SportsSeptember 1, 2015
SEMO football preview: Transfer players arrive at OVC schools via varied paths but play important roles
The top three teams in the Ohio Valley Conference last year -- Jacksonville State, Eastern Kentucky and Eastern Illinois -- also lead the league in number of transfers on their rosters.
They arrive at Football Championship Subdivision schools like Southeast Missouri State through various paths.
For some it's a step down for more playing time or a second chance at a football career. Others make the jump up after getting the grades they need or once they've matured as a football player.
Transfers, whether they come from a Football Bowl Subdivision school, a junior college, Division II or via some other road, get the opportunity to continue their football career while the team they join typically gets an athlete that can fill an immediate need.
The top three teams in the Ohio Valley Conference last year -- Jacksonville State, Eastern Kentucky and Eastern Illinois -- also lead the league in number of transfers on their rosters while Austin Peay, which has finished last in the conference standings the past three years, has the second fewest.
EIU second-year coach Kim Dameron is able to feed off the success of the Panthers program and his connections to coaches at a higher level and get several transfers from Football Bowl Subdivision schools.
Others like Murray State coach Mitch Stewart, beginning his first year as a head coach, and Southeast coach Tom Matukewicz, entering Year 2, bring in more transfers from the junior college level as they try to build their programs into contenders in the conference.
One thing's for sure: the numbers say the right transfers are necessary to compete in the OVC.
Matukewicz, Dameron and Stewart all agree on three items that are pretty standard throughout football: recruiting high schoolers is ideal; the evaluation process for transfers is quicker, but more stringent; and relationships make a difference.
"High school guys are going to be here for a lot longer, so they tend to be a lot more invested into the program and they want to get plugged in," Stewart said. "They want to get plugged in to the campus community, they want to get plugged in to the community themselves. When you recruit a kid out of high school you bring him here and he's got other offers -- he chooses you because he loves Murray State. On his visit he just fell in love with Murray State and the town and those types of things. A lot of times with junior college players and transfers and things like that, there's a lot of times where you're just their last option, you're their only option."
Matukewicz didn't expect to sign as many transfers as he has since he took the job at Southeast in December 2013 but found it necessary to add depth and erase holes at certain positions with his first two signing classes. He expects that with each recruiting cycle the need for players that must come in and contribute immediately will dwindle.
This season the Redhawks have nine new transfers on the roster.
"We're not a name program so to be able to get the true, big-time, four-year drop-down guy is hard," Matukewicz said. "You know, I feel like we'd be taking everybody's trash, so I'm real leery about that at this point until we start winning. And maybe if you get a signature win -- like you beat a Missouri or you beat a Memphis or something, now you have more credibility."
Starting small
The ability to get mid-year transfers and have them participate in spring practices can be critical. Coaches can quickly see whether the player they expected to fill a void will be able to while it gives the new players time to adjust to the schemes.
Junior college transfer quarterback Tay Bender enrolled at Southeast in January and won the Redhawks' starting job last week.
Bender, a three-star recruit and the No. 20 dual-threat quarterback in the country according to rivals.com out of high school, graduated early from Southwest High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, to enroll at semester and participate in spring drills at Kansas State where he was competing for the backup job. He left Kansas State before the season, later transferring to Iowa Western Community College where he played two seasons.
The Redhawks coaching staff expected Bender to be highly sought after and didn't think they had a chance to sign him last June, but toward the end of last season it became evident that his other offers were ones Southeast could compete with.
"JUCO definitely isn't anything close to a Division I program at all, but going from school to school you realize a lot more what you want, what you're looking for," Bender said, "and SEMO had the best offer out of everything I wanted, and that's why I made the choice to come here."
Bender said in mid-July that he's the most comfortable he's been in any football program because of the close-knit relationships he's formed with his teammates and coaches since he arrived in January.
"At my position the biggest thing is being comfortable and knowing that your teammates trust you, gaining the trust," Bender said. "Here it was the best feeling. It made sense that I came here and I believe everything happens for a reason."
Running back Tremane McCullough was one of five other transfer players who participated in spring drills.
While at Northern Illinois, Matukewicz recruited McCullough as a cornerback out of high school, but he went to Arizona Western Community College instead because of poor grades. He ended up with Bender at Iowa Western after one season in Arizona, but redshirted due to his grades and an injury before his coach at Arizona Western convinced him to return to the team.
He spent his redshirt sophomore season back at Arizona Western. Meanwhile, Matukewicz continued to monitor him when he moved on to Toledo and eventually Southeast, and kept in contact, which is why McCullough ended up with the Redhawks.
"I decided to stay with him since he's been loyal," McCullough said. "I decided to be loyal back to him."
McCullough, who is expected to be Southeast's No. 2 running back this season, graduated with an associate's degree and feels like he's finally at the point where he should've been coming out of Royal Palm Beach High School in Florida.
"I would say it's just you're on your own," McCullough said of the challenge of junior college. "You come here and coaches help you out a lot more. They're on you about class, they're on you about everything you do. Junior college you have so much freedom to the point where you can get in trouble so easily. It's easier to mess up in junior college and get behind on your grades. (The challenge) is really getting out of junior college."
Pearl River Community College transfers Jamarl Holloway and Taron Divens made the team's depth chart at cornerback while Highland Community College transfer Byron Wilson is listed as the team's second-string outside linebacker.
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Markuice Savage, who played two seasons at Division II Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, also went through spring drills as a cornerback before the coaches decided to convert him to a receiver, and he's the team's third option at punt returner.
Savage, from St. Louis, was recruited by the previous coaching staff at Southeast near the end of his high school career at Lafayette. He attended Lincoln because it was one of two Division II schools that offered him a full scholarship.
After two years there he reached out to Southeast's current staff and joined the team.
"Getting up and competing every day," Savage said of the difference from Division II. "Like, knowing that you have to bring a hundred percent every day. You can't bring 85 percent and still be as good as the competition out there. You have to bring 100 percent every day."
Stewart believes in some instances those expectations ring even more true for transfers.
"They don't have time to sit out there and mess up like a true freshman because the thought process on a true freshman is, 'Well, he's just a freshman. He's OK. He's young. He'll be OK,'" Stewart said. "Whereas when a junior college guy or a transfer comes in and they make some type of stupid mistake, a mental mistake, you really just jump on him because the expectations are so much higher and a lot of times that's not fair to that kid."
Dameron tries not to put any more pressure on a transfer than players that come in as freshmen. He pointed out that quarterback Jalen Whitlow transferred to the Panthers from Kentucky last summer and took a few games to secure the job full time.
"Some kids learn quicker than others, and so I don't see them as any different than the freshman," Dameron said. "They are young men who have been through this before, they should have some knowledge of the game, but as far as us thinking they're going to walk in and be able to play Day 1, I've never thought that. To me that doesn't give enough credit to the kids you already have on your football team. We feel like they're going to be good additions to our football program, and when they get up and running, obviously, they could be better than maybe somebody we went and recruited out of high school, but I don't try to put any undue expectations on them as far as the timetable."
The four-year plan?
Matukewicz has signed just one transfer from a four-year institution since he was hired at Southeast. Senior quarterback Alex Niznak transferred from Central Michigan last summer and served as the backup to Kyle Snyder, a transfer from Ohio, last season. Niznak transferred after playing in just a handful of games. He made one start as a redshirt sophomore and did not get any playing time as a redshirt freshman in 2012.
Matukewicz doesn't believe the program has been successful enough to warrant some of the top-notch FBS transfers that other schools in the conference are able to get, and even if he were able to that player would have to prove they were worthy of a new opportunity at the FCS school.
While he was an assistant at Southern Illinois Matukewicz recruited running back Brandon Jacobs, who transferred from Auburn after a season where he rushed for 446 yards and three touchdowns. Jacobs rushed for 992 yards and 19 touchdowns in one season at SIU before being drafted by the New York Giants in the fourth round of the 2005 NFL draft. He played nine seasons in the NFL, eight with the Giants and one with the San Francisco 49ers.
"Brandon Jacobs is a kid at SIU that had wild success," Matukewicz said of his experience with four-year transfers. "He didn't play at Auburn and he came and got drafted, so that's a lot different. But for every Brandon Jacobs there's probably five others that just either hung around, provided some depth but didn't do much. I just haven't done it a lot. I've taken very little four-year transfers."
Stewart recently dismissed one of the 10 four-year transfers he signed -- quarterback Zeke Pike. Pike was arrested for "possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, operating a motor vehicle under the influence, disregarding a stop sign, failure to signal, resisting arrest, second-degree escape and open container," according to an article on al.com.
Pike transferred to Murray State after he was dismissed from Louisville following an arrest in March 2014.
He signed with Auburn out of high school in 2012 but also was dismissed there due to an arrest for public intoxication.
Stewart also signed defensive lineman Elijah Daniel in late July, a transfer from Auburn who was dismissed from the team in May after he was arrested for theft and burglary the previous month. Daniel played in all 27 games during 2013 and 2014 for Auburn.
After finding out about Daniel's dismissal via Facebook and first contacting Daniel over the social media website, Stewart said he and his staff spoke with as many people with knowledge of the situation as possible, including friends and family, because Stewart is from Auburn, Alabama.
"We left no stone unturned when it came to that situation because the last thing that I want to do -- and I told the AD and the president -- is take somebody like that that I don't really know and I haven't done all my homework on and I just kind of lie and all of a sudden he gets here and embarrasses the program," Stewart said.
There are some incidents that won't even warrant research from Stewart.
"We have our policies just like everybody," Stewart said. "If it's domestic abuse, there's not even a phone call, I don't even want it coming up in the staff meeting. If it's weapons, I don't even want it coming up in the staff meeting."
It's been made clear to Matukewicz's staff that in doing their research on a player they must find someone that Matukewicz is familiar with to verify that Matukewicz will want the player in his program.
"I'm going to say, 'Hey, who's signing off on this kid?' because they know better than to bring a kid (without someone to vouch for them)," Matukewicz said. "And it's, 'This guy who you know, coach, said you need to take this kid.'"
Dameron has 15 FBS transfers on his roster. Two are transfers from Arkansas, where Dameron and two of his assistants graduated from and where he began his coaching career as a graduate assistant under Lou Holtz, with many others coming from Southeastern Conference schools where he and his staff have formed connections.
"Recruiting is like anything -- it's all about relationships," Dameron said. "And the people that you have relationships with already are the people that you continually kind of go back to."
Regardless of what coaches prefer, they realize that in the FCS and OVC, variety is a necessity.
"I see it all as kind of one big philosophy that if we're not in those markets, the other teams that we play will be," Dameron said. "And we'll be falling behind."
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