2019 recruiting

All in. Get it? Get it? Do you get it[Bryan Fuller]

Uh, I guess we forgot to do a hello for the second commit, and lowest-ranked, of Michigan's four St. Frances Academy prospects. He was also the seventh player to join the class at the time, and the first OL of what's now up to four. Our reasoning for waiting at the time was sound: nobody had anything on him. Until last year Mazzccua was playing for a small school in Philadelphia and Temple was his only offer. A transfer to Biff Poggi's mega-program, and the release of his junior film in early 2019, led to a Syracuse offer on January 24th. Michigan followed the next day—the day teammate Osman Savage committed—and Mazzccua made it official a month later, following an unofficial visit in February.

A bunch of scouting was dumped in the aftermath, all of which described a huge, agile, sushi raw mountain somewhere in the realm of 6'6"/290 (Rivals when he committed) or 6'5"/335 (24/7). There's a little more out there now, so let's play the feud for him, finally.

GURU RATINGS

Rivals ESPN 24/7 24/7 Comp
3*, 5.7, #51 OT,

#22 MD
3*, 79, #46 OT,

#66 East
3*, 85, #89 OT,

#31 MD, #1019 Ovr
3*, 0.8622, #65 OT,

#23 MD, #757 Ovr
☆ rtg: 3.61 3.70 3.44 3.62

None of these existed when he committed 20 weeks ago, so everybody's playing catch-up, and that means rankings in the "Michigan probably knows what they're doing?" range. Rivals ignored him until February 22.

[Hit THE JUMP for scouting from those two sites, video, and the rest.]

Blair Academy's David Ojabo stares into your soul
[Brian Dohn/247Sports]

I was thinking about what I should put in the intro of this piece and the first thing that came to mind was something about Ojabo’s background and the length of time he’s been playing football. I couldn’t remember exactly what the story was off the top of my head so I pulled up the Hello post—something I don’t like to do until after I’ve written up the scouting portion to limit confirmation bias—and I am so, so glad I did. It was worth it for this paragraph alone:

Ojabo took a unique path to his Michigan pledge. Here's how his head coach describes his journey to playing football in the first place:

“(David Ojabo) was born in Nigeria, then he moved to Scotland when he was about seven, eight-years-old,” Saylor said. “Parents live in Scotland now but goes back and forth from Scotland to Nigeria – works for Shell Oil.

“He came to Blair Academy two years ago. As a junior, he played basketball and soccer. He was on the basketball team with [2018 top-100 Penn State DE] Jayson (Oweh), saw how Jayson was blowing up, came into my office and said, ‘hey coach. I’m more athletic and I’m tougher than Jayson. Do you mind if I play football next year?’ He’s 6-5, 240-pounds. I looked at him and said, ‘Oh yeah. You can play some football next year.’

But Ace followed that with this golden nugget:

Ojabo doesn't appear to lack confidence, nor should he: after his first year playing football, he picked up over 30 scholarship offers. As his stock blew up, so did his phone—but not quite in the way he wanted, he told The Wolverine's Andrew Vailliencourt:

“I’m not going to lie, when I look at my text messages, there’s no girls in there, it’s all coaches, so it’s kind of stressful,” Ojabo said. “It’ll be good to get it over with, but it’s a good problem to have.”

I cannot fathom having the kind of confidence that allows someone to look at a teammate and be like, wow, I guess I should play some football, can’t be very hard if they let that weenie play and having the weenie guy be a freaking top-100 recruit who’s known in Penn State circles for his freakish speed and athleticism. To the tape!

[After THE JUMP: The tape! Scouting, too]

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