Ramsey building bonds with new teammates

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Football is the easy part for Peyton Ramsey.

Northwestern's new grad transfer quarterback has three years of college football under his belt. He has thrown for 6,581 yards in his career, which is more than four times more than Northwestern's top four quarterbacks combined. His father is a high school coach.

So picking up offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian's new offense hasn't been much of a problem, even though he's had to rely on Zoom calls to learn it. He's seen it all as a QB.

"Football is football," Ramsey points out. "There's only so many plays you can run."

Ramsey says that the biggest challenge during this period of remote learning has been connecting with his new teammates. That can be difficult through a computer screen.

"That, for me, has been the hardest part," said Ramsey during a Wednesday Zoom meeting with media. "It hasn't been learning the offense. It hasn't been anything football-related. My biggest thing was how I'm going to relate to the the guys so that when we have some time on campus, they're already familiar with me as a guy."

That's especially important for a quarterback, who has to earn the trust of his players and be a leader in the locker room and on the field.

So Ramsey has taken some steps to get to know his new teammates.

First, after he committed to Northwestern in March, he texted every player on the Northwestern offense to start some dialog.

He also went old school and did some things in-person.

A couple weeks ago, he drove up to Evanston to throw with wide receivers Riley Lees and Ramaud Chiaokhiao-Bowman, NU's top two pass catchers last season.

Back home in Cincinnati, Ramsey has thrown the ball around with a couple of fellow Ohioans: quarterback Andrew Marty, a fellow Cincinnatian, and tight end Trey Pugh from the Columbus area.

But Ramsey knows that there's no substitute for time together. So once the team gets the green light to return to campus, he is planning to go a few days early "just to hang out with the guys and be around them, to be a familiar face so that when we do get out there on the practice field I'm not some stranger that they've never seen before."

Ramsey hopes that the effort he is making now will pay off down the line.

"I'm doing the best I can in order to get to know some of these guys," he said.

Ramsey just joined the quarterbacks' regular Zoom calls last week. In addition to the regular daily meetings with Bajakian, there's also a player-run call every Thursday morning, with veterans TJ Green, Aidan Smith and Marty in charge. On that call, Ramsey gets a chance to catch up with his teammates on a personal level, as well as go over concepts, plays or signals they want to emphasize.

"Players have done a good job reaching out to each other to make sure they're doing what they need to do athletically, academically and even personally," said Bajakian.

As far as Xs and Os go, Ramsey has proven to be a quick study, according to Bajakian. The first-year OC has used film study and PowerPoint presentations over Zoom to install the offense and says that "we've been able to get (Ramsey) caught up to speed very quickly."

For Ramsey, Northwestern's system isn't all that different than the one he ran at Indiana.

"The biggest difference is the verbage and the way that things are communicated and the way that things are called," he said.

Northwestern may have more play-action passes and two-tight end sets, but "there's a lot of carry-over," he said. Ramsey’s quarterbacks coach at Indiana, Nick Sheridan, was a graduate assistant under Bajakian at Tennessee.

Ramsey said that making the decision to transfer to Northwestern as a graduate was an easy one. It was the only school he visited.

"I just fell in love with the place," he said. "I've always had a ton of respect for Northwestern and Coach Fitz (head coach Pat Fitzgerald)."

Ramsey, in fact, was sold on the Wildcats four years ago, when he was coming out of Cincinnati Elder High School.

"I really wanted to come to Northwestern out of high school but didn't have the opportunity," he said.

The Wildcats didn't offer Ramsey, a Rivals two-star QB, in that recruiting cycle. They got an early commitment from QB Deuce Wallace in the spring of 2015 and thought they were all set. Wallace, of course, wound up decommitting and Northwestern signed Smith a couple months later.

This time around, though, Ramsey couldn't be happier to wind up in Evanston.

"So far it's been awesome," he said. "The guys (players) have been awesome, the coaches have been awesome... I couldn't be more excited to get started."

Ramsey may be the new kid on the block at Northwestern, but players should be wary of trying to haze the new guy. Not only is Ramsey a 22-year-old veteran with 23 starts to his credit, but he can always remind his teammates of last season, when Indiana blitzed Northwestern, 34-3. Ramsey didn't start that game, but he came off the bench to throw for 108 yards and a touchdown.

"I have some trash talk in my back pocket," he said with a smile.