Hoke Smith

He finished high school in Macon, Georgia with 499 tackles. Two hundred and ten of them came in his senior season alone, which MaxPreps ranked as the most in the state and the ninth most in the country. He was the Georgia High School Association's Class A Private School Defensive Player of the Year at First Presbyterian Day School, all-state twice, and he lettered four times in football and four more in baseball. He had zero scholarship offers. His name is Coleman Cauley. Three schools invited him to walk on. Georgia Southern, Georgia State, Mercer. Not one of the three made it a preferred walk-on spot, which is the version where somebody is at least expecting you. "It really upset me when I didn't get an offer from Georgia Southern, after a really good senior season," he said. He was ready to quit football. His mother had been doing the work he would not do for himself. Coaches tweeted when he won something, and he never passed any of it along. "I remember telling him that this is not the 1980s anymore," Becky Cauley said. "You need to market yourself." So she did it for him. She retweeted the news of his senior award and added a tag for an account called Recruit Georgia. A Navy assistant named Robert Green saw the tweet. Green called the account and asked why nobody had taken this kid yet. "Because he is humble," the man told him. In late January of 2022, Green called the house in Macon and got Coleman's father, Scot, on the line. Coleman's own answer arrived as a text message to his dad. "I am not going in the navy." He went and visited Annapolis anyway. The offer came after that trip, and he took it. He is a senior now, studying political science, playing MIKE linebacker, and through eight games this season he has 63 tackles with 35 of them unassisted. Navy is 2 and 6. He has not missed much. On January 2 he picked off a pass in the fourth quarter of the Liberty Bowl and ran it back for a touchdown in a 35-13 win. He had 10 tackles in that game too. No Navy player had ever scored on an interception return in the program's bowl history. "And he is a hammer who plays really fast on Saturdays," his head coach Brian Newberry said. He graduates in May. What he wants out of it is a commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. On SATURDAY, Navy plays Temple in Annapolis. Four years ago, three schools would not promise him a locker. The only reason anyone in college football ever looked at his film is that his mother hit the retweet button on something he was too embarrassed to share.