Of the three dozen old football players I’d set out to find last month, LaDerrick Vaughn wasn’t initially on my list. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’d forgotten about him.
The 247Sports team page that I’d called up listed 22 players as part of the 2007 Ole Miss football signing class. Vaughn wasn’t among them. Those online rankings, however, don’t factor in transfers from four-year colleges even though the schools have to count them in their signing classes, so Jevan Snead, the quarterback transfer from Texas and the most important member of the group, wasn’t included in there either.
Advertisem*nt
Vaughn was initially part of the Rebels’ 2006 class but was stuck in NCAA academic limbo for months before getting cleared and was added to the ’07 class. Vaughn, from Memphis, didn’t register any statistics in his playing career in Oxford aside from making two sacks in the Rebels’ 2007 spring game.
Because there was such limited information about his football career online, and because it had been a struggle to find much about several of his old teammates who had actually played more at Ole Miss, I figured Vaughn probably would be the toughest to locate. But he actually was the easiest to track down.
There it was in the first result of a Google search. I did a triple take at the line below the link.
He has almost 13,000 Instagram followers? Wait, what?
I was not expecting this.
Turns out the most anonymous member of the 2007 Ole Miss signing class is now a celeb of sorts. The former two-star prospect-turned pass-rushing defensive end has become a five-star marketer and one of the most famous trainers in the Deep South. He is the CEO of a fitness company called Look Good Naked and has billed himself as the brand ambassador for StayFatForWhat. Vaughn’s Instagram feed is a mixture of workout clips, apparel ads for Look Good Naked and StayFatForWhat gear and some videos of him stretching and massaging women as part of his Feel Good Naked spa business.
Yeah, I definitely was not expecting this.
In 2006, I started a book project to try and find out how exactly a big-time college football program goes from the 1,000 or so names it wades through at the beginning of one recruiting cycle to the 25 or so guys it ends up signing.
The school I focused on was Ole Miss. The head coach was Ed Orgeron, who a few years earlier had been the recruiting coordinator of the most loaded class in modern college football history. The 2003 USC recruiting haul included four players who would go on to become first-round NFL Draft picks, five who became second-rounders and three others who were late-round picks. Landing talent at Ole Miss, a program that hadn’t ranked in the top 10 of the polls in more than 35 years, was going to be a much tougher task.
I had all access inside the Rebels’ football program and was a fly on the wall for every step of what was a fascinating process. The first prospect evaluated by the staff in the book was a 5-foot-11, 185-pounder from Hendersonville, Tenn., named Golden Tate.I wrote then:
The Rebels saw Golden Tate as a cornerback. His tape, however, began with a series of dazzling offensive plays. He was juking would-be tacklers, leaving them staggering into each other. He was spinning. He was cutting. He was stopping and starting. His ability to regain top speed, going from first gear to fourth gear, was startling. That kind of quickness was critical for a defensive back who had to break on the football after a receiver had made his cut. Tate also was showing go-the-distance speed, running away from everyone on the field. A few other clips displayed that he had good hands and could make catches in traffic.
“We sure he’s not a running back?” Orgeron asked.
Advertisem*nt
“I talked to him,” responded (assistant coach Hugh) Freeze, the coach who recruits Tennessee, “and he says it doesn’t matter.”
Orgeron: “Only thing we gotta figure out is, what’s our strategy? I know he says it doesn’t matter but somebody somewhere is going to sell this kid on something.”
Freeze: “Tennessee’s also offered him.”
Orgeron: “You’re not afraid of Tennessee, are you?”
Freeze: “No, sir, I am not.”
My book, Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting, was published in 2007. The crop Orgeron and his staff signed that year was ranked No. 26 by Rivals and No. 31 by Scout — although the 247 Composite Rankings for that class now list it at No. 17. That class would be the last one Orgeron signed in Oxford. He was fired 10 months later.
Houston Nutt took over and won with Orgeron’s recruits, going 18-8 with a win in Gainesville against the eventual national champs and back-to-back Cotton Bowl titles. Nutt, though, also would get canned by Ole Miss after the Orgeron recruiting well ran dry and the Rebels went 2-10 in his fourth season.
There were two main reasons Orgeron developed a reputation as a terrific recruiter.
First, the guy is just wired differently than almost every other coach I’ve been around. He’s genuinely head over heels for watching eval tapes, trying to unearth talent and the process of wooing it. At Ole Miss, he seemed to be obsessed with the chase of recruiting. Even now, in his mid-50s, I don’t think that part has changed one bit.
The second part is that he trusts his evaluation skills developed from his days working for Jimmy Johnson and Pete Carroll, and as a result he loves being the first one in the boat — the first coach to offer a prospect.
The measurables and what he saw on film were critical, but by the time he was in Oxford he’d learned that the intangibles — how competitive the kid was; how tough he was and how much he loved football — often were the difference in whether a prospect fizzled or flourished in college. But so much of the process was about projection—physically, mentally and socially.
Advertisem*nt
The 180-degree turn Orgeron’s career has done in the dozen years since then is as remarkable as any coach I’ve ever seen. Since going 10-25 in Oxford, he is 31-11 as a head coach and now has his dream job leading the LSU Tigers. The story of what happened to the rest of the folks from Meat Market, the kids Ole Miss signed — and some of the guys they chased but couldn’t reel in — is also pretty compelling and should serve as a cautionary tale about the hype around each signing day.
The 2007 Ole Miss class featured five four-star recruits — not including Snead and five-star nose guard Jerrell Powe, whose academic battles with the NCAA lasted so long he was technically part of all three classes Orgeron had at Ole Miss. Two of those four stars, A.J. Jackson and Roderick Davis, never made it to Oxford due to academic issues, and a third, linebacker Chris Strong, lasted just one season there.
Jackson, a 6-5, 220-pounder who had been ranked as the nation’s top junior college wideout, ended up at Division II California University of Pennsylvania, where he earned All-America honors catching 101 passes for 1,424 yards and 18 touchdowns as a senior. He had a tryout with the New York Giants but didn’t stick with the team.
Strong arrived at Ole Miss weighing 281 pounds, about 20 more than Orgeron had hoped. He struggled with his conditioning and his adjustment to college, starting three games for the Rebels at middle linebacker in 2007 and making 19 tackles. But with Orgeron gone, Strong — Rivals’ No. 53 player in the 2007 recruiting class — withdrew from school the next semester. He never played a down of football again.
Strong is still in Mississippi and is doing well owning a trucking business, according to Lance Pogue, his old coach at South Panola High in Batesville.
Ole Miss beat Oklahoma and Tennessee, among others, to land Davis, a wide receiver from Memphis. It helped the Rebels’ cause that Davis wanted to stay near his then-15-month-old daughter, and Oxford was only about a 90-minute drive away. But Davis never qualified for Ole Miss and ended up enrolling at Memphis, where he was cleared to play in 2008, he told me this week over the phone. Still, Davis opted to take a job driving trucks to help support his young family. “Life can pull you in different directions,” he says. “I can’t complain about anything.”
Davis has since moved to Dallas, where he works for a construction company. He and his wife, a nurse, now have four kids. His coach at Wooddale High School, Cedric Miller, has coached six players who have played in the NFL and says the two best players he’s ever had were Davis and Dontari Poe, the 11th pick in the 2012 draft. “Roderick just did things on a football field you can’t teach,” Miller says. “He was just so instinctive.”
Advertisem*nt
The other two four-stars had productive careers at Ole Miss.
Ted Laurent, a Quebec-born powerhouse defensive tackle, had moved to Georgia in the eighth grade. His mother spoke no English, so Orgeron talking to her in French helped seal the deal on her son’s signing. Laurent had 17 tackles for losses in his career at Ole Miss before being picked in the 2012 CFL draft. He spent three seasons with the Edmonton Eskimos and has been with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats the past five. In 2018, he notched eight sacks en route to earning CFL All-Star status for the fourth time.
Ted Laurent has carved out a career in football more than a decade after joining the Rebels. (Joe Robbins / Getty Images)
Tony Fein, a junior college linebacker, came to Oxford as a 24-year-old Army veteran who had served in Iraq. He made 136 tackles in his two seasons for the Rebels, including 10 in their upset win at Florida. He went undrafted but had stints with the Seattle Seahawks and Baltimore Ravens during the 2009 NFL preseason. He died a few weeks later from what a coroner determined was an accidental drug overdose. Part of Fein’s legacy at Ole Miss was that he’s creditedwith being the one who came up with the “Landshark” hand gesture that has become a rallying cry in Oxford.
Snead, rated by 247 as the No. 37 player in the Class of 2006, was the biggest get for the Rebels’ staff back then. Ole Miss desperately needed a quarterback. Trouble was, Snead wasn’t going to be eligible to play until 2008. Orgeron never did get to coach him beyond watching him light up the first-team defense with the scout team that season. Just pinpointing Snead was quite an experience for the Rebels’ staff.
At the beginning of the 2007 class recruiting cycle, “QB” was scrawled right below O-line and D-line as the third-biggest priority listed on a dry erase board in the Ole Miss war room.
The most touted quarterback in the high school class that year was California’s Jimmy Clausen. The QBs who interested Ole Miss the most and who the staff felt like they were best positioned to sign were Stephen Garcia and Robert Marve from the Tampa area and Nick Foles, a huge kid from Texas who stood out both for his size and for the fact that he didn’t seem to have any trace of ego amid the recruiting circus. The Rebels’ wish list also seemed to fall in that order.
It played out this way: Garcia was enamored with Steve Spurrier and South Carolina. Marve liked Miami more as his stock surged, and Ole Miss strung along Foles, who later committed to Arizona State before ultimately signing with Michigan State and eventually transferring to Arizona.
“Oh God, that’s right. I forgot we slow-played Nick Foles!” said one of the former Ole Miss coaches I spoke with last week, letting out a big laugh at the thought of something that sounds rather silly these days. “The Super Bowl MVP! How about that?”
Advertisem*nt
Snead lost out on a quarterback battle with Colt McCoy in Austin in 2006. When Snead visited Oxford on his official visit, he was accompanied by his high school coach, Chad Morris. (Yes, that Chad Morris.)
Snead said he chose Ole Miss over TCU because he fell in love with the campus, for the opportunity to play in the SEC and because Orgeron “is a hell of a recruiter.” Snead backed up all of the expectations once he got into action, highlighted by a 14-2 TD-INT stretch over the Rebels’ final five games of 2008. That included wins against Auburn, at LSU, Miss State and No. 8 Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl.
Then the Snead hype kicked into overdrive. CBS Sports NFL columnist Pete Prisco touted Snead as a future first overall pick. ESPN’s Todd McShay said he was a first-round talent. Mel Kiper listed Snead in the top 10 on his draft big board going into 2009.
Even though Snead led the Rebels back to the Cotton Bowl, he struggled, throwing 20 interceptions. He opted to leave Ole Miss early and enter the NFL Draft but didn’t get selected. He signed as a free agent with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers but was cut, brought back briefly and then released again without ever playing in a game.
“Unbelievable talent. I’m talking unbelievable. Big. Had it all. Gun for an arm. Rocket. 6 (feet) 4. Runs,” Morris told me a few years back. “I can tell you exactly what happened: He lost it between the ears. He lost his focus. He got involved, as we’ve seen it many, many times — he was enjoying being a college quarterback, I guess, at Ole Miss.”
Morris thought Snead’s confidence also took a hit. “I remember him coming down to my house and telling me he was going to come out early,” Morris said. “I told him, ‘Don’t do this.’ It was after they beat Oklahoma State in the Cotton Bowl. And so he about gets his head took off out there in that game that night and I just thought to myself, ‘Don’t do this, Jevan. Don’t do this. You don’t need to do this right now, Jevan. You need to stay. You need to stay another year.’ ”
Jevan Snead was an important get for the Rebels. (Matthew Sharpe / Getty Images)
After getting cut by the Bucs a second time, Snead says he decided he “eventually had to grow up and get a real job.” He had a job in sales in Texas and also worked in business development in the medical device field until about a year ago when he moved to Southern California. He works for Cushman and Wakefield, a commercial real estate company.
Snead admits he sometimes thinks of the what-ifs. What could he have done differently? What if he would have stayed that extra year? But he knows dwelling on anything like that does him no good. “I really try to think more about what I can do today to ensure that I’m happy tomorrow,” he said.
Bouncing down memory lane with the former Ole Miss coaches also served as a good reminder of how farcical some things in the recruiting world can be. I had asked former Ole Miss running backs coach Frank Wilson, now the head coach at UTSA, if he remembered Robert Elliott, a one-time four-star Rebels running back commitment who ended up signing with archrival Mississippi State.
Advertisem*nt
“Do Iremember him?” Wilson said with a laugh.“I remember me and Freeze were hiding in the trees by his house (the weekend before signing day) because we thought (Mississippi State) may have beencommittingaviolation or were going to try something illegal.”
Orgeron’s initial class at Ole Miss in 2005, ranked by 247 at No. 32, was an unbalanced mix of high-level NFL talent and big character risks compiled while scrambling from leaving the USC staff for a second-tier SEC school. About half of them would be off the roster by Year 2. Five members of the class played in the NFL, including two first-rounders in Peria Jerry and Michael Oher, a future Pro Bowl wide receiver in Mike Wallace and BenJarvus Green-Ellis, who had two 1,000-yard rushing seasons.
Orgeron’s second class was by far his best. It included eight future NFL players, led by three-star prospects Dexter McCluster and Greg Hardy. The two classes provided the Rebels’ program with a much-needed infusion of talent.
“The approach (Orgeron) took would eventually have led to success,” former Ole Miss linebackers coach Dave Corrao says. “He had the willingness to go into places and out-recruit people because at Ole Miss you’re not a name-brand program. You’re trying to break through.
“No disrespect to (former Ole Miss head coach David) Cutcliffe, but there were probably only five draft-quality players in the whole program when we got there. And keeping up with the Joneses in the SEC is a hard thing, man.”
Corrao, now the director of football research for the Detroit Lions, wasn’t far off. From 2006-08, only three Ole Miss players were drafted. Regardless, going 7-16 in his first two seasons at Ole Miss only made reeling in coveted recruits that much harder for Orgeron in the SEC.
“The ’06 class was our best class,” says former Ole Miss defensive line coach Ryan Nielsen, now the New Orleans Saints’ D-line coach. “We killed it. I think we worked harder in ’07. But I think the whole ‘hot seat (thing)’ happened and we hadn’t won in two years. Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, they’re getting fired.’
Advertisem*nt
“We recruited the right players. It just wasn’t the right time.”
One of the first players committed to Ole Miss for 2007 was running back Stevan Ridley from Natchez, Miss. About three months later the future New England Patriot flipped to LSU. The Tigers were Ole Miss’ greatest recruiting nemesis. LSU signed six players Ole Miss had gone after hard.
T-Bob Hebert, ranked as the nation’s No. 2 center and No. 129 overall by 247, was family friends with Orgeron. His dad Bobby, the former Saints quarterback, grew up with Orgeron, and they played together at Louisiana’s Northwestern State. Ole Miss was the younger Hebert’s first college offer.
Hebert loved the summer camp Orgeron put on at Ole Miss. “It was super competitive and also super fun,” he says. “It was something so primal. From a pass-rushing standpoint, I learned so much from that camp. I think I got 10 sacks the next season as a 3-technique, and almost all of ’em I attributed to that camp.”
In addition to the camp, Orgeron’s charm was a draw. “He’s got that Cajun gift of BS,” Hebert says. “My grampa has this, where you can put him with a complete stranger and he’s just so tactful and socially adept that after 10 minutes you’d think they’ve been friends of years.” But Hebert still opted for the school his family grew up loving. He wound up starting 26 games, was part of the Tigers’ 2008 national title team and is now a morning show host on 104.5 ESPN Radio in Baton Rouge.
Like Hebert, Will Blackwell, a lineman from West Monroe, La., ranked by 247 as the country’s No. 225 prospect, had a connection to Orgeron. Blackwell’s grandfather Jerry Arledge coached Orgeron in college. Blackwell loved that camp, too, but he just couldn’t say no to LSU. Blackwell became an All-America guard for the Tigers in 2011. He’s back in Monroe, working for a company called Stryker that manufactures and distributes medical devices.
Drake Nevis committed to Ole Miss in February of his junior year at John Ehret High just outside of New Orleans. “They (Orgeron and Wilson) understood me as a person,” Nevis told me last week. Orgeron saw the explosive 6-1, 280-pounder, along with Laurent and Powe, as key pieces to a dominant defense. Nevis was rated as a three-star for much of the recruiting cycle until late in his senior season when he got bumped up to a four-star right after LSU offered him. Once that happened, the Rebels’ staff was worried he’d flip, too. And he did.
Nevis said the LSU offer changed things. “It was more from the spiritual side that changed it. It was very flattering to get that offer. You had that electrifying atmosphere of Tiger Stadium, but the word spoke to my spirit as I was in service, to go help out at LSU. You don’t want to argue with the Lord.”
Orgeron saw the potential of Drake Nevis (92) long before others did. (Steve Franz / LSU via Getty Images)
Nevis ended up as Rivals’ No. 93 overall prospect for the 2007 class. In his senior season in Baton Rouge, he made 13 TFLs, had six sacks and three forced fumbles and made All-American. For his career at LSU he had 31.5 TFLs and left as a third-round pick of the Indianapolis Colts. He spent four seasons in the NFL and the last four in the CFL. He and Ted Laurent finally got to be teammates, albeit with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Nevis graduated from LSU in 3½ years and plans on becoming a minister or youth pastor when he retires from football.
Advertisem*nt
Wilson joined the LSU staff in 2010 before Nevis’ senior season. He remembered what the big D-lineman had told him when he broke the news of his decommitment from the Rebels: “He said, ‘God has put me in position to go there and make a difference,’ and when I got there, he was very entrenched in the FCA and was a spiritual leader in that locker room. The things he set out to do, it wasn’t lip service, he talked and walked it. This wasn’t a kid who just said something. He lived it.”
The bulk of the 2007 class were three-star recruits. Some of them didn’t make it far into the Nutt regime in Oxford, whether it was due to maturity issues or the new staff simply preferring to bring in their own recruits instead. A handful of others from the group became steady contributors to those Cotton Bowl teams.
- Cornerback Jamariey Atterberry, who had run a 4.47 and vertical-jumped 38 inches at Ole Miss camp, was dismissed from the team shortly after Nutt arrived. He later became a police officer in Mississippi, according to a few of his old teammates.
- David Rue ended up signing with Wilson a second time when the former New Orleans high school coach was working at Southern Miss, but the 6-5, 250-pound tight end didn’t last long there, either.
- Justin Sanders — the defensive lineman whose father raised gameco*cks for fighting and put on a co*ckfight for Orgeron and two other Rebels assistants on the head coach’s home visit — returned to Alabama, where he’s married with kids living in the Huntsville area, according to former teammates.
- Scottie Williams, a linebacker from Atlanta, ended up transferring home to FCS Morehouse, where he became a standout defensive lineman after gaining about 40 pounds.
- Isaiah Smith didn’t find a role at linebacker for the Rebels and later joined the military, according to former teammates.
- Lionel Breaux, a former track standout from New Orleans, caught 32 passes in his four seasons at Ole Miss as a reserve wideout and special teams standout. According to teammates, he’s back in Louisiana and married with children. Breaux’s twin brother Delvon, whom the Rebels also tried to recruit, broke three vertebrae in a high school game and was never cleared to play in college at LSU. However, he was later cleared by other doctors and went from the Arena League to becoming an all-star in the CFL before playing for the NFL’s Saints from 2015-17. He rejoined the Hamilton Tiger-Cats last season as the highest-paid defensive back in the league.
- Alex “Tank” Washington, a 6-4, 348-pound offensive lineman who intrigued the staff when he clocked a 5.39 40 at the Rebels’ summer camp, never rose up the depth chart. Washington got into coaching after graduating from Ole Miss, working as a graduate assistant at Louisiana Monroe and then as the O-line coach at Livingstone College. Last February he was hired as the head coach and athletic director at his alma mater Carroll High School in northwest Louisiana.
- Mark Jean-Louis came from a California junior college to bolster the Rebels’ offensive line but didn’t see much game action. He stayed at Ole Miss to get his master’s degree and is now an assistant principal at Okolona (Miss.) High.
- Lamar Brumfield, a speedy junior college linebacker from Southern California who picked the Rebels over N.C. State, had 50 tackles and five TFLs at Ole Miss in three seasons. Brumfield moved back to L.A. after Ole Miss and is the president of Never Leveled, a travel/entertainment company.
- Fon Ingram, a three-star safety from Atlanta, had 133 tackles and five interceptions in his four seasons for the Rebels.
- Lawon Scott, the D-lineman from Florida who Rebels assistant Matt Lubick thought was named Scott Lawson until a few minutes after he’d offer the player a scholarship, was listed as the lowest-rated player in the class, according to 247. By his sophom*ore season, the 6-1, 322-pound defensive tackle earned honorable mention All-SEC honors. Scott had a shot with the Dallas Cowboys but was cut after minicamp. He had been working in Columbus, Ga., helping manage a Walgreen’s after playing locally in the Professional Indoor Football League for the Columbus Lions, but a co-worker at the store told The Athletic that Scott was deployed in the military last month.
- Johnny Brown, projected as one of the top in-state recruits from Mississippi in the class, lived up to that billing. The safety piled up 235 tackles and eight TFLs in his career with the Rebels. He now works as a salesman for Pepsi.
- LaDerrick Vaughn says his football career tailed off after he tore knee ligaments. He studied graphic design in college and sort of fell into personal training after he moved to Atlanta. “I got certified as a trainer and have met a lot of awesome people,” he says, adding that he’s now working on an app and, at 31, he’d also love to try out for the Atlanta Falcons. “My goal is to teach you how to work out without me. Diet scares people. It’s not what you’re eating. It’s what you’re drinking (in terms of the alcohol and sugars). It’s about portion control. I push work ethic. As long as you’re getting off the couch, something good will happen.”
Four members of the 2007 Ole Miss class stuck on NFL rosters. Bradley Sowell was a 6-7, 364-pound project from an hour north of Oxford. The staff saw potential in his size and athleticism — Sowell also was a pitcher on his high school baseball team. The hope was that if Sowell ever got down to 315, they’d really have something. They were right. Sowell started 36 games for the Rebels, with 28 at left tackle. He showed up at the NFL Combine at 309 pounds and ran a 5.22 40. He went undrafted but has played seven seasons in the league. This season, while playing for the Chicago Bears, he even caught his first touchdown pass.
Ashlee Palmer came to Ole Miss from Compton (Calif.) Community College. He made an immediate impact at linebacker and finished his two-year career in the SEC with 139 tackles, 12 TFLs and four interceptions. Palmer didn’t get drafted but played seven seasons in the NFL, excelling on special teams.
Ashlee Palmer was a linebacker with multiple skills and speeds for the Rebels. (Matthew Sharpe / Getty Images)
Jerrell Powe battled weight issues and was plagued by injuries but was a force for the Rebels once the NCAA finally gave him the green light. He had 24 TFLs and seven sacks in three seasons, making second-team All-SEC twice before moving on to the NFL as a sixth-round pick. Powe, who clocked a 5.25 40 for NFL scouts despite weighing 335, played six seasons in the pro before his body started to break down, he told me. “My body still hurts from the injuries that I had,” he said. “My back. My right knee. My big toe. My left wrist don’t bend. I have anxiety attacks, but I’ll get through it. I’ll be OK.”
Despite the health issues, Poweis as big a success story as there is from the Meat Market class. After having such a public battle with the NCAA, he made good on a promise to his family and friends that he would earn an Ole Miss diploma, and last summer he accomplished that after completing 21 credit hours to finish his criminal justice degree.
“I always wanted to be the first (in his family to graduate),” he said. “I used to pray as a little boy that I wanted to be the one to carry the family on my back. And just proving everybody wrong, and I’m a competitor. When they say I can’t, I’m gonna do it.
Advertisem*nt
“I always tell people that it’s easier to tell ’em why you did it than why you didn’t do it. Hell, if I’d have never done it, I’d have found a million f*ckin’ excuses. Aw, the NCAA screwed me over. They kept me out three years, this and that. I beat the odds on every level.”
Rishaw Johnson was the rare Louisiana native who chose Ole Miss over LSU. The 6-4, 315-pound offensive lineman also picked the Rebels over Florida State. Johnson, who dominated at an Ole Miss summer camp to go from under-the-radar to hot commodity, had really bonded with Wilson. The Rebels’ running backs coach under Orgeron was respected all over Louisiana and had brought a dozen players from his home state to Oxford in his first two years there, Wallace and Green-Ellis among them.
A big, explosive athlete, Johnson was a starting guard until Nutt dismissed him in the 2010 season for a violation of team rules. Johnson transferred to California(Pa.) University, where he was an All-American and member of the dean’s list. He spent three seasons in the NFL. He has since reunited with Wilson at UTSA and is in his third season on the Roadrunners’ staff as an assistant offensive line coach.
“We had a very talented class,” Johnson says. “A lot of us were rough around the edges, I won’t lie. The thing I can say is we were really talented. Some of usstruggled maturity-wise, maybe not understanding the expectations it takes to be a college football player and not being disciplined enough to understands the rigors of what it takes on and off the field.”
Some of the stuff I remember most involved the biggest fish the Rebels went after. A little more than a week before national signing day, there were only two prospect nameplates on the out-of-state recruiting board in the Ole Miss war room. One was for Joe McKnight, the nation’s No. 1 overall recruit, and the other was from a four-star tight end from Pittsburgh whom 247 rated as the No. 101 recruit. (The nameplates of other out-of-state prospects with whom the Rebels were still involved had been shifted to the in-state board.)
The tight end’s name was left up there by Orgeron as a not-so-subtle reminder to assistant coach Art Kehoe about chasing ghosts. Kehoe, who coached the Rebels’ offensive line coach, had flown up to Pennsylvania to make a plea to the tight end because one of the player’s teammates, a center the Rebels were recruiting, said he was going to try and bring his more highly touted buddy with him. Kehoe made the trip and the tight end cold-shouldered him, saying he was more interested in Ohio State, Clemson and Arizona.
“All of those schools up north are trying to come down south to find players, so why would we do the opposite?” Orgeron told the staff, convinced the time and travel money was better spent elsewhere. “It makes no sense.”
That trip led to Orgeron’s newest motto: “Planes don’t fly north!!”
Advertisem*nt
That tight end: Rob Gronkowski.
Another player the staff swung for and came up empty on was a three-star edge rusher from DeSoto, Texas, whom Orgeron described as “a power-packed frickin’ freak.” That player, Von Miller, has gone to seven Pro Bowls and been a Super Bowl MVP. And Golden Tate wasn’t the only versatile Tennessee native Ole Miss targeted. Freeze predicted he’d out-recruit the Vols to get 247’s No. 264 player, Harrison Smith. Unfortunately for the Rebels, Notre Dame out-recruited Ole Miss for both of them, and Smith ended up as a first-round pick.
Then and now, Orgeron’s enthusiasm has served him well on the recruiting trail. (University of Mississippi Athletics via Getty Images)
A few of the players Orgeron was especially high on didn’t pan out at all. Rolando Melancon’s film reminded Orgeron of Warren Sapp, a player he coached at Miami. Melancon was a surprisingly nimble defensive tackle who also excelled as a running back, but there were concerns about the work ethic and effort level of the 6-1, 270-pounder from Lutcher, La. Could Orgeron boost those once the kid settled in at Ole Miss? He’d never find out. For as much as Melancon had said he loved Orgeron and that he was the first coach to jump out for him, he said he thought Tennessee wanted him the most. Melancon, ranked No. 131 overall by 247, signed with the Vols but didn’t qualify. He was routed to junior college in Northern California but didn’t stay there long. He returned home to enroll at Louisiana Tech but was dismissed for a violation of team rules in early 2009.
Melancon resurfaced at FCS Texas Southern later that year and had 11 TFLs in nine games. The following season he battled an ankle injury but was still an impact guy for Texas Southern until a rival coach turned him in for transcript irregularities that made him ineligible. According to a LinkedIn profile, Melancon is an electrical apprentice for a construction company based in Kansas.
“He was as talented as all get out,” says Tremaine Jackson, his position coach at Texas Southern, who is now the defensive line coach at Texas State. “His get-off and twitch were like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The way he could periph the ball (find it in his peripheral vision) and see his key and be on the guard before the guard even know it — he was legit now. I interned with the (Houston) Texans in ’09 and interned with the Chargers in 2016 and even Melvin Ingram, as good as his get-off is, it doesn’t compare to Rolando Melancon. He didn’t lift weights. It would’ve been scary if that guy loved the weight room.”
McKnight’s story took a more tragic turn. The dynamic all-purpose back whom coach Wilson had guaranteed he’d get to Ole Miss in the spring of his junior year, signed with USC. McKnight battled homesickness and leg injuries but had a dazzling performance in the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl win against Illinois after the Trojans geared their game plan around him. McKnight ran for 1,000 yards in 2009 before leaving USC after three seasons to enter the NFL Draft.
He flashed some of the skills that recruiters raved about but was best as a kick returner, making All-Pro for the 2011 season. The New York Jets released him one year later.McKnight moved on to the CFL and was under contract with the Saskatchewan Roughriders for the 2017 season. On Dec. 1, 2016, McKnight was back home in Louisiana when he was gunned down by a 56-year-old man in a road rage incident. Last March, the man was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 30 years in prison. McKnight left behind a 9-year-old son.
Advertisem*nt
Colby Arceneaux, one of McKnight’s best friends since they were 9 years old, had just gotten home from work when he saw the look on his wife’s face that December day two years ago.
“It was so surreal that it happened that way,” Arceneaux says. “Anybody that knew Joe knew he wasn’t an aggressor. Joe was a great guy. He would do anything for you. He’d joke around like nobody else.He loved his little boy. That was his world.
“It’s still really difficult for his family to deal with it. Joe was the leader for that family.”
A dozen years ago, Ole Miss’ plan was to sign both McKnight and Arceneaux, a 5-7, 175-pound defensive back who was a four-year starter at Louisiana prep powerhouse John Curtis High. Orgeron’s in with them seemed strong. He and Arceneaux’s dad were college teammates and were still tight. McKnight also had formed a bond with Wilson.
“Joe had a real interest in Ole Miss just because of what Frank and Ed were able to recruit,” Arceneaux said. “He really liked the players here. The coaches had a huge presence in New Orleans. Frank Wilson in New Orleans at the time was legendary. Everybody knew Orgeron’s ability to develop talent. But USC had that appeal, that Heisman celebrity feel.
“I was hoping he’d come, but I wanted him to truly do what was best for him.”
Arceneaux lettered as a true freshman backup safety and on special teams. However, he left after the coaching change after he says Nutt told him he didn’t want Arceneaux playing for the Rebels’ baseball team. He transferred to his dad’s alma mater Northwestern State, where he made 77 tackles in two seasons. Arceneaux graduated in three years with a double major. He later got a master’s from Tulane. Two years ago he relocated his wife and two kids back to Oxford, when he became the youngest acquirer of a U.S. domestic insurance carrier with Upstream Life.
“There was a good opportunity to grow the business here, and this was a place I wanted to raise our kids,” he says. “It really has a good small-town feel.”
Advertisem*nt
Arceneaux admits he has regrets about leaving Ole Miss, but they aren’t as much football-related as they are for networking purposes. He talks to Sowell, his best friend,every day and says he talks to Powe and Johnny Brown frequently, too.
“We had a blast,” Arceneaux says. “What was so neat about that group is between the junior class, the sophom*ore class and our class, I think we were all pretty tight. We had lots of New Orleans guys and we got pretty close.”
In retrospect, Orgeron’s Ole Miss staff was pretty close to getting the Rebels turned around, but like the big Cajun once said back then, if he didn’t win fast enough, he’d bestocking the fridge for someone else. And he was spot-on.
(Top photo by Chris Graythen / Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57lnJvcGtkZH9xfZhoZ2tnYGl8o77UnJxmnpWhsa6tzWaknpmkYrqivsqeq2aan6S4brvLnmSmoaOoeqe7zq2ZmqScYr%2Bmr9GuoK2hnpx6c3yPcGScpJGowG6xw2amq5%2BVp7yvew%3D%3D
- ←Previous Post
- NextPost →
