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It all happened so fast.
On December 14, as Michigan basketball faced a top ten Oregon team, a skeleton crew of staff members hosted a small number of recruits and commits. Much of the staff was out of town, recruiting for the future while securing there’d be no surprises come Early Signing Day that upcoming Wednesday. But there was one uncommitted prospect in town from the 2020 class: quarterback Dan Villari.
Villari, from Massapequa (NY) Plainedge, was under-recruited, as his region isn’t exactly a hotbed of Division I-level college football prospects. He sat in the stands at Crisler Center without an offer, but getting his first taste of Ann Arbor, seeing if it was a fit. After all, Michigan was still hopeful that now-Ohio State signee C.J. Stroud — who had visited the week prior — would choose to be a Wolverine, and this was all in the wake of J.D. Johnson — who had been committed for nearly a year — announced he wouldn’t be able to play football any longer due to a congenital heart defect that was recently detected.
Villari took it in, and hoped for that offer. It soon came, on Signing Day. It took all of a few hours for him to make that decision, to become a Wolverine and sign the papers making it official.
We know what went into Villari’s choice, but what about Michigan? What did it see in him? After all, he was unheralded, a three-star ranked well below most of the Wolverines’ 2020 signees and commitments.
Naturally, he wasn’t just a consolation prize, as some might suggest. Speaking with Jon Jansen on the Learfield IMG weekly Inside Michigan Football radio show, Michigan director of recruiting Matt Dudek shared some traits of Villari that piqued the team’s interest, and how the staff went about finding him after Johnson announced his retirement as a football player.
“Watching Dan – and we obviously had the unfortunate circumstance of our quarterback committed being medically DQed for us – we love him, can’t say his name right this second but everybody knows,” Dudek said. “It’s one of those deals where we’re honoring his scholarship. We were put behind an 8-ball because of that – not his fault.
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“You recruit quarterbacks typically two years in advance. So now we’re three months out, two months out from signing day. So we went through, my staff – Nate Crutchfield, Jerret McElwain – we went through and scrubbed everything. Not just main commitments, main school commitments – we went back on all the guys we already evaluated, and we stacked Dan Villari up against all the guys that we watched, and there’s something special about him. He is a big guy – so a little different than what we have – than Cade. Nothing against Cade. Cade’s a little bit shorter guy at 6-foot, and I can’t talk about the other guy I was thinking about now that may be coming at a later date, at a later class (Ed. note: presumably J.J. McCarthy). The difference is he’s a little bit bigger. He’s athletic, he can move. He’s a lacrosse player, so he has that competitive nature in him. Throws a really good ball, but that being said, he cannot even play in the second-half of even most of his games.
“In November, his coach was suspended for a game for running up the score, quote-unquote, so he didn’t even play in the second-half. So he has a lot of growing to do. We’re really, really excited about Dan.”