Former Nassau CC tight end Ian Thomas on doorstep of NFL

Looking back, Ian Thomas is grateful for his time at Nassau Community College. He spent two years there playing for the junior college football team and straightening out his academic record before transferring to the University of Indiana and emerging as a tight end many expect will be drafted by an NFL team next week.

“It all worked out in the end,” Thomas said.

At the time, though, it was hard to see that finish line. Thomas arrived on Long Island in the summer of 2014, a kid from inner city Baltimore who’d survived all the struggles that entails and more. He’d never lived away from Baltimore, never been on his own. Then, suddenly, he was in a house in Hempstead crammed to the attic with strangers who had nothing in common except that they were fellow football players. Thirteen of them, two in each of the six bedrooms and one on the couch.

A few weeks later, they changed houses.

“I moved like five times to five different houses,” he said of the two years he spent in the area. “We kept getting put out of the houses we were in because some guys couldn’t pay rent. We just were moving and doing different things.”

He compared it to the gritty Netflix documentary series “Last Chance U” about a junior college football team in Mississippi, “but I guess Nassau was a little bit worse than that. We were just sticking together getting through it.”

In terms of organized football, it was about as far away from the NFL as he could have been.

In terms of life, he’d been further.

Overcoming adversity

Thomas was an orphan before his 10th birthday. His mother, Martha, died from complications stemming from an abscessed tooth on his eighth birthday. His father, Earl, had a heart attack a little more than one year later.

“You’re so young and you don’t really know what death means and how to react to it,” Thomas said. “It made me grow up earlier than most people do.”

His uncle took him and his eight siblings in, but that quickly became too much and the children were placed in foster homes. It was then that Thomas’ older brother, Cliff Farmer, who was 19 at the time, legally adopted several of his younger family members including Thomas, who was 12.

“Coming from the inner-city, there’s so much stuff going on and it’s so easy to follow crowds,” Thomas said. “My brother never let us stray from the path. Just looking up to him, it made me really want to push forward and do something good with my life.”

Football quickly became a path toward that, but interest from nearby Towson and some smaller Division II and III schools fizzled when Thomas was declared academically ineligible. That’s when he turned to Nassau CC.

“He didn’t even know what junior college football was,” former Nassau CC head coach Joe Osovet said. “I had to walk him through the process, was speaking heavily to his coach and to his brother and they were huge influences that impacted him. I told him: ‘If you do everything right and take care of what you have to take care of from an academic standpoint, there’s going to be an opportunity for you.’”

Off-the-charts ability

Osovet didn’t know that would be in the NFL. When Thomas showed up in Garden City he was a skinny 215-pounder. The first game of his junior college career, though, Thomas showed flashes of what was to come. And that was before the ball was even kicked off.

During pat-and-go drills in warmups in the 2014 opener against Navy Prep, Osovet recalled Thomas putting on a show.

“He would literally jump up, take his right hand and stick it between his legs, and catch the ball one-handed,” said Osovet, now an assistant coach at the University of Tennessee. “It was the first game of the year and it was something I had never seen. The coaches, we were astounded standing on the sideline watching this kid go through the drill and catching the football.”

Thomas played in just four games as a true freshman and had four catches for 88 yards and two touchdowns. The following season he was a team captain at Nassau and in eight games he caught 23 passes for 433 yards and three touchdowns. He was recruited by Texas A&M and South Carolina before deciding to attend Indiana.

There was still the issue of his size, which Thomas fixed too. He is at the doorstep of the NFL weighing 256 pounds and while he is still more dangerous as a pass-catcher he is a willing blocker.

“Obviously the NFL is a matchup league, and he’s as polished as they come on the perimeter,” Osovet said. “If he can be attached and block people on the edge, I’m not saying he’s going to be a [Rob] Gronkowski, but he’s going to be a matchup nightmare.”

Nassau to the NFL

Thomas said his two years at Nassau CC were influential to his development.

“It was definitely something new for me and something to adjust to,” he said. “It was part of the learning. Now I have it in my brain and I can keep going through life with those lessons and opportunities.”

Thomas has stayed in touch with most of the 12 strangers who became roommates when he took his first steps toward the NFL with a foothold on Long Island. Some of them will be joining him on the journey to professional football.

Rasul Douglas, a cornerback, went to the University of West Virginia and won a Super Bowl with the Eagles last season. Tyrell Chavis, a defensive tackle, went to Penn State and should wind up in a training camp either as a draft pick or an undrafted free agent this summer. Malcolm Pridgeon, an offensive lineman from Central Islip, wasn’t in the house but he was on that 2014 team at Nassau CC. Now he’s getting ready for his senior year at Ohio State and might be an NFL draft pick in 2019.

All have traveled the long, winding path from Nassau CC toward the NFL. Few, though, can say they have traveled as far as Thomas.

“I guess it always seemed unlikely, especially coming from Baltimore City,” Thomas said of making it to the NFL. “Not a lot of kids make it to college. Not a lot of kids make it to see 21. For me to make it this far has been a blessing and I’m just defeating the odds as I go along.”

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.