How a pipeline to Colorado State helped Oklahoma State
STILLWATER — Tim Duffie says if you want to know how Taylor Cornelius became the starting quarterback at Oklahoma State, you have to start in Fort Collins, Colorado. Even though Duffie coaches cornerbacks for the Cowboys, he knows of what he speaks. He is the reason OSU has Cornelius. Regardless of how you feel about the quarterback’s performance through five games— he’s broken program records and made award watch lists while simultaneously drawing calls for his benching— no one can debate the amazing nature of his unlikely back story. The skinny-as-a-rail walk-on from a tiny Texas high school waited patiently for four years before getting his chance to replace one of OSU’s greatest quarterbacks of all time. The final scenes have yet to be written this season, but it’s the stuff of Hollywood. And it would never have happened if not for Tim Duffie. He was an assistant at Colorado State, and because he played at Texas Tech, he recruited that area in the panhandle. As a cornerbacks coach, he had an eye for defensive guys, and he really liked a defensive end out of Bushland High named Andrew Hudson. The hard-nosed, high-energy Hudson eventually signed with OSU— his career was cut short after he was savagely hit during a kickoff against Nebraska in2010— but David Flowers, then the coach at Bushland, called with another option for Duffie. “I know you really like Andrew,” Flowers said, “but we have an offensive lineman that I think you need to look at.” Duffie and Colorado State eventually signed Weston Richburg, who became the Rams’ starting center, then was eventually picked in the second round of the NFL Draft by the New York Giants. He recently signed a fiveyear, $47.5 million deal with San Francisco. A year after Richburg
signed with Colorado State, Duffie and the Rams lured another recruit from Bushland. Crockett Gilmore became a standout tight end at Colorado State before being drafted in the third round by Baltimore.
Bushland’s track record was solidified with Duffie. He knew that the school produced outstanding players and that the coaches there knew big-time talent when they saw it.
So when Bushland coach Steven Flowers, David’s replacement and son, called in early 2013— “You’re not gonna believe this, but we got another one”— Duffie was all ears.
“It happened to be Taylor,” Duffie said.
He was no longer at Colorado State, having spent one season at Wake Forest before landing at OSU after the 2012 season. That meant Duffie was the new guy in Stillwater. He was learning to navigate his surroundings. He was trying to establish himself with the other guys on the coaching staff.
That could’ve made him leery of touting Cornelius.
Duffie coached defense— what if he misjudged a quarterback recruit? Would it make him look bad?
Time was, coaches recruited by geographic area, so they regularly evaluated and vouched for recruits at positions that they didn’t coach. Nowadays, position-specific recruiting has become the way of the college football world.
But Duffie’s previous experience with Bushland recruits being hardworking, team-first players who also happened to be really good, he felt good about taking Cornelius’ name to offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Mike Yurich.
“You don’t want a coach chasing guys that can’t play,” said Yurich, who happened to be a new guy on the staff back then, too. “You’ve got to feel really good about it, which obviously Duffie did. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s great recruiting.
“You’ve got to see potential.”
Duffie did.
“He kind of resembles everything we talk about ... never show fear, frustration or fatigue no matter what the circumstance is,” Duffie said.
After more evaluation, the Cowboy coaches decided to go after Cornelius as a walk-on. They didn’t have another scholarship to give a quarterback, but they saw enough in Cornelius to want him in the orange and black.
Now, he is their starting quarterback.
No one is happier than Duffie.
“He’s a great teammate, a great competitor,” Duffie said of Cornelius. “I know he does all he can do ... to help his team win the game.”
Cornelius is part of this team, though, because of a cornerbacks coach who wasn’t scared to speak up, because of a recruiting pipeline that had first been built from the Texas Panhandle to the Colorado Rockies, because of unexpected prologue to an already unbelievable saga.