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Devin Kargman QB '22

C

CF3

Recruit
Joined
Jan 26, 2014
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417
Plays at Woodrow Wilson in Camden, NJ. Offered by Rutgers and Temple before he started a game. My cousin is the kid's QB/7x7 coach. Will blow up with offers and break all his older brother's records (now a freshman at WMU). Really hope the Canes give him a look.

 
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Back in the '80's we recruited Camden Wilson. Not sure if we actually signed anybody from there. I thought back then they were a good football school but I haven't heard much in years.

Back about '86 or '87 we wanted a DL badly who might have been from Wilson but he couldn't get in academically. His name was Smothers. Signed with ASU or UA and never heard of him again.

EDIT: The kid we wanted was Bill Smothers I believe but he ended up somewhere else. This might be his father:http://www.dvrbs.com/people/CamdenPeople-BigBillSmothersSr.htm

I think we ended up taking Mark Caesar from New Jersey the same year. He ended up starting for us but things I heard back then suggested the kid we really wanted badly was Bill Smothers, who I think was from Camden Wilson.

I don't think Smothers had the grades so we couldn't take him. He would have been a Jimmy Johnson- Butch Davis recruit.
 
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TheMatador said:
Back in the '80's we recruited Camden Wilson. Not sure if we actually signed anybody from there. I thought back then they were a good football school but I haven't heard much in years.

Back about '86 or '87 we wanted a DL badly who might have been from Wilson but he couldn't get in academically. His name was Smothers. Signed with ASU or UA and never heard of him again.

EDIT: The kid we wanted was Bill Smothers I believe but he ended up somewhere else. This might be his father:http://www.dvrbs.com/people/CamdenPeople-BigBillSmothersSr.htm

I think we ended up taking Mark Caesar from New Jersey the same year. He ended up starting for us but things I heard back then suggested the kid we really wanted badly was Bill Smothers, who I think was from Camden Wilson.

I don't think Smothers had the grades so we couldn't take him. He would have been a Jimmy Johnson- Butch Davis recruit.
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When do we get a Matador podcast
 
TheMatador said:
Back in the '80's we recruited Camden Wilson. Not sure if we actually signed anybody from there. I thought back then they were a good football school but I haven't heard much in years.

Back about '86 or '87 we wanted a DL badly who might have been from Wilson but he couldn't get in academically. His name was Smothers. Signed with ASU or UA and never heard of him again.

EDIT: The kid we wanted was Bill Smothers I believe but he ended up somewhere else. This might be his father:http://www.dvrbs.com/people/CamdenPeople-BigBillSmothersSr.htm

I think we ended up taking Mark Caesar from New Jersey the same year. He ended up starting for us but things I heard back then suggested the kid we really wanted badly was Bill Smothers, who I think was from Camden Wilson.

I don't think Smothers had the grades so we couldn't take him. He would have been a Jimmy Johnson- Butch Davis recruit.
Click to expand...
Butch recruited Jamaal Green out of Wilson. Started at DE in '01.
 
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Back in the '80's I began to notice a number of big city inner city schools around the country that were producing some good talent, worthy of national recruiting interest. One I remember was Camden Wilson.

Over time, as UM didn't recruit in those areas, my attention to those schools waned

I'm trying to think of some others....maybe Evans in Orlando (because we got some good kids from there in the '80's-'90's); Dallas Carter (maybe briefly--I not sure); there was a school in Compton, I think. Then D.J. Williams' school, Concord de la Salle(?), which was not really big city and not public; and I know there were others.

Even Anthony Lewis's school in the Boston area, Brockton, was no. 1 in country for a while. Generally, New England was not elite in high school football. Lewis was a 2nd USA Today A-A OL who never did much at UM.
 
We had another N.J. kid from the Philly area who was a starter in the Rose Bowl, Howard Clark. Clark, from Pennsauken, took over for Chris Campbell (RIP) who had a knee infection and sat out.

Pennsauken had given us Greg Mark and Jason Hicks a few years before.

Jason's brother Dwight had been a starter on a great 49er Superbowl secondary. Jason didn't have good feet, never played much at UM. Greg Mark was a beast. Just not built for the pro game. Parcells drafted him and tried him as a nose tackle.

Jimmy Johnson said "if there was one guy who he would want to take with him into a dark alley it would be Greg Mark."
 
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TheMatador said:
Back in the '80's I began to notice a number of big city inner city schools around the country that were producing some good talent, worthy of national recruiting interest. One I remember was Camden Wilson.

Over time, as UM didn't recruit in those areas, my attention to those schools waned

I'm trying to think of some others....maybe Evans in Orlando (because we got some good kids from there in the '80's-'90's); Dallas Carter (maybe briefly--I not sure); there was a school in Compton, I think. Then D.J. Williams' school, Concord de la Salle(?), which was not really big city and not public; and I know there were others.

Even Anthony Lewis's school in the Boston area, Brockton, was no. 1 in country for a while. Generally, New England was not elite in high school football. Lewis was a 2nd USA Today A-A OL who never did much at UM.
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The inner city school for Los Angles that you're thinking of is likely Carson HS, which is near Compton. They were routinely a top-25 nationally ranked school in the 80s, with plenty of prospects. The second best one was probably Compton Dominguez.
 
Barboni said:
The inner city school for Los Angles that you're thinking of is likely Carson HS, which is near Compton. They were routinely a top-25 nationally ranked school in the 80s, with plenty of prospects. The second best one was probably Compton Dominguez.
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Carson sounds right. I don't know if we ever tried to get anyone from there.

The '80's were pretty tough for African-American kids from the inner city schools. Prop 48 became a big deal and after a few years of recruiting and signing kids who lost a year of eligibility but otherwise admitted to school Jimmy Johnson stopped signing them. He said they became a real problem because it was hard to integrate them into the program, being on campus but I don't know if they could even practice. Obviously, they could not play in games. Even if not deemed a prop 48 based on test scores and grades, a lot of kids were otherwise not admitted to UM given the university's own requirements.

We backed off so many kids whom we could not get into school. Sometimes we sent them to prep schools, other times to JUCO. Other times, we just backed off and didn't offer. We could only hope that some would come back after prep school. If the kid went to JUCO it was less likely we would try to get them back.

Back then, some of my friends blamed the public schools in Dade for being very bad and not preparing kids. But there were so many kids from other places who were shaky on test scores or grades or both and we ended up not taking.

I do remember vaguely hearing about Jimmy's frustration with this in the '80's and I was worried he would get fed up and bail.

Eventually he did and of course the Dallas job was reason enough to leave but I'm sure it was not lost on Jimmy that he could simply evaluate personnel without worrying about a player meeting academic requirements, which he had to do in college recruiting.

When I mentioned inner city schools, most were predominantly minority and the athletes we tried to recruit were overwhelmingly African-American.

I always felt the inner city kids we recruited were in many ways cream of the crop given the disadvantages of coming from poorer backgrounds, too many exposed to bad things in the environment (drugs, crime, etc.), perhaps not having a good family environment, etc. These kids overcame so many external factors that they were exceptional in staying committed to a sport and to academics at least enough to be eligible in college.

Still, so many fell by the wayside, usually because of academics.

Today, it seems so many of the kids are better prepared academically.
 
There were some other good programs in the Houston area. We liked to recruit in that area. HS football was very good there and probably still is. We got Charlie Pharms from a Houston area school. The next year there was another CB we wanted, Grady Cavness, but he went to Texas.

I think Marty Patton was from Houston. I used to have a tape of the Texas State All-Star game his senior year and as I recall the very first play was Jessie Armstead at LB for one team tackling RB Marty Patton for the other Texas team (probably east vs. west). One UM commit tackling another UM commit in the Texas HS All Star game! Those were the halcyon days of UM recruiting in Texas.

Come to think of it, I think Patton might have gone to Madison, or maybe it was Pharms, I don't remember.

We had at least one kid from Cy-Fair (Cypress-Fairbanks?), Todd Keene, an OL. He stayed around one year, as a redshirt, got his NC ring, and announced the next morning he was leaving. We had so much trouble recruiting OLs even then.

We recruited a group of five OLs that year, I think. We were excited, they were so much bigger than what we had, and most turned out to be mediocre.

Keene still likes to brag about his UM days, though, as I recall, he did nothing at the U.

https://www.thepowerteam.com/
 
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Actually our freshman recruiting class in '87 was a very mixed bag. We got Leon Searcy and Claude Jones in that class. As highly-ranked as Claude Jones was (no. 1 HS OG), Searcy turned out to be a better player--by far. We signed Daniel Downey out of You grown Ursuline. I think he left almost immediately. Then there was Keene, who did virtually nothing in his one year.

There was a lineman from Chicago, and I can't remember if he was OL or DL. I don't remember how long he was around. I think he did next to nothing. Latest news is that he was arrested for bank robbery more recently. Of course media, as par for their rotten course, still reports him as Miami football player despite the fact he did virtually nothing, as I remember. I wish I could remember how long he was around and how much he did.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nb..._Prep_Star_Faces_Time_Behind_Bars2.html?amp=y
 
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Mr. Matador, correct me if am wrong but isn't that what they called George Mira? Are you from the keys? Did Boog Powell have a nickname? I remember Speedy Neal, fast for his size.
:q3xkxex::stormwarningflag-sm:
 
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