Cam Camper's injury means IU WR Andison Coby's learning curve must speed up

BLOOMINGTON — One of the first things Andison Coby's Indiana teammates noticed about the Tennessee transfer wide receiver was how many questions he asked, trying to pick the brains of absolutely everyone.

When he arrived in Bloomington, Coby had two years of college football experience, including one at a historical powerhouse, but he operated as if he could take wisdom away from anybody from sophomores to grizzled seniors.

"One thing I learned in this sport is you always want to take coaching," Coby said. "Coaching is the best way to learn. There's a lot of stuff you can learn just by asking somebody. And another way to separate yourself from other people in a fast way is the extra work ethic. What are you doing in the dark? ... Ever since I started playing the sport, that's all I've been doing. Trying to get better and working on my craft."

Tom Allen ready to make QB change?'Wait till Saturday to see.'

The 6-2, 175-pound Coby is very much aware as a wide receiver, he's a work in progress, as his development has not been going on for very long. He is in his fifth year of organized football, and in that time, he's played for five different schools — two high schools, a junior college, and two Power-5 collegiate programs. He has immense athletic potential, but he's been trying to drink out of a firehose while learning the game's finer points, and sometimes it shows.

The spotlight is about to shine on him much more brightly. Junior college transfer Cam Camper, the Hoosiers' leading receiver with 46 receptions for 569 yards, tore his ACL against Rutgers. He's the only outside receiver with at least 20 receptions this season so IU will need someone to step up and produce at the position. That means they need more from Coby immediately as they head into Saturday's home game against No. 16 Penn State having lost five straight games.

"He's a guy that this team needs to step up and rise up," coach Tom Allen said. "I expect him to. I want him to. I believe he will."

Coby has started IU's past seven games as one of its two outside receivers and has 16 receptions for 153 yards and a touchdown, but he's also had a few rough moments. One of the first passes thrown to him as a Hoosier slipped out of his hands and into the arms of an Illinois defender for an interception in the season's first game. Against Maryland, he was near the left sideline holding the ball in his right arm instead of his left arm, which gave a defender a clean shot at it. His helmet hit the ball and knocked it clean out of Coby's hand for a fumble that helped turn the tide in Maryland's win.

But someone who has had to learn his sport and his position so fast has no time to dwell on mistakes, so Coby learns and moves on.

Coby had plenty of opportunity to get involved in football earlier in life. He grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and was the seventh of nine children born to a landscaper and a nurse. He had older brothers who were obsessed with the sport, including Herve — the second oldest of the children and the oldest boy — and Marcus, who was just a few years younger than Herve and the next in order.

Herve and Marcus played some form of backyard football on a near-constant basis. Herve was 10 years older than Andison. Herve and Marcus tried to get Andison to play ball with them, but it wasn't exactly a fair fight.

"We would always tell him to come into the back and play pickup football with us," Herve said. "But he was always smaller than everyone. I could kinda see why he shied away from it at a younger age, because we kind of beat up on him a little bit. I feel like he always had passion for it, but he had to get around kids that were more his age to play. He always had a passion for sports. It was just trying to get him to realize he was good at football."

Herve was good at football and he knew it. He was an all-conference wide receiver at American Heritage High School in Plantation, Fla., where he was part of a Class 1A state championship team as a junior. He played his college ball at Bowling Green and didn't play much.

Andison admired Herve, but he put his athletic energies into basketball and had some level of success, but he had some academic struggles as a freshman in high school and went to Coral Springs High School as a sophomore hoping to simply focus on getting his grades right.

That year, however, he also caught the eye of his weightlifting class teacher, who also happened to be the Coral Springs football coach at the time, Vinny Ziccardi.

Ziccardi had 60 students in his weight training class which is a lot to govern. In one of the first classes of the semester, asked them to do six lifts — curls, triceps extensions, squats, bench press, push-ups and ankle walks. Most students didn't finish them, but at the first class Ziccardi saw Coby attacking the exercises. And about 10 minutes after Coby caught his eye, the dread-locked sophomore asked what more there was for him to do.

Ziccardi took the conversation to another level. He asked Coby if he played any sports and if not, why not. Coby told him he had transferred because his grades had dipped and that he wasn't playing anything for the moment to focus on academics. Ziccardi offered him a deal.

"I said, 'Why don't you think about coming to play football for me?'" Ziccardi said. "'On staff, I have an academic coordinator who meets with kids two or three times a week, sometimes every day depending on your situation to get you the classes that you might need to re-take and the tutors that you need. How does that sound?' He said, 'That sounds great.' I said, 'Well, in order to make that commitment, you have to have a 3.0 this quarter to show me that you're serious.'"

Coby did take it serious and he did get a 3.0 GPA that quarter. Ziccardi told him he would have access to the academic help whether he was any good at football or even wanted to continue with it or not. When the other coaches on Ziccardi's staff got a look at Coby's natural athleticism, they couldn't wait to get him in camp.

"I had the kids in the gym on a Friday and the other P.E. teacher was my J.V. coach," Ziccardi said. "... I said hey, go check out that kid over there (Coby). He said, 'Holy (expletive) who is that kid?' I said, 'That's the kid I was telling you about.' He said, 'Go get Mike (the wide receivers coach) in here right now.' ... He comes over and I said, 'That's the dude.' He said. 'Jesus. Z, we need him.' He was dunking a basketball, just the way he was moving laterally. You see these kids throwing up bricks and he's just a lot smoother on the court."

Coby practiced all spring but wasn't eligible to play until the following fall. When he finally was eligible as a high school junior, Coral Springs ran into all kinds of issues with offensive personnel including lots of injuries and ended up going 3-5. Coby was just beginning to learn how to play wide receiver, but he caught 35 passes for 500 yards and five touchdowns that year, and Ziccardi's biggest regret is not getting him the ball more.

"Every week, we saw something new from the kid that was unbelievable," Ziccardi said. "It was like watching a baby deer learning how to run. There were some things that were so spectacular. There were other things like learning the route concepts or certain things like that he didn't (have down yet). Every week it was like, 'We need to give him the ball more, we need to do more.' We didn't know what we had. We always look back and thought, 'We should have just given him the ball 20 times a game.' We just didn't know what he was capable of."

One thing Ziccardi instilled in Coby was to always ask questions. He told all of Coral Springs players they should always feel comfortable asking their coaches questions during the week and that they should never try to muddle through without clarity, because on Friday nights they would be expected to know what they were doing.

Ziccardi was fired from the coaching job after that season, and by that time Herve had been hired as wide receivers coach at American Heritage. Herve never tried to make his younger brother's decision for him, but made it clear that the option was on the table.

"I always suggested, 'Yeah, I'm at Heritage, you should come play for me and I'll give you the ball a million times,'" Herve said. "I never was like, 'OK, this is what you're gonna do.' I let him make that decision on his own like, 'I'm heeerrree.'"

So Coby did decide to play for his brother, which led to more intense coaching on the finer points, and he built on what he learned at Coral Springs.

"Early on, he needed to learn how to run routes, how to run a route versus a certain coverage," Herve said. "If I told him to go run a post, he'd know how a post is supposed to look. But he just had to learn the details of the game."

His speed, size and improvement made him one of American Heritage's most dangerous weapons. He caught 56 passes for 884 yards and seven touchdowns in 2019 for a 10-2 team that reached the second round of the playoffs before losing to Miami-Northwestern.

"He was raw, but he had this unbelievable desire with his brother there next to him to just continue to strive to just be the best," American Heritage offensive coordinator Nick Martinez said. "We had to convince him sometimes to take a day off. He had strength, not just weightroom strength, but he plays with a strength about him to break through a simple arm tackle or bring down the ball when he would go up and bring down the ball from a defensive back because he had strong hands. His ability to get in and out of routes, he had that, and another thing was that he ran a lot of concepts where had to find open grass. He had an ability to grasp those concepts and get on the same page as the quarterback."

Coby drew some attention from Western Kentucky and other schools, but some of that faded and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic complicated his recruiting. Even though he was academically qualified for a four-year school, he decided to take the junior college route and went to Northeast Mississippi Community College.

Coach Ed Davis got a tip about Coby from a Western Kentucky assistant, and saw enough from five minutes of Coby's film to know he'd be helpful to his roster. Even though he'd played just two years, he showed more polish than Davis was used to seeing from incoming freshman in the junior college ranks.

"He was explosive," Davis said. "His body control and the way he gracefully turned his body to catch. He caught the ball well. He just turned his body in athletic positions that made you go, man, this guy can make plays. His versatility. He was a guy that we looked at and said he could play inside or outside. The other thing you could tell was polished. He was polished coming in and out of breaks, going up and high-pointing the ball, setting up blocks. There were things that just said, 'This guy gets it. He gets it right now.'"

In six games that COVID-shortened season, Coby caught 24 passes for 422 yards and seven touchdowns and also took a kick return back for a touchdown. So not surprisingly, Davis didn't get to keep Coby long. He was rated the No. 21 junior college player in the country and the No. 5 wide receiver, and since he had qualified, he had immediate offers.

One of those offers came in January from Tennessee, and Coby jumped on that one almost immediately, even though at the time, the Volunteers didn't have a head coach. Jeremy Pruitt was fired days before Coby got the offer, but his staff was still in place including former Tennessee quarterback and wide receivers coach Tee Martin.

A few days after Coby committed and a day after he enrolled, Tennessee hired Josh Heupel. Heupel kept Coby on the roster, but the Vols already had a stable of wide receivers returning and they shined under Heupel's uptempo system. In 2021 at Tennessee, Coby caught just one pass for 5 yards and decided to go elsewhere that he could play more.

"I just wanted to put myself in a better position to be successful," Coby said. "Tom Allen gave me that opportunity."

Coby earned a right to be in Indiana's starting rotation and stood out just a little more than the other options at outside receiver enough to get the starting job opposite Camper. He is still sharing time with Javon Swinton, Donaven McCulley and Malachi Holt-Bennett, but he has the most receptions and yards out of that group and he might be counted on to do more with Camper out for the season.

"He's done a really nice job," offensive coordinator Walt Bell said. "He has continued to develop not only from a technique and fundamental standpoint as a player, but system knowledge, system awareness. Had a couple of catches that were really big us when they happened. He's a guy that I think his role will grow as the season goes on."

Beyond this season it could grow even more. There will still be more mistakes, as even then Coby will still be relatively new to the game. But he will learn and do more of his work in the dark.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana football: Tennessee transfer Andison Coby learning on the job