Michigan safety Dax Hill lets his play speak for itself
Top recruit is still getting acclimated to the college game.
By Ashley Bastock / The Blade
Tue, 15 Oct 2019 18:30:20 GMT
link -- with images
ANN ARBOR — True freshman safety Dax Hill might be soft-spoken off the field, but his play on the field is loud and clear.
Hill was Michigan’s top-ranked signee in the 2019 class. But Hill isn’t one to look at star-ratings, social media, or boast about his accomplishments. On Tuesday night, before the Tulsa, Okla. native met with the media, fellow safety Josh Metellus said that while Hill isn’t the loudest, he’s still got an edge to him on the field.
“You're going to be able to tell when he comes out here, he's really quiet, he don't speak out that much,” Metellus said. “But he's a competitor, you can just see that in his eyes. Especially when we get in the workouts or on the field, you can see it. He wants to win every rep, he wants to be able to play.”
The 6-0, 190-pound Hill has 12 tackles this season, and 11 have come in Michigan’s past three games. In the weeks since the Rutgers game, the five-star safety has seen increased playing time and reps on the defensive side of the ball.
“I'm just taking it week-by-week,” Hill said. “Not trying to overthink anything. Just trusting my abilities and the coaches. It's just a great coaching staff coaching me, so I'm just trusting the process throughout this whole season.”
Hill is one of the fastest players on the team, according to special teams and safeties coach Chris Partridge. He’s also proven himself to be a quick learner, and said that after his increased reps in the Iowa game, he had more confidence.
But Hill had proven himself to the coaching staff a week earlier, before the Rutgers game.
“It's funny, if you've got a freshman, you throw him out there, he gets burned for a touchdown, then people would be saying how much he sucks,” Partridge said earlier this season. “But going into the game we felt comfortable. I wasn't nervous at all. I felt like the role we were going to ask him to do, he was going to do, and do it at a high level. And he did.”
In many ways, Hill says he’s adjusting to his first year at Michigan like a normal college student, even though he is anything but, considering he was rated as the No. 1 high school safety in the nation in his class.
He leaned on his older brother, Baltimore Ravens running back Justice Hill. He also enrolled this summer in Michigan’s bridge program, a seven-week program that helps freshmen acclimate to college life academically as they make the transition from high school.
The biggest hurdle when he got to Ann Arbor wasn’t anything schematically in Michigan’s defense; rather it was getting used to more intensive academic and football schedules, as players go from early morning football meetings, to morning classes, back to meetings, and finally to practice.
“It was probably in the middle of the summer where I started getting used to everything,” Hill said.
While Hill’s impact has increased in recent weeks, there was a point last winter when there were serious questions about whether he would play for Michigan at all.
In early December, Hill tweeted that he was flipping his verbal commitment from Michigan to Alabama. He offered no additional context at the time he tweeted out his decision to de-commit, but then was back to his original choice of Michigan less than two weeks later.
Hill said on Tuesday that Alabama’s hard recruitment of him briefly led to him changing his mind.
“Really, they were just hard on me,” he said. “I didn't really know where my head was at at that time.”
But one of the reasons Hill ultimately landed on Michigan was Don Brown’s defensive scheme. At Booker T. Washington High School, Hill was the feature on the team’s man-coverage scheme. He recognized similar aspects of Brown’s system.
“I was watching Michigan for a couple of years, and I knew I could actually see myself playing in that defense because that's what I'm used to playing, man,” he said. “So that's one of the reasons why I chose to come.”
Hill might have had a lot of outside expectations placed on him coming into the season, but he’s not paying those any mind.
For now, he’s content to let his current play and work ethic speak for him, rather than high school evaluations.
“It's just me being myself,” he said. “I didn't really think about that coming in. I knew all of that didn't even matter, that was in the past, high school. Coming in I just wanted to compete and see where I could contribute.”