The best player in Rich Rodriguez’s first-ever UA recruiting class sat in his apartment on Saturday, his television tuned to Pac-12 Arizona.
He watched as the Wildcats fell at home to Washington State. The visiting Cougars poured it on, scoring 45 points and gaining 631 yards against an overmatched UA defense.
He could be in there at linebacker, piling up tackles, making an impact. He should be, really.
“Yeah, I mean, that’s crossed my mind,” Dakota Conwell said. “But I’m happy where I’m at.”
Conwell was the lone four-star recruit in Rodriguez’s 2012 class, good enough to commit initially to the Todd Graham regime at Pittsburgh and still good enough to switch to Arizona when Graham bolted for Tempe. He was expected to make an immediate impact at linebacker.
Conwell had 12 tackles and one sack as a true freshman. He’d still be playing — and probably starting — at the UA had he not moved away.
Far away. Conwell is now playing for West Liberty University, a Division II school in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Arizona’s issues with depth and inexperience this season can be traced back to that 2012 class. Conwell isn’t the only one who left: Of the 25-person class, only nine players remain.
Conwell isn’t even a linebacker anymore. In a loss to Notre Dame College last week, Conwell — now a quarterback — passed for 405 yards, rushed for 84 more and accounted for six touchdowns.
“It is crazy where I’m at right now, and I never imagined myself being here,” Conwell said, “but I’m really happy and grateful for where I’m at, and I’m loving what I’m doing.”
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Jamar Allah.
Trey Griffey.
Cody Ippolito.
Will Parks.
Rodriguez inherited nine of Mike Stoops’ commitments when he took over, and brought in 16 players of his own during the short window — two months and 10 days — between his hiring and national signing day.
Of that 16, Allah, Griffey, Ippolito and Parks are all that remain.
“The most difficult part of a coaching transition is that first recruiting class,” Rodriguez said. “The first year is always the most difficult because you’re just finding out what the school is yourself as a coach.”
A few of Stoops’ commitments have not only stuck, but started. Cayman Bundage is a three-year starter on the offensive line; Zach Hemmila also contributes at guard and center; Josh Kern, recruited as a quarterback, starts at tight end; and Anthony Lopez, recruited as a running back, gets significant playing time as a reserve safety.
Other Stoops commits never even arrived in Tucson. Taylor McNamara, a four-star tight end, followed Stoops to Oklahoma before transferring to USC; quarterback Nate Sudfield starts at Indiana. There were six others who de-committed from Arizona upon Rodriguez’s arrival, too, notably linebacker A.J. Hilliard, who started at TCU before transferring to Texas A&M, and offensive lineman Steven Moore, now at California.
That part wasn’t a surprise.
“When I first got here, everyone told me, ‘Don’t be surprised when there’s only eight or nine of you left,’” Lopez said.
As of Thursday, there are nine left; 15 others either transferred, quit or were declared academically ineligible. One player, Scottsdale Chaparral defensive end Dylan Cozens, opted to play baseball: He’s now in the Philadelphia Phillies’ farm system.
“You miss on some,” Rodriguez said earlier this season. “We’ve missed on some, but I think when we’re all healthy and young guys grow up, we’re going to be OK.”
When Rodriguez was introduced at a press conference in McKale, things looked — and sounded — different than they do now.
The Lowell-Stevens Football Facility was still under construction, nobody in Tucson knew the “OKG” acronym, and “On to the Next One” was just a popular Jay-Z track.
Arizona was coming off a miserable 4-8 season in which Stoops was fired midway through the year. Rodriguez’s recruiting base from his time at West Virginia and Michigan was largely on the right half of the United States map — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the like.
The staff got resourceful, tapping into the recruiting bases from their previous stops. While Rodriguez spent the 2011 season as a CBS broadcaster, assistants Calvin Magee and Tony Gibson coached at Pittsburgh, recruiting coordinator Matt Dudek was at Rutgers, Jeff Casteel and Bill Kirelawich were at West Virginia, and Rod Smith was at Indiana.
Smith found Griffey, a star receiver at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando, Florida, and the son of baseball legend Ken Griffey Jr. Griffey had just returned from a visit to ASU when the UA reached out.
“Coach Smith called and said, ‘Where you going?’” he said. “‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘All right, well, I already set a trip up for you, you’re coming out to Tucson.”
Griffey committed soon after.
Griffey knew Rodriguez’s background, and heard good things about him recruiting well in the Florida area. At Michigan, Rodriguez recruited receiver Ricardo Miller, a Dr. Phillips alum.
“As soon as coach RichRod got the job here, I looked into it, looked at Arizona, and seeing what he’s done with players in the past, getting them to the next level and teaching them football, and just everything,” Griffey said. “He’s had a couple players go there. The way he recruits Florida, he has a really strong history, so that helped me a lot.”
Parks, now a senior leader and Arizona’s best defensive playmaker not named Scooby Wright, followed Dudek to Tucson. The safety initially committed to Pittsburgh, then changed his commitment to Rutgers when Dudek moved. He flipped again to the UA when Dudek followed Rodriguez to the Old Pueblo.
Conwell followed Gibson, now an assistant at West Virginia, to Tucson.
Griffey and Parks are the success stories of that 2012 class. Bundage, Hemmila, Ippolito, Lopez, Kern and Allah, too.
The rest? Not so much.
“Coaches, we’re in a society where they want to get it done right now, in one to two years,” Rodriguez said, “and it’s tough to do that.”
•••
Griffey has a running bet with Clive Georges, a 2012 classmate and UA teammate, about who will finish with the most receiving yards this season. He still talks to Javelle Allen, a quarterback who was dismissed as a sophomore.
Allen most recently played at Kilgore College in Texas, while Georges is currently playing receiver at North Dakota.
That Conwell is playing at all is shocking. The linebacker was medically retired before 2013 because of concussions.
Conwell took the 2014 season off, then felt the urge to play again. He decided to move on to West Liberty, just an 80-minute drive away from his Pittsburgh home.
From a four-star UA linebacker to spectator to quarterback. For Conwell and the 2012 class, it’s been a strange four years.
“A lot of people have left, but there’s still a bunch of us,” Griffey said. “We’re the first class to really go through the system of what’s the hard edge, and everything about that.”
