SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The four-star quarterback was a three-sport star in high school, and though that versatility may have kept him out of the zip code of five-stars a few years ago, DeShone Kizer says now playing baseball and basketball was the best thing to ever happen to him.
“It allowed me, one, to create the athletic ability that it takes to be able to adjust on the fly when you’re playing at this high level,” Kizer said last week. “And two, I’m learning more about the quarterback position every day than I ever have.”
Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly echoed those thoughts, saying that a few month away from the gridiron can declutter a player’s mind and help him think outside the box, a trait more valued for a quarterback than perhaps any other position in team sports.
“It keeps you sharp in competitiveness, in team sports, competing all year-round,” Kelly said. “Thinking in terms of other sports, there are definitely correlations that you can bring to the game, itself, from other sports. And I just think sometimes we become a little too specialized at the position, and I enjoy seeing guys that play some other sports.”
So how exactly did baseball and basketball sharpen Kizer’s football mind? And was he actually any good on the diamond or the hardwood? The more appropriate question may be: Just how good could he have been?
‘We couldn’t hide him’
Toledo (Ohio) Central Catholic baseball coach Jeff Mielcarek was able to resist the temptation to use Kizer on the mound, but there was no point trying to hide him in the batting order. After so much interest from college football coaches forced Kizer to shut down his pitching arm — which Mielcarek said maxed out in the 80s — his sophomore year, Meilcarek put him in the outfield and hit him cleanup.
Kizer threw a bullpen session for an assistant during his junior year, Mielcarek said, prompting a heart-to-heart between coaches over the budding star’s use.
“One of our [assistant] coaches came in and said, ‘Coach, DeShone — we need to use him,'” Mielcarek recalled. “And I said, ‘Seriously?’ And I named three schools coming in that he was going to be auditioning for to throw for football, and I said, ‘We haven’t used him all this time. What are we going to do now? This is silly. So no, we’re not going to do that.'”
Kizer played an integral part on Central Catholic’s conference championship team in 2013, hitting an RBI double in the title game. Perhaps more impressively, he returned in 2014 for his senior year, just months away from starting his college football career.
That year-round commitment earned Kizer the respect of opposing prep baseball coaches, said Mielcarek, who thinks Kizer could have been drafted into the major league baseball draft had he stuck with the diamond. And though football and basketball kept Kizer from turning baseball into a 12-month activity, his attitude during his limited stay with Mielcarek’s squad seemingly made up for lost time.
“We’re playing summer baseball and DeShone’s not playing summer baseball because he’s going to football camps and he’s going to this and he’s going to that, and nobody ever questioned what DeShone was doing,” Mielcarek said, “because DeShone not only will show you that when he shows up he’s going to work harder than anybody else, but DeShone will also make certain that he gets those people on his side because he just says the right thing, he does the right thing. It’s amazing.”
When Kizer was buried at No. 3 on the Notre Dame depth chart in the 2015 spring, he contemplated a move to baseball. He put out a feeler to Irish baseball coach Mik Aoki through teammate and Irish outfielder Torii Hunter Jr. before coming to terms with his day job.
“I went to the batting cages a couple of times, but never really fully got it in motion, I never ended up leaving,” Kizer said. “It was time to lock in and play my part as a backup at the time.”
A 6-4 rarity
Like every quarterback who dabbled in basketball, Kizer was a point guard. The 6-foot-4 Kizer maxed out height-wise early, but the anomaly of a tall freshman distributor led to analogies that bordered on hyperbole.
“He knows where a guy is open when the guy doesn’t know he’s open,” said former Central Catholic basketball coach Jim Welling, now the school’s admissions director. “DeShone was like a miniature Magic Johnson. Now, he wasn’t 6-8 like Magic was, but he had peripheral vision and the ability to find open guys, and it was really uncanny because I had never seen anything like that before.”
Kizer’s father, Derek, played basketball at Bowling Green, and Welling said he thinks DeShone could’ve surpassed his father at the college level.
If there was one knock on Kizer, it was a suspect jump shot that he didn’t get enough time to work on.
“When you go from 15 football games a year and then you go to a 25-30-game basketball schedule and then you go into a 25-30 (game) baseball schedule and then you have summers where everybody wants you to do summer activities, you really don’t have time for player development like DeShone really needed,” Welling said. “If he had gotten that, I have no reason to believe that he couldn’t have been recruited by the Big Ten, ACC or Big East.”
Kizer’s Notre Dame teammates echo that sentiment, with receiver C.J. Sanders coming away impressed by the paradox of Kizer’s hoops game whenever they play pick-up.
“He’s an athletic guy for his size, that’s what’s most surprising,” Sanders said. “He’s a big guy, like (230 pounds). Being able to move like that playing basketball is crazy.
As a prep sophomore, Kizer was a captain. As a senior, he was league player of the year and third-team All-Ohio thanks to a stat-sheet-stuffing line of 11 points, 5.6 rebounds and 6.8 assists per game, according to the Toledo Blade.
Lines like those were all the more amazing considering he often got a late start thanks to football playoff runs that bled into winter sports.
“He’s a guy that had a state tournament championship game on Friday night, and Sunday evening he’s practicing basketball within two days with no reps,” Welling said. “That’s how anxious he was to get on the floor.”
The later, the better?
Kizer may have been good enough to sign with Notre Dame, but he was only ESPN RecruitingNation’s 16th-ranked dual-threat quarterback in the 2014 class. Did his well-rounded background make it more difficult to master sports’ signature position?
“To go through all three sports in high school, I never really locked into one, so there’s a lot of stuff that I wasn’t able to learn in high school where people have preached it since they’ve been 8 years old,” Kizer said. “So a lot of that new stuff got put on me my redshirt freshman year when I was mature enough to learn from it, and now it’s kind of put me at a higher learning curve now that I’m in my 20s where things are a little easier to understand.”
Kizer is 9-4 as a college starter and, if all breaks right, could play on Sundays next fall. More than two years after Kizer’s signing day, 11 of the 15 QBs ranked ahead of him have switched either schools or positions.
Is all this a credit to Kizer’s prep approach? Or does his college success just speak to his individual makeup?
“That mind works like a computer,” Welling said of Kizer. “He can retain stuff in basketball that you had to go over and over and over things and hopefully you think they’ll get it in some point in time. In his case, he didn’t have to do that. If you did it once, he had it.
“His process-ability skills are off the charts, and I think when you throw those three different sports together and you’re processing like he has the ability to do, I would agree with him 100 percent that he’s probably benefited from all three sports.”
