Midway through his senior season at UCLA, though, the youngest Ford began to question whether he wanted to do this anymore.

He had moved crosstown last season, down to Westwood, after four years spent as a former five-star recruit at USC watching a fleet of receivers and friends – Michael Pittman, Drake London, Amon-Ra St. Brown – pass him by. UCLA and Chip Kelly beckoned in the transfer portal, promising more opportunity at outside receiver. A few games into 2023, though, Kelly’s Bruins saw quarterback turnover and offensive line struggles and little momentum in their passing game, and Ford was stuck with the same lack of targets and lack of luster he had experienced 10 miles east.

“All the stuff I’ve been through,” Dan remembered his son asking him, midway through the year, “is this God’s plan for me?”

“Well,” Dan replied, “if you don’t play it out – how do you know?”

So Ford played it out. Nothing much changed, finishing with 22 catches in 12 games. He hit the portal again in March, and Lincoln Riley came calling, promising competition in a young USC receiver room. By April, he was back with the Trojans in one final shot at a breakout, declaring on social media he was “trippin’” for leaving in the first place.

Six months later, nothing has much changed, and Ford has found himself in the same position he’s been in his entire college career. Stuck, fighting for snaps. Stuck, as the clock ticks.

Six years later, he has come to the life-altering realization that none of it really matters anymore.

“Just coming out and just being the same person every day, regardless of what happened the game before, has been definitely a challenge for me,” Ford said last Friday night, after USC’s victory over Rutgers.

“But I’ve been very proud of myself in the way that I handle that, and I don’t say that too often, so.”

He was once the pride of Orange Lutheran, and the prize of USC’s 2019 recruiting class, next-in-line in the lineage of great Trojan receivers. But Ford, now 6-1, 225, tore his ACL midway through his senior year of high school football, and tore his other ACL in what would have been his redshirt freshman year in 2020, and remained stuck on the carousel of wideouts that flew about in the midst of Clay Helton’s firing and Lincoln Riley’s hiring.

“It was just like, ‘C’mon dude, how many more years do we have to go through this and prove his worth?’” Dan described, recalling Ford’s decision to transfer to UCLA.

Ford, now, has a handful of college games left, and 14 catches in eight games this season. He has yet to eclipse 400 yards in a season. A free-agent contract might be the only light that remains at the end of a long tunnel, one of the stranger careers in recent local college memory.

“Frustrating, for sure,” Ford said after the Rutgers game. “I mean, I’m not gonna sit here and lie. I’ve never been that way. I mean, of course, I’m frustrated every week. I just know what type of player I am, so I mean – just knowing who I am and having to just be patient, and stuff.”

“I mean, I’ve been patient my whole career.”

Two years ago, though, Riley didn’t know if Ford could have handled this. He didn’t, really, leaving for a fruitless chase for his moment at UCLA. For years, Dan said, he would train in the offseason with NFL buddies Pittman or St. Brown or London, and they will implore him with the sentiment that has haunted: why is it taking so long to get here?

There is nowhere to go, now, in Ford’s final year, and he has accepted fate is no longer in his own hands.

These Saturdays, he still doesn’t see starting snaps. These Sundays, though, he doesn’t channel his post-game frustration into a dumbbell or bench press. He golfs, instead. He sees family. Sometimes the frustration bleeds into Monday. Sometimes it bleeds into Tuesdays.

But then Ford returns to Howard Jones Field, the self-actualized sage in a room full of sophomores battling in the same position he was once in, and leaves it all behind.

“I think just having that wisdom and perspective in that room,” quarterback Miller Moss said of Ford’s maturation, “has been really helpful.”

Ford came back, ultimately, because he was comfortable at USC. He took “significantly less” money in NIL offerings, as father Dan put it, to return to Troy. He came to contribute, and contribution meant he didn’t need “7,000 yards,” as he shrugged Tuesday.

“I just want to help this team win games,” Ford said. “And I feel like I’ve been doing a good job of that, and hopefully that does translate and set a good example for the rest of these years coming.”

Still, the NFL dream hasn’t died. Ford could have called it quits, holding a USC communications degree and experience with internships at ESPN and Fox, father Dan said. But Ford men don’t hang it up until they’ve seen it through, and Ford needed to see this journey to fruition.

On Friday, he was finally afforded a shining moment and seized it, catching a crossing route from Moss. He stiff-armed a Rutgers defender into the turf – “I’ve always had that,” he smiled postgame – and leaped into the end zone in glee. It was his just his second touchdown in five years at the Coliseum, a reminder of how strange this journey has been.

And it wouldn’t have happened, Ford reflected, if he had never washed away the frustration.

“Hopefully, those things stack,” Ford said Tuesday, a man who has felt it all.

“And God will have everything fall where it needs to fall.”

ocregister.com

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