How life at a small football powerhouse shaped Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss into a star on the biggest stage

(CNN) — At the end of an extended visit with an SEC school he prefers not to name, Tony Annese considered all that he had seen.

Players with lots of recruiting stars next to their names and coaches with lots of zeroes on their paychecks. Smoothie stations ready to replenish calories as quickly as they’d been lost and golf carts stationed to ferry players to class. He turned to his hosts and asked a simple question.

“How,’’ the Ferris State head coach asked the staff, “do you train a team to be tough when they’re entitled to so much?”

He was not being insolent, just genuinely curious.

Annese has spent nearly the entirety of his adult life as a football coach and has never fired up a smoothie station. Instead, he has learned how to bundle up in five layers to stave off the sub-freezing temperatures of a December playoff practice in Michigan and craft rosters out of wherever players happen to live in the four high school districts he’s led.

Annese has made due to the tune of a preposterous 378-66 lifetime record that strings from high school to junior college to college and includes three state titles, one JUCO national title and as of last month, four Division II national championships.

Ferris State has just won its fourth title in five years and has lost just five games during that same span. It is a dynasty, albeit, one that few have heard of.

As Miami and Ole Miss meet in Glendale, Arizona, and Indiana and Oregon square off in Atlanta, the Big Rapids, Michigan, university is about as diametrically opposed from the four schools vying for a college football championship as you can get.

It is gritty, not glamorous. A school lauded by the Carnegie Foundation for being an “Opportunity University,’’ a nod to its accessible education for a diverse and historically underserved student body.

Charter flights don’t carry the football team unless the NCAA is footing the bill for the playoff, and no one is ponying up millions in NIL money. The entire university last year reported revenues totalling $208,470,668. According to the Knight-Newhouse Athletic Database, Oregon athletics alone took in $169,206,109.

Yet, if these college football playoffs have proven anything, it is that football is football. The recruiting stars attached to a player’s name do not guarantee success any more than a coach’s blue-blooded bonafides ensure his greatness.

Top-ranked Indiana is led by a coach who started his career at the Indiana University named for a Pennsylvania town 13 years before taking over the previously hapless IU in Bloomington. Five of his starters followed him from the FBS edges of James Madison and his Heisman-winning quarterback originally committed to Yale.

Pete Golding, who existed as a flowy haired coordinator before Samsoning his locks upon scoring the boss job at Ole Miss, coached a dozen years on the periphery of the big time. He jump-stopped from Cleveland, Mississippi (Delta State) to Greenville, Tennessee (Tusculum) to Hammond, Louisiana (Southeastern Louisiana) to Jackson, Mississippi (Southern Miss) to San Antonio (UTSA) before finally landing in the Oz-ian football land of Tuscaloosa.

And Golding’s quarterback, the one who made like a humanoid video game in the fourth quarter of the Sugar Bowl against Georgia, started at none other than Ferris State.

‘Can you handle the pressure or can’t you?’

Two years ago, Trinidad Chambliss played his first college football game.

“He was horrible,’’ Annese said with a chuckle. “If you would have watched his first game, you would have said that kid would never play at any level.”

But the seeds of who Chambliss is now were sown at the 6,200-seat Top Taggart Field, under the guidance of a man who has won more four-year college games (153) than three of the four semifinal coaches combined.

“People are funny about football,’’ Annese told CNN Sports. “Or about levels of football, what people can do where. At the end of the day, it’s just football. Can you handle the pressure or can’t you?”

The son of a coach, Annese grew up wanting nothing more and nothing less than to emulate what he saw as his father’s very full life. Nick Annese’s name is on the Corunna High School field where Tony and his two brothers played.

Annese spent 22 years in the high-wire performance act better known as high school teaching.

Saddled with educating kids about the less-than-sexy subjects of history and government, he learned to meet his students at their level.

He entertained while he taught, trying to inject a little life into what he recognized were dull and seemingly irrelevant subjects to kids. Teaching gave him a close-up view to teenagers, a terrifying and fascinating anthropological and sociological study if ever there was one. He saw beneath the bravado and the posturing, deep into the hidden insecurities and their need for guidance.

He brought those lessons to the football field, using his spot at the front of the classroom to shape how he would lead from the sidelines. He landed on four principles: faith, order, love and discipline, or FOLD. He encouraged his players to be in the fold, to be intertwined with one another even if – or especially if – it felt uncomfortable.

High school coaching also taught him to be flexible, to understand that athletes weren’t square cogs meant to squish into his round wheel.

“Whoever shows up is what you get,’’ Annese said. “Someone says an offensive lineman has to be 6’4”, 310 pounds, well we don’t have those things. We have a guy who is six-foot, but he’s as powerful as he can be and he works hard. We were highly successful playing guys who were mediocre but we learned to work toward their strengths.’’

Those lessons carried over when Annese joined the college ranks, first at Grand Rapids Community College and then at Ferris.

“The hill was pretty steep,’’ said Perk Weisenburger, the now-retired Ferris athletic director who hired Annese in 2012. “I would tell him sometimes that convincing him to take the job was the best sales job of my career. We were resource poor. Pretty much rubbing two nickels together.’’

The challenge was all the greater since one of the country’s best D2 schools sat a little more than an hour down the highway. Grand Valley State won four national titles from 2002 to 2006 and dominated the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

Annese beat the Lakers, 40-24, the first time the two schools met in 2012. It was Ferris State’s first victory against Grand Valley since 1999.

And so it began, a rivalry win begetting a playoff berth two years later, leading to a semifinal berth in 2016 and a title game appearance in 2018. By the time Annese spied Chambliss in a high school basketball game, Ferris State was pushing deeper and deeper into the playoff bracket.

Chambliss was much like the high school kids Annese coached: Not necessarily prototypical but more than good enough. Athletically gifted, he was the all-everything kid at Forest Hills Northern in nearby Grand Rapids – the quarterback in the fall, point guard in the winter and shortstop in the spring.

But at 6-foot-1-inch and 170 pounds, he was small for a quarterback, and – burdened with the additional year of the Covid-19 pandemic recruiting blanket – no one was terribly interested.

But Annese, who also coached high school basketball, liked the way the point guard saw the court and directed his teammates. He saw in his play the sort of leadership he believed a quarterback ought to possess.

Chambliss spent two years as a backup and watched Ferris State explode into a power. By the time he assumed the starting role in 2024, the Bulldogs had won two national titles in three years.

In his first game, Chambliss threw a pick on his fourth play from scrimmage and another before halftime. He got sacked twice, rushing for all of -4 yards and Ferris State lost its opener.

“It was the pressure,’’ Annese said. “He was feeling the pressure. I just told him, ‘Son, relax. You’re going to be great.’”

Getting into the FOLD

Ferris State never lost again and, by the time the season ended, Chambliss had thrown 26 touchdowns and rushed for 25 more, leading the Bulldogs to another national title.

What happened in between is largely what happens a lot at Ferris, and a lot to players who learned under Annese. Chambliss got into the FOLD. His confidence grew and his natural abilities did the rest.

“Who Trinidad is, how he processes success, he’s a believer,’’ Annese said. “He is an extraordinary case study in the power of belief, of what can happen if you have the right belief system.’’

He did not want to transfer and ignored the people who reached out even before the portal opened – “Yes, tampering,’’ Annese said with a laugh.

But when the offers came with more and more lucrative financial incentives, Annese encouraged him to leave. Chambliss didn’t sign with Ole Miss until April 15.

Not long after, Annese was sitting in his office. His windows overlook the weight room and, spying Chambliss working out, he waved to him to come talk to him.

“I said, ‘Dude, you’re in my office all the time and now because you’re going somewhere else you feel uncomfortable?’” Annese said. “But he felt bad and didn’t want me to be upset. I just said, ‘I love you. You’re my guy. You’ll always belong here.’”

Chambliss assumed the starting role at Ole Miss in September after Austin Simmons was injured. He threw for more than 400 yards against Arkansas, and has since taken the Rebels to an 11-1 record, through a chaotic coaching change, to a heroic, fourth-quarter rallying win against Georgia in the Sugar Bowl and now two wins from a national title.

Annese is two weeks removed from winning his. On December 20, the Bulldogs smoked Harding, 42-21, to become the first Division I or II team to finish a season with a perfect 16-0 record.

Annese watched Chambliss’ two circus plays against Georgia – a last-second shovel pass while being pursued by two defenders and a mad dash scramble and first-down throw – and laughed. He’d seen Chambliss do the first plenty of times at Ferris.

As for the second, well, let’s just say the coach thought the quarterback maybe should have thrown the ball away.

“But all of these people keep asking me, ‘Are you surprised?” Annese says. “Are you kidding me? Watch his highlight film. That’s Trinidad. That’s who he is. He’s a baller, and that’s all this is. It’s just football.’’

The-CNN-Wire
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