Why Kirby Smart, UGA Football Won Big With Ryan Puglisi
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Avon, CT - One look at Tommy Guy’s face and it was clear he’d been blown away. The Excel Sports Academy Quarterback Coach had just completed his first workout with Ryan Puglisi and was obviously impressed.
Puglisi was introduced to Guy and Excel Director Steve Martin through family friend David Brunelle, who already had his own two sons working out at Excel.
“They built the infrastructure and became the go-to place for talented football players in Massachusetts,” Brunelle said of Guy and Martin. “They’re the most authentic, most real guys in the state for developing kids for the right reasons.”
So, early on a Sunday morning in November of 2019, Puglisi made the hour-plus drive from Paxton, Mass., to work with Guy for the first time at Roots Athletic Center in Westfield, Mass. With dozens of young quarterbacks in attendance, it was obvious to anybody paying attention that the eighth-grader was talented, but Guy saw much more. Immediately after walking off the field, Guy – not one prone to hyperbole – said, “This kid has the potential to be the best kid I’ve ever worked with.”
Puglisi was raw, but Guy could see tremendous room for growth.
"He didn’t really know what he was doing,” Guy says now. “He didn’t do a lot of things right, but he had a really, really quick motion and he was a big, athletic kid. You can see right away what a kid’s mindset is and he was really coachable and locked in right away. His mindset was the mindset of a winner, a kid who is going to be a champion, similar to a lot of the other elite, higher-level kids I’ve worked with like Pop Watson.”
Watson, now at Virginia Tech, had already proven himself worthy of Power-5 offers and was a role model of sorts for Puglisi at the time.
“I think today they look at each other more as equals, but Pop was an unbelievable motivator through competition,” says Martin. Puglisi was actually a receiver when he first started playing for the Worcester Cowboys, an elite youth football program in Massachusetts. After a series of injuries toward the end of his sixth-grade season, he ended up getting his chance at quarterback in the playoffs.
“He went out there and won the Super Bowl for us just taking over the fourth quarter,” Cowboys coach Doug Cooney recalls. “You could just tell the competitive edge that he had.”
Puglisi would transform the program over the next couple years.
“We modified our whole offense to use his arm strength and running ability and hit the ground running from there,” says Cooney, whose team made it to the national tournament in Florida in Puglisi’s final two years with the program. “For our team to go to Florida two years in a row was pretty impressive.”
Puglisi says those youth days helped him more than people probably realize.
“Everyone can say it’s just youth football and eighth-grade football, but at the time, it really wasn’t,” he says. “Those games down in Florida, I was playing against the best kids in the country. Those kids you see now who are highly-recruited kids, that’s who we were playing against in eighth grade. Playing against that top talent at a young age even when I wasn’t a real quarterback helped me tremendously.”
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An elite-level baseball player as well, Puglisi’s arm has a reputation that precedes it, yet somehow still manages to exceed expectations.
“The biggest thing is the arm talent,” says Watson’s father, Bill, who coached his son and Puglisi for the Supreme Excel 7-on-7 team.
“When the ball comes out of his hand, it flies out of there. It just looks a little different than most of the quarterbacks you see when you move around the country.”
Being tucked away in New England was always going to make it difficult for Puglisi to become a true national prospect and COVID-19 would make it almost impossible…almost.
His freshman year at Lawrence Academy in Groton, Mass., was completely wiped out when the New England Prep School Athletic Conference cancelled the 2020 season because of the pandemic. He did participate in the 2021 Under Armour Baltimore Regional Camp, where he held his own against highly-touted quarterbacks like 2022 Notre Dame commit Steve Angeli, but few national media members were in attendance to document it.
So, Puglisi missed out on almost an entire year when national evaluators should have had the chance to see what Guy saw.
He’d pick up offers from Boston College, Ole Miss and Temple at satellite camps and eventually add UConn and Akron, but camp opportunities were limited, and some schools were hesitant to offer a kid with literally zero high school film.
Still, he was assured by those around him – people like Guy, Martin, Watson, Brunelle and others – that he was too talented to remain a secret for long.
“We knew it was going to happen, we just didn’t know when,” says Guy. “He stood out to everybody. I can see it with some of my higher-level quarterbacks like a kid like Pop who I’ve worked with for a long time. You can tell who’s at that level and who’s not. Most people aren’t and Ryan was.”
“We believed in him,” Bill Watson says. “We knew what we were watching, and we saw the work he was putting in, so we knew it was only a matter of time.”
Martin was confident that time would come in 2022.
“We knew we just had to put him in the right places and it would be his summer,” says Martin. “It was hard because he was watching kids who we knew – and he knew – he was better than get offers, but his work ethic and his mental toughness during that period was great.”
After his sophomore season at Lawrence, Puglisi transferred to Avon Old Farms in Avon, Conn., in January of 2022 to play under head coach Jon Wholley, who spent a decade-plus at the college level with stops UConn, his alma mater, Mississippi State, Fordham and others.
“I have nothing but trust and respect for Jon Wholley,” says Martin. “The man was at the FBS level for 16 years. Having that guy there to talk to him about things that obviously I can’t talk to him about has been invaluable.”
Like everybody else, Wholley agrees the first thing that jumps out is Puglisi’s arm talent.
“He can throw the ball as far and as hard as probably anybody in the world,” the coach says without a hint of exaggeration. Colleges coaches made their rounds during the May Evaluation Period. It was the first time many of them had seen Puglisi throw in person. For some, once was enough, but others remained patient.
Wholley used the opportunity as a teaching moment.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to stop worrying about whatever happens,’” Wholley remembers. “I said, ‘You’re good enough. You’re going to go wherever you’re going to go based off your talent and your character. You are who you are and it’s their fault if they don’t see what you have in you.’”
Guy met with several college coaches during that period who certainly saw it.
“I had multiple big-time college coaches come in and tell me that he was one of the top three kids in the country in his class,” says Guy.
The flood of scholarship offers followed.
In a single week in May, Puglisi picked up offers from Duke, Minnesota, West Virginia, Pitt, Virginia Tech and Rutgers. He’d add Vanderbilt a few days later before attaining true national status in June.
After landing offers from Michigan State and Purdue at the start of the month, Puglisi hit the camp circuit. By the time he completed workouts at Alabama and Georgia, Puglisi flew back to Massachusetts with the two biggest offers a recruit can get.
“I wasn’t surprised at all,” says Guy. “He’s definitely a Power 5 kid and I’ve always thought he was a Top 5 kid in his class nationally.”
Now, Puglisi is in Athens and ready to compete.
“At the end of the day, Ryan’s physical attributes and talent will speak for themselves,” says Brunelle. “When there are five quarterbacks on the field, it doesn’t matter where they came from, it just matters what they do on the field.
“Ryan’s got it all. He’ll be fine. He’ll be surrounded by a lot of talent, a lot of weapons and I think that’s a quarterback’s dream. He’ll make the most of it.”
Guy understands the position Puglisi has put himself in with the defending national champions.
“Of course, he may have to wait his turn, but he’s going to keep getting better,” says Guy. “So, as good as he is now, he’s going to improve so much more. He hasn’t reached his peak. The thing that gives me the most confidence is that he has room to grow as a quarterback because he’s still new to the position.”
Guy has worked with him a ton over the past few years, but Puglisi also played a lot of baseball during that time as well.
“He’s going to go in there ready to work and learn as much as he can,” says Guy.
Wholley agrees.
“He’s a great kid who is humble and works hard to get better,” the coach says. “Even if he has a bad day, he gets better each day. He constantly improves. He has an extreme toughness to him that’s going to keep him fighting even when things are down. With his talent, God has blessed him to be as good as anybody, but I think the intangibles and the grit to work through things will allow him to be successful.”
Martin believes the adversity Puglisi has dealt with will prepare him for the next level.
“A lot of people see the destination, but not many people know his journey,” says Martin. The Puglisi family and the Excel family have become one in a sense.
“Tommy always believed in that kid,” says Martin. “Obviously, I always believed in the kid. Even outside of football, I just love the kid and what he was, what he is and what he’s going to become. He’s the man, dude. He’s the man.”
