College football 2010 | Man without team finds home at ODU

NORFOLK

As the defensive coordinator of a brand new college football team, Andy Rondeau knows that when an NFL scout calls him these days, they’re doing it as little more than a courtesy.

There’s no way Old Dominion University’s second-year team could possibly have a player worthy of NFL consideration. Not this soon.

So when Rondeau answered a call from a scout for the Arizona Cardinals over the summer, he wasn’t quite sure what to say to the guy on the other end.

“I told him, 'You aren’t going to believe this, but we’ve got a player who tests,’ ” Rondeau said.

It’s an interesting word, tests. It takes on a different connotation when you use it in NFL circles. It means a guy runs fast, jumps high and is freaky strong.

There are certain measurement numbers that catch an NFL scout’s eye.

Run the 40-yard dash in 4.37 seconds and scouts take notice.

Add in a 36½-inch vertical jump and a 9-foot-6-inch horizontal leap and you’ll have that scout entering a new name into his Blackberry.

When the scout learns that you run the NFL’s standard shuttle test in 4.12 seconds, bench 410 pounds, squat 475 and hand clean 3 40? Suddenly, there’s a computer file with your name on it.

Add the fact that your older brother was the NFL’s defensive rookie of the year in 2008 and you are pinging on radar screens.

Deron Mayo tests.

And he’s about to start his one and only season of playing football at Old Dominion University.

In December, Mayo was a discard, left behind in the trash heap that quickly became Hofstra University’s football program. He was headed for a biology class the morning of Dec. 3 when a Hofstra assistant c oach called him and told him to skip it.

“He said, 'You need to be at this meeting more than you need to be in that class,’” Mayo said. “I knew something was up.”

The program was being disbanded, the players sent on their way. There would be a fire sale of flesh to follow the next week, with college programs salvaging what players they could.

Bobby Wilder had finished his first year as head coach at ODU just weeks prior. While the Monarchs were pretty good – they went 9-2 in their inaugural season – there were some deficiencies. Stopping the run and sacking the quarterback were two big ones. ODU did neither with regularity.

So when Rich Nagy, one of the coaches at Hofstra, called Wilder and told him he might want to take a look at a certain defensive end, Wilder was plenty inter ested .

Having grown up in Maine, Wilder over the years took more than just a passing interest in the New England Patriots. He knew all about Deron Mayo’s older brother Jerod, who plays linebacker for the Pats.

Even better, Wilder had recruited Deron’s younger brother, Derek, who ended up signing with Richmond.

Mayo isn’t as big as Jerod or Derek. In fact, his size – he’s 5-foot-11 and weighs 225 pounds – throws some people off when told that he plays defensive end. But Mayo is more of a hybrid than a true end. He was recruited at Hofstra as a linebacker and ended up at defensive end only b ecause the Pride had an injury-riddled year and needed him there.

Wilder didn’t care what position Mayo was listed as playing. He just knew he needed that speed, whether it was rushing a quarterback or dropping off the line to cover a tight end or running back on a pass route out of the backfield.

As a bonus, ODU was a ticket home for Mayo, who grew up in Hampton and played at Kecoughtan High.

Kecoughtan was where he first flashed his incredible speed. As a senior there, he was fourth in the 100 meters in the State Group AAA championships, clocking 10.7.

Mayo laughs now at how he had ended up at Hofstra. He attended a football camp at Richmond and enjoyed working with Spiders assistant Mike Elko. When Elko moved to Hofstra, he went hard after Mayo, who made a recruiting visit to only on e place: Long Island.

“They took me to New York City, showed me the bright lights, and I committed to play for them the next day,” Mayo said. “I learned later that Hofstra isn’t really in New York City.”

Mayo has one year of eligibility at ODU. That’s the tough part about shutting down a program, the hurt it causes.

It also put Mayo in a bit of a pickle. Rather than play his senior season in a program where he had matured over the years, whose system he k new well, he’s been in overdrive since arriving at ODU, trying to catch up, trying to earn his stripes.

His saving grace – his “in,” so to speak – was Ryan Martin, ODU’s strength coach. Martin had been at Hofstra before ODU. Mayo was a weight-room junky from the get-go, and Martin needed Mayo to show the younger players at ODU how it’s done.

“The kid has thrown our curve off in the weight room,” Rondeau said. “The numbers don’t add up. He shouldn’t be doing this. And when you tell people what he’s doing, it’s easy to understand if they think you’re full of crap.”

Couple his insane weight-room number s with his speed and, well, Mayo has had moments when he rubbed his new teammates the wrong way.

“When he put that 4.37 up during spring testing, he ran back past the skill position guys – you know, the wide receivers and running backs and DBs – and he kind of winked, as if to say, 'Mat ch that,’ ” running back Desmond Williams recalled.

“And he wears No. 5, which was also kind of a problem at the beginning. In our locker room, the lockers are arranged by numbers, not by positions. Defensive ends aren’t supposed to wear No. 5. He’s right in the middle with all the skill guys. We didn’t take it too well.”

Then came the day in May when Mayo pushed the biggest button he could. The team was running long gassers – 80-yard sprints – for conditioning. After a dozen of them, Mayo looked around at teammates who were winded and pooped as the workout ended. He hollered at Martin, “That’s it? No overtime? Man, we need to run more.”

It was a moment in which Mayo could have turned off an entire team. Instead, Williams said that was the moment when the rest of the team “got it.”

“At that point, I really understood that Deron Mayo is all about being the best he can possibly be ... and wants to take the rest of us with him,” Williams said.

Deron Mayo can’t wait for Saturday to get here. He can’t wait to race onto Foreman Field in front o f a throng of home fans. He’s beyond anxious when he thinks about playing a home game i nside a packed stadium.

For him, that’s never happened. Hofstra’s was a dying program from the moment he walked onto the campus. He just didn’t know it. In hi s three seasons there, the la rgest home crowd was the 7,160 who came to see Hofstra play Long Island’s other team, Stony Brook. And probably half that crowd was rooting for Stony Brook.

Wilder hopes Mayo enjoys the moment when he first walks onto Foreman Field, where a sellout crowd of 19,782 will await.

“The only person putting any pressure on Deron to perform should be Deron,” Wilder said. “We are not asking him to be the savior of this program. We were a good program already. I just want him to play his game, to play his role. And by game time his role will be clearly defined.

“I want him to just play. And with his freakish combination of speed and strength, that should be enough because he’s the strongest 225-pound football player I’ve seen in my 22 years of coaching.”

Mayo’s only regret? That he has just one year at ODU. But he figures it’s better than nothing.

“I don’t think I could have found a better place to land,” Mayo said. “I felt after everything that happened that ... that God had a plan for me.”

Rich Radford, 446-2463 rich.radford@pilotonline.com