’ve had the opportunity to coach. I had some good ones at Georgia Southern and some good ones here, but what Ricky has accomplished kind of sets him apart,” Jasper told Wagner. “I’m really going to miss that cat. I told Ricky that I always focus on the negatives and sometimes call him a knucklehead, but the truth is that he’s done some great things here. I have to give him his props.”
Again, go read the whole article. It’s chock full of interesting quotes and tid-bits never before heard about Dobbs’ time in Annapolis.
