Bucknell University Athletics
Trigg Remembers It's Just Football
9/14/2009 8:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 14, 2009
By Jon Terry, Bucknell Athletic Communications
It's just football!
That was the only thought going through Marcello Trigg's mind midway through his freshman year at Bucknell, when he suddenly found himself as the team's starting quarterback after upperclassmen Terrance Wilson and Andrew Lair stunningly both suffered broken collarbones in consecutive weeks.
Remarkably unflappable for such a green college quarterback who was still learning a triple option offense that was the polar opposite of the pitch-and-catch scheme that he prepped in at Tampa's Robinson High School, Trigg went 4-3 in his seven appearances to end the 2006 season. Among the wins was a terrific showing in a big season-ending win over Colgate, when he completed 9 of 10 passes for 185 yards and a touchdown, and also ran 24 times for 73 yards and a score. That gave the Bison a 6-5 season, one year removed from a 1-10, and Trigg drew rave reviews from the coaching staff for helping to rescue what might have been a lost season.
"I was just ready," remembers Trigg. "I have never been the type of person who gets real nervous. It's just football, a game that I've played a thousand times in my lifetime. It's just the same game with different people. I saw an opportunity and wanted to make the best of it."
For Trigg, being thrust into a new situation and having success against older players was nothing new. In fact, he had been doing just that sort of thing ever since his hands grew large enough to grip a football. With two older brothers in the house and a slew of cousins in the neighborhood, at the age of five little Marcello was quickly made the all-time quarterback in the neighborhood football games.
"I was the youngest but I had a good arm, so they told me just to throw it up in the air and they would go battle for it," Trigg recalls.
Soon after, he was starting for his youth football team, and then at Robinson High, where he had one of the most prolific passing careers in Tampa prep history. Playing in a football hotbed, Trigg started for the varsity all four years, passed for over 7,000 yards and broke the Hillsborough County record for career touchdown passes with 82. He was Florida's Class 3A Player of the Year and a first-team all-state quarterback, but despite that impressive resume his size kept him off the radar screens of the major colleges.
Fortunately, Trigg's mother, Sylvia Johnson, instilled in him the importance of academics, and both his football accolades and his grades caught the eye of the Bucknell coaching staff, even if those offensive styles did not quite match up.
"She always instilled in me that if I did well in school, then I would have the opportunity to go to college," Trigg says of his mother, who has been sending him home-cooked meals throughout his Bucknell career. "When it came down to making my decision I picked a school where I could get a good education and still continue to play football."
Even though the triple option was foreign territory and his learning curve was high, Trigg admits that gaining an understanding of the option principles has made him a much better-rounded quarterback today.
"Ironically it helped me become a better passer," he says. "The triple option really helped me read and understand defenses in a different way. In high school when I had to read a defense it was just about looking at the coverage. With the triple option you had to count using a number system and figure out which play to get in. I really grew as a quarterback from that aspect of reading an entire defense."
As Trigg became entrenched as the team's primary signal caller - he had to fight off challenges from Terrance Wilson in 2007 and Andrew Lair last season - coach Tim Landis began to open up the passing game to play to his quarterback's strengths. While there are still option philosophies, the offense now mainly operates out of the shotgun.
As a sophomore, Trigg passed for 1,130 yards and eight touchdowns while throwing only four interceptions. His 214-yard, two-touchdown passing performance in an upset of nationally ranked Fordham in the season finale set the stage for what had the makings of a monster junior campaign.
In the first eight games of 2008 Trigg completed a school-record 67.1 percent of his passes (104 of 155). Thirteen of those tosses went for touchdowns against only three interceptions, and he ranked eighth nationally in pass efficiency rating. Trigg had led the Bison to a 4-2 start, and they were 4-3 heading into a big road game against Holy Cross. The Bison were hanging in there against the powerful Crusaders, leading 10-0 into the final minute of the first half thanks in large part to Trigg's 79-yard TD pass to A.J. Kizekai.
But late in that first half, disaster struck. Trigg got flushed out of the pocket and a hard-charging linebacker planted himself into his right knee. Trigg immediately knew he was in trouble, but he tried to get up and jog it off anyway. Two steps later he was back on the ground, and the team doctors soon confirmed his worst fears: ligament damage, surgery needed, season over, grueling rehab ahead.
The injury was a crushing blow for Trigg, who could only sit and watch as the Holy Cross game slipped away in the second half. His shot at an all-conference citation and some more school passing records also came to an end.
"Rehab was pretty bad, there were really no bright parts about it," Trigg now says with a laugh. "The first day I was cleared to start running again was when I realized that I was getting better and that I was going to be able to play football again. The problem was that I had to run so much in order to get better, and I hate running. But I started to understand that if I just worked hard, then everything would work out."
Trigg received plenty of support from his teammates during the process, particularly from running back Rashod Bumpers, who has been through his own share of rehab over the last four years. But all the exercise in the world cannot prepare a player for the mental hurdle of taking that first hit in a live game.
"I was actually very nervous about getting hit for the first time," confesses Trigg, who did not participate in spring practice while he continued his rehabilitation, but he was ready to go for day one of preseason camp last month. While admittedly not quite 100 percent, he started last week's season opener against Duquesne and threw for 152 yards and two touchdowns and ran for another score. He tossed a pretty 41-yard TD pass to Marlon Woods on the third play of the season.
"As the game went on I thought about it less and less, and really I don't think it hindered me in any way," he says.
Trigg is now able to shift his focus from his own health toward helping his team compete for a Patriot League title.
"I made a couple of huge mistakes in the [Duquesne] game, and it is always hard to win a game if the quarterback does not play well," Trigg offers. "Offensively we moved the ball well but just got held up by some mistakes. The good thing is that the mistakes are all things that we can correct, it wasn't anything they did defensively. This week when the opportunity presents itself we have to make the plays and limit those mistakes."
Those who have been watching Trigg play since his freshman season know that he walks off the field with the same deportment whether he has just thrown a touchdown pass or an interception. That even keel has been a major part of his success. Whether it is in the back yard with his older brothers, beating powerful Hillsborough in the second game of his freshman year in high school, or carving up Patriot League champion Fordham as a Division I college quarterback, Trigg has kept the same mindset: it's just football.
