Kelly Lyell

kellylyell@coloradoan.com

Kevin Nutt Jr.’s good friend and teammate, Marquis Sutton, was shot and killed by an acquaintance in an apartment not far from their high school.

It was in September 2012, and Nutt was a junior at Edison High. Sutton, 18, was a senior and one of the stars on a football team that went on to the state semifinals.

Another good friend and teammate, Deondre Howard, was gunned down three years later outside the home of a family member while talking to his younger brother, who also was shot but survived. Howard, 21, was a baseball star at Fresno City College at the time of his death.

“They were the same type of kids as Kevin,” Nutt’s father, Kevin Nutt Sr., said. “It’s not a matter of them getting in trouble; they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s just the nature of how it is here.”

Here, the father said, is the west side of Fresno, California. In the neighborhood surrounding Edison High School, consistently rated one of the top academic schools in the San Joaquin Valley, thanks to a magnet program for math and science that draws students throughout the Fresno Unified School District.

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Edison has a proud athletic tradition, too, as the alma mater of an Olympic gold- and silver-medalist, 10 NFL players, three MLB players, two NBA players and a soccer player in England’s Premier League.

But it’s on the wrong side of town — “urban inner-city Fresno,” said football coach Matt Johnson, a former University of Southern California cornerback and NFL draft pick. The side of town opposite the suburban shopping centers, chain restaurants and gated communities with golf courses lined by million-dollar homes.

The younger Nutt needed to get away from Fresno, his father said. Most of the talented high school athletes in the area do, he said. It’s been that way since Nutt Sr., now a substitute teacher, was in school, living three blocks away from Edison and attending rival Washington Union High School.

“Even when I was in high school in the ‘80s, a lot of (Edison’s) athletes were murdered; shot and killed on the streets,” he said.

So Kevin Nutt Jr. wasn’t about to play football for Fresno State, even though he did make an official recruiting visit to his hometown school. He was far more serious about the offers he received from Boise State, Houston, Nevada, San Jose State and CSU, where he ultimately signed after twice backing out of verbal commitments to Nevada. His recruiting trip to Reno, where his best friend Blake Wright is a sophomore running back, was a “disaster,” he said.

What sold him on Colorado State University was former coach Jim McElwain agreeing to let him play cornerback instead of running back. Running backs “get beat up a lot,” Nutt Jr. said, and after playing free safety as a high school senior, he decided he’d rather play defense in college.

“Of all the schools that were recruiting me, this is where I liked it the best,” he said Wednesday, as the Rams (4-4, 2-2 Mountain West) were preparing for a home game Saturday against Fresno State (1-8, 0-5). “It was just a friendly place to be, not just within the football team, but the students I met on campus and all the other stuff. So that’s what really led me to come all the way out here to Fort Collins.”

There have been times over the past two seasons when he’s wondered if he had made the right decision. His sprinter’s speed — he ran the 100 meters in 10.55 seconds and the 200 in 21.17 at the 2014 California state track championships — earned him a spot on the Rams' special teams as a true freshman. But he was stuck behind veterans DeAndre Elliott — now playing for the Seattle Seahawks — Bernard Blake and Tyree Simmons on the depth chart and rarely got to play defense.

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Nutt Jr. is an outstanding student who had the grades and test scores to attend just about any college in the country, Johnson said. He’s studious about football, too, Simmons added, taking meticulous notes during position meetings and spending much of his free time in the football offices analyzing video.

But he needed game experience to validate the importance of the techniques he was working on every day in practice: Back-pedaling, turning his hips to run alongside a receiver without sacrificing speed, hand-placement and breaking on the ball.

Mostly, Simmons said, he needed to develop confidence in his ability to play the position. Nutt Jr. moved into the starting lineup for the second game of the season and has started six of the past seven. He’s made 21 tackles, including 15 solo stops and two for lost yardage.

When cornerbacks are at their best, though, they go mostly unnoticed by everyone but the opposing quarterback.Nutt Jr. had one of those games Oct. 22 in a 42-23 win at UNLV, limiting the Rebels' star receiver, Devonte Boyd, to three catches for 62 yards, all after the Rams had built a comfortable 35-0 halftime lead.

“It just really lets me know if I keep working on my technique, I can cover anybody, because that game, I had very good technique, and one of their best receivers I was able to shut down,” he said.

It was an eye-opening performance for him.

Much like his 96-yard kickoff return for a touchdown last year in the regular-season finale at Fresno State reminded Bobo and his staff of the kind of impact he could have for the Rams.

And it reminded everyone else in the stands that night about the level of talent that gets away from Fresno and the surrounding area every year.

“I had to get out,” the younger Nutt said. “Edison is not in a very good area. There’s a lot of negative that make kids not want to stay in Fresno. When somebody gets the opportunity to leave, they take the opportunity to get out for a better life.”

Follow reporter Kelly Lyell at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.