Some said he was overrated, that he failed to step up in the pressure of the Big East. Others said he was wasted by Georgetown in an offense that didn't fit his natural talent. Or maybe Jerry Nichols was just the right player at the wrong time.

In a state that had produced the likes of Chris Jackson, James Robinson, and Othella Harrington over the previous five years, Nichols joined these future NBA stars as the recipient of Mississippi's "Mr. Basketball" award, averaging 34 points, seven rebounds, and three assists a game for Jackson's Lanier High School, shooting at a resounding 58 percent from the floor. He selected Georgetown over the likes of Kansas, Missouri and Ohio State.

If Nichols was Georgetown's number one recruit in April of 1994, he wasn't by August, when Allen Iverson arrived at the Hilltop. The unique talent of Iverson led coach John Thompson to rebuild the entire Georgetown offense of 1994-95 around Iverson, and Nichols was left on the sidelines. In their first game as freshmen, Iverson played 29 minutes, took 18 shots and scored 19 points in a loss to defending national champion Arkansas. Nichols played just six minutes, took one shot, and missed it.

"It took just a game or two to discover the astonishing truth: Jerry Nichols wasn't a college scorer," said writer Howard Megdal in 2009. "A Georgetown team with Allen Iverson, Victor Page, Jahidi White and Othella Harrington -- had Nichols truly been the small forward most people expected he'd be -- would have been national championship caliber [in 1996]. And that was the astonishing thing about Nichols. You knew right away that he wasn't the answer to Georgetown's small forward drought."

In a review of the 1994-95 season, the Georgetown media guide said that Nichols was "primarily a support player" and "another potential outside scoring threat", but Nichols was neither. He averaged less than seven minutes per game and contributed just 22 points all season. Within the role of a stationary small forward, Nichols was ineffective. He missed all 10 three point attempts and scored just seven points in Big East play.

Nichols saw his most productive season in 1995-96, with one game that stood above all. Ten days after he was unceremoniously benched following a breakaway dunk versus Morgan State, Nichols scored 23 points off the bench in Georgetown's 123-65 rout of St. Leo. In 19 minutes of action, Nichols was 8-8 from the floor and 6-6 from three point range. For the remainder of the season, however, he shot just 31 percent from the floor en route to a 4.6 points per game average.

With the departure of three starters to the NBA, Nichols seemed ready for the starting lineup but he again slumped, shooting 26 percent from the floor and failing to gain a start all season. Nichols opted for a rare junior year transfer, but found no takers among the original schools that recruited him. Instead, he enrolled at Mississippi Valley State, but never played there.