Hoping for an opportunity
Billy Osborn’s path hasn’t been a smooth one. Nor has it been direct. But despite more than a little adversity, the 2022 quarterback prospect is focused on his goal of playing college football.
The story begins in Marlton, New Jersey. That’s where Osborn, whose father is former three-sport Pitt athlete Bill Osborn, attended Cherokee High School. He didn’t play on the varsity team as a freshman, but he entered his sophomore year with expectations of playing and possibly starting.
Before that could happen, though, Osborn’s career took a detour.
“I had worked really hard to get ready and I had grown a lot in height and weight, so I was still growing into my body and I threw my arm out in July before my sophomore year,” Osborn told Panther-Lair.com. “It was a growth plate fracture, so I had had surgery and I still have a screw in my elbow.
“Luckily, the surgery went well and I haven’t had problems since then.But I missed my entire sophomore year.”
Fast-forward one year and Osborn was back in action. He was Cherokee’s starter as a junior in 2019 and threw for more than 2,000 yards and 12 touchdowns and rushed for another eight scores. The Chiefs went 6-7 that season, by that record doesn’t tell the whole story.
They won just three games in the eight-game regular season, which was actually an improvement over the previous season when they only won one game.
In the playoffs, though, Cherokee got hot, winning three in a row to win the Central Jersey Group 5 championship. Osborn did his part in the run to the title, throwing for 422 yards and three touchdowns with just one interception, while also rushing for six touchdowns.
All told, Cherokee scored 12 touchdowns in those three games, and Osborn threw or rushed for nine of them.
Despite the postseason heroics, Osborn didn’t see a lot of recruiting interest. Former Penn State assistant Tom Bradley offered him a scholarship as a member of Jim Mora's staff at UCLA after Osborn's freshman season (Osborn wanted to wait to announce the offer until he was the starter at Cherokee), and a handful of FCS and Ivy League schools were reaching out after his junior year. But according to Osborn, the missed year as a sophomore didn’t just limit his game film; it also kept him out of the weight room, so he was “very skinny” and needed to add muscle and size.
There was plenty of time, though. He had just finished his junior season and would spend the spring bulking up before hitting the road for a tour of college prospect camps, where coaches could evaluate him in person.
Then more adversity hit. This time it was in the form of a global pandemic that shut down all recruiting visits and activities for more than a year. That meant no prospect camps for Osborn during the crucial-for-recruiting summer prior to his senior year.
Of course, the impacts of COVID stretched beyond the summer. Cherokee played a shortened seven-game season last fall, and while Osborn threw for more than 1,000 yards and 13 touchdowns and added five more rushing scores, it wasn’t the showcase he was hoping for - or the one his recruitment needed.
Osborn even finished as Cherokee’s all-time leading passer with 3,160 yards, despite playing in just 20 games. And he did the unthinkable in mid-October that year when he accounted for three touchdowns in a 37-8 upset of The Hun School.
But his recruitment didn’t take off, so when his senior season at Cherokee ended, Osborn had a decision to make.
“I didn’t have any set-in-stone offers, just [preferred walk-on opportunities] from FCS schools like Monmouth, Furman, Long Island and Wagner,” Osborn says. “It was in the winter around December or January and the offensive coordinator at East Coast Prep reached out to me.
“I was probably going to go to Monmouth or Furman, but I was still motivated to play at a higher level.”
That’s the opportunity East Coast Prep looks to give players. Located in Great Barrington (Mass.), the school bills itself as a post-graduate program for football players. Former Gateway and Temple receiver Delvon Randall spent a year at ECP. So did former Ole Miss standout and current Carolina Panther Myles Hartfield.
Now Osborn is hoping to follow a similar path.
“I have a great opportunity here at East Coast Prep,” he says. “It’s nice to be completely focused on football and it’s great to have the opportunity to get an extra year. I’m just trying to make the most of it.”
Osborn is a Pitt legacy, of course, but he has interacted with the Pitt coaches as a recruit - not just the son of a former player. Osborn attended Pitt’s prospect camp in June prior to moving to East Coast Prep. That gave him a chance to spend time with offensive coordinator Mark Whipple, and it also started a relationship with head coach Pat Narduzzi.
“I talked to Coach Whipple at the camp, and he was great,” Osborn says. “He obviously knows what he’s talking about. I loved how he had a film session before we went out to throw at the camp; that was the only camp I went through where we did that.
“I’ve talked to Coach Narduzzi, too, and sent him my film. He’s great, too. He always gets back to me and he’s always very supportive.”
In addition to Pitt, Osborn attended camps this past summer at Rutgers, William and Mary, Monmouth, Princeton, Columbia, Delaware and Villanova. He’s still looking for his first scholarship offer, but the situation of 2021, where the uncertainty of roster numbers due to super seniors combined with the surplus of players in the transfer portal have made the market for quarterbacks very crowded, has left Osborn without many options at this point.
Still, Osborn is 6’4” and 205 pounds, has a big arm and good mobility, and he’s hopeful that college coaches will notice the combination of talents.
“I feel like mentally I’m very good,” he says. “I have a good understanding of where to go with the ball, both pre and post-snap, and I think I’m athletic and can make plays if the play breaks down.”