MORGANTOWN — When Steve Dunlap went to watch Shaw High School in Cleveland play football, the West Virginia University assistant coach in charge of safeties had his head turned by a player who most coaches would have taken one look at and walked away from.
The world of college football isn’t interested in 5-foot-11, 179-pound defensive ends.
That is what Darwin Cook was in those days, but Dunlap saw something far different.
Being the safety coach and having brought along the likes of Robert Sands and Sidney Glover and so many other defensive players at West Virginia over the years, he saw a kid who was both quick and fast, a kid who was athletically gifted, a kid who enjoyed hitting.
And he saw one other thing, perhaps the most important trait that a player can have.
“He’s a kid who wants to be somebody,” Dunlap said.
Darwin Cook is not a name you heard a lot about, unless you spoke privately with Dunlap, who was in love with what he has prior to his coming out party in the Gold-Blue Spring Game, in which he had six tackles, most of them tooth rattling.
He came to WVU last year knowing nothing about the safety position and really didn’t learn a whole lot as he spent his time on the scout team, running other teams’ defenses.
That and gaining weight, having put on 30 pounds since arriving in Morgantown.
“I didn’t even see the weight, until I stepped on the scale,” Cook said.
The weight was necessary, but Dunlap said it took him a while to get used to carrying it on the field.
The first question for Cook is to ask him what was a kid who lacked size doing at defensive end in high school, especially one who was such a good athlete that he was a 600-meter champion, played running back and also punted.
“I was there one day when he dropped the snap, so he picked it up and ran 55 yards for a touchdown,” Dunlap said.
How does that wind up at defensive end?
“They said to me ‘if the quarterback can’t throw the ball, we don’t need you in the secondary,’” he said.
They just told him to line up, put his hand on the ground and go get the quarterback, something he did 21 times one year, 25 another. He was spending more time in the opponent’s backfield than the tailback.
And he did it savagely.
“I’m a head hunter,” he said, adding, “a head hunter with speed.”
When he arrived here, everything was new.
“It’s gonna take time,” Dunlap admitted. “It’s just a different world from anything he’s done. He played with his hand on the ground. Now he has to play like a linebacker, learn to blitz, play man-to-man, make the checks. You have to be smart to be there.”
What was toughest?
“The hardest thing has been getting coached. In high school they just said ‘Get the quarterback.’ So that’s what I did,” he said.
Now he was being yelled at on a daily basis by Dunlap, pushed hard to learn all the intricacies of safety play.
“When I first got here I had never played anything but defensive end. They had me doing man-to-man and man, I was looking terrible,” he said.
How could it not, considering how his head was swimming with instruction.
“My head wasn’t swimming. It was spinning,” he corrected.
To help him learn, they assigned him to watch Glover, the veteran safety who he would be backing up.
“I model myself after Sidney,” he explained, referring to hard-hitting Sidney Glover, the senior starter at the position. “They told me to watch him and do what he does. Well, he likes karaoke. Now I’m doing it just like him.”
Now he’s on the doorstep of grasping it all.
“He’s come a long way and he’s only going to get better,” Sands said.
It looks like he’s going to be somebody.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
