Dominic Raiola has never been as nervous around a football field as he is now.
“Being quarterback parents now, it’s nerve-wracking,” the former Detroit Lions center told the Free Press on Monday. “The ball’s in your hands, but I feel like we’re more nervous than he is. He’s the coolest one on the field.”
Raiola, who played 14 seasons for the Lions from 2001-14, is eight years into a retirement he’s spent mostly being a sports dad.
His daughter, Taylor, is an outside hitter and captain for TCU’s volleyball team. His sons, Dylan and Dayton, are high school quarterbacks. And Dylan is the top-ranked football recruit in the country, according to Rivals.com, a Georgia commitment who is set to play for his godfather Matthew Stafford’s old coach and old team.
Dylan starred at Phoenix’s Pinnacle High School last year, but Raiola said the family is in the process of moving to northern Georgia, where Dylan will finish high school and to make traveling easier to his college games.
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The Raiolas made a similar move from Arizona to Texas when Taylor signed with TCU, and it was about that time Dylan got his start playing QB.
“He was in eighth grade and nobody was giving him a chance to play quarterback,” Raiola said while in town for the Calvin Johnson Jr. Celebrity Golf Classic. “Coaches would tell him like, ‘You’re too big to play quarterback.’ So finally, Jon Kitna came to our house and said, ‘Don’t let anybody tell you you’re not a quarterback,’ and Jon told me, he said, ‘He’s going to be the No. 1 player in the country one day.’ This was in eighth grade, this was before we moved to Texas. Jon told me that in eighth grade. I was like, ‘Yeah, come on, man.’ He was actually a better baseball player than he was (football at that time). He was one of the top catchers in the country. I think he was ranked 40th. Even that, and then he just, he started playing quarterback and never looked back.”
Dylan, who occasionally accompanied his dad to work with the Lions as a kid, was the starting JV quarterback as a freshman at Buford High, while Kitna’s son, Jalen, started on varsity.
The Raiolas returned to Arizona for Dylan’s sophomore season, where he played at Phoenix-area powerhouse Chandler High, then moved across town to Pinnacle after their new house was finished last year.
Raiola said it’s been “surreal” to watch his son transition from a defensive end/tight end who thought about quitting football to focus on baseball when coaches wouldn’t give him a chance to play quarterback, to the top recruit in the country.
Dylan committed to Ohio State before deciding on Georgia, and had scholarship offers from Michigan and his father’s alma matter, Nebraska, among other schools.
“We see him every day so we take it for granted, I feel like, but when you look at what he’s doing in the sports field, I mean, he’s not just the No. 1 quarterback, he’s the No. 1 player in the country so it’s pretty awesome to say that,” Raiola said. “But that’s kind of how he handled it the whole time. He just always felt like he could be the best in the country and he worked like it, trained like it. He was raised in it, so bringing him to work every week, once a week, twice a week, shoot, he was raised in that, and he knew what the standard, what it looked like to play at this level. But it was pretty cool to see.”
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A longtime starter for the Lions, Raiola said he still watches games with a lineman’s eye.
“I’m still like, ‘Hey, you could have helped your tackle there if you moved this way and you better catch every snap. If it drops straight down it’s your fault, and catch the shotgun snaps,'” Raiola said. “So I’m still very pro-lineman in that sense.”
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Dylan, who threw for 2,400 yards and 22 touchdowns with five interceptions last season, was blessed with a rocket arm and rich athletic genes. Yvonne Raiola, Dylan’s mother, played water polo at Hawaii, and Dominic’s brother, Donovan, also played offensive line in the NFL.
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Raiola said it’s been amazing to see football come full circle for the family.
At Georgia, Dylan will play for offensive coordinator Mike Bobo, who was Stafford’s position coach and play caller with the Bulldogs. Another of Raiola’s ex-Lions teammates, Shaun Chapas, is Georgia’s senior director of development. And Raiola will be right there, nervously cheering from the stands every game.
“It’s definitely special to see, cause you never want your kids to have to follow what you did, especially as a former player who did it at the highest level,” he said. “You never want to put that on your kids, but if they want to do it, I always said I’ll be right there to hold you accountable and hold you to that standard as long as you tell me what you want to do.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.