According to LATimes.com, "Brad Otton, a former USC quarterback and Rose Bowl star, realized that the long hours and nomadic lifestyle of college football coaching no longer appealed to him."

"So he called an audible. He traded pigskin for pizza. If that sounds like a radical shift, the easygoing proprietor of two highly successful artisan pizzerias insists that it was years in the making. Otton, a Mormon, says he'd always wanted to open a business and that he knew he'd found a potential winner when he fell in love with Neapolitan-style thin-crust pizza while on a two-year mission in southern Italy in the early 1990s. 'I understood how good it was,' he says, 'and I wondered why no one was doing it here in America.'"