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DT Michael Hall, Jr. (Cleveland Browns)

Man playing with boys. I live in the next district over from Coventry and had thought about going to see Hall but when the torrential downpour started I thought better of it. Streetsboro got a couple good college prospects from Akron East that should really improve them offensively.
 
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MIKE HALL

Hall, a two-way player for Streetsboro, noticed a linebacker blitzing, took a quick jab step to the left and knocked the poor soul from Field High School off of his axel, sending him spinning into the grass. As Hall – playing right tackle – adjusted his helmet mid-play due to the collision, his quarterback loaded up for a deep incompletion down the sideline. But a second after releasing the ball, he got drilled by a Field defensive end for an egregious late hit penalty, careening into his unexpecting running back’s legs.

Quickly turning around, Hall grabbed the offender and pulled him off to the side. As he leaned his right hand down to help his quarterback stand up after getting rocked, Hall turned his attention to the defensive end. He walked him down, standing facemask to facemask as he let his thoughts be known.

“It was just a crazy feeling because, you know, you've got to treat your quarterback like your mom,” Hall said. “You would never want anybody to hit your mom. So I treat my quarterback like my mother. I would never let anybody do nothing. You've just got to treat it as that. You've just got to take that leadership.”

Those 16 seconds – the pancake, the pull-off and the jawing – personified Hall’s performance on Friday. He was physically unstoppable while serving as both the vocal presence and a leader by example for his team in a 35-0 victory, which improved its record to 2-0 on the season. Except for a less-than-three-minute stretch when he battled a charley horse in his leg, Hall played every single snap on both sides of the ball.

Hall’s future as a Buckeye will come as a defensive tackle. Yet versus an overmatched Field team – which plays Ohio high school football in Division-IV – with nobody who could handle the 6-foot-3, 290-pounder, Hall showed why he had Division-I teams such as Iowa State who wanted him to play offensive line for them, too.

Moving around between nose tackle, 3-technique and defensive end, Hall shut down everything that came his way, picking up several tackles for loss and a sack. At right tackle, he either neared or reached double-digit pancakes (hand up, I wasn’t writing that count down).

Oh, and the coaches subbed him in with a 21-0 lead and one second left in the first half, lined him up at fullback and called for him to take a handoff.



Naturally, he plunged into the end zone for six points.

“I played great, definitely,” Hall said. “Even my coach said I just played with effort. It was just crazy. It was better than anything he's seen before, so it was definitely a great compliment.”
 
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Broken hand, done for the season. :(

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Hall has committed to play in the 2021 All-American Bowl in early January and has been contemplating early graduation so he could enrol at Ohio State in January and start his Buckeye career early.

Just sayin': Hope we see Mike Hall on campus this January (or at least by the Spring practices) with a fully healed right hand.
 
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INJURY UPDATES
Last week, Cleveland.com reported that 2021 defensive tackle commit Mike Hall would miss the final two games of the regular season with a broken hand he suffered in a practice.

Looks like Hall's recovery went better than expected, though, as it appears Hall is set to come back a week early:

 
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HALL BELIEVES BUCKEYES WILL HAVE “BEST DEFENSIVE LINE IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL”
The first time Mike Hall met Jack Sawyer, Hall had not yet joined Ohio State’s 2021 class, but Sawyer was doing his best recruiting job on his fellow defensive line prospect and was already setting the standard for what he expects from them.

Soon enough, Hall committed to the Buckeyes, and he is now on the path to hitting the ceiling that he believes this three-headed haul of himself, Sawyer and Tyleik Williams will one day hit.

“I believe we will be the best defensive line in college football,” Hall told Eleven Warriors. “That’s the mindset. That’s always been the mindset for Jack. When I first got introduced to him, that was his mindset, and that’s all we talk about is being the best defensive line in college football and to win national championships. That’s been the mindset since day one.”

THE HALL FILE
  • Class: 2021
  • Size: 6-foot-3/290 lbs
  • Pos: DT
  • School: Streetsboro (Streetsboro, Ohio)
  • Composite Rating: ★★★★
  • Composite Rank: 49
Hall is a four-star prospect ranked No. 49 overall while Sawyer is a five-star defensive end ranked No. 4 overall and Williams is ranked No. 161 overall and No. 12 at defensive tackle as a four-star recruit. It’s one of the best three-man hauls in America’s 2021 recruiting class, and in two months (or maybe longer), they could be joined by the No. 3 overall player in five-star defensive end J.T. Tuimoloau.

Hall and Co. are making a concerted push to land the No. 2-ranked strongside defensive end out of Eastside Catholic (Washington) High School after having recently landed a fellow Washingtonian in five-star receiver Emeka Egbuka.

“J.T. doesn’t talk too much that I know of,” Hall said. “But me and J.T. are cool. He’s definitely a cool person to talk to over the phone. He seems like a good person. We try to talk to him every day, but at the end of the day he doesn’t talk back. He’s just like Emeka. They’re not really talkative guys so it’s pretty hard to get those guys to talk when they’re not used to it.”

In an opposite story of Tuimoloau – who has been ranked in the top 10 overall ever since he received his first ranking as a sophomore – Hall was a late bloomer rankings-wise.

In the summer of 2019, Hall was ranked No. 409 overall as a three-star before slowly rising into the top 250 as a four-star, then into top-100 territory and eventually getting to his perch now as a top-50 prospect.

“It’s definitely been crazy going from being underrated and under-ranked and going to one camp and just being a three-star and coming out of nowhere,” Hall said. “But it made me work harder because it made me realize that not everybody is good as when they rank them. Rankings don’t really matter as long as you know your worth and your work ethic and work hard, you can do anything.”

At a summer camp in 2019, Hall blew up after a head-turning performance to jump-start that journey. Even though he was unable to work in Larry Johnson’s group that day, word eventually got around to the Buckeyes’ defensive line coach and he got in contact with Hall to get his Ohio State recruitment truly rolling.

“It was in the summer camp with a lot of people just talking about me, coaches and everything,” Hall said when asked how Johnson got his eyes on him. “I was the top guy at the camp, and people kept talking about me and I guess Coach J heard about it the next day. So they started contacting me when they could.”

That eventually sprouted into a strong relationship between the like-minded pair.

“I talk to Coach J just about every day,” Hall said. “I definitely have a strong relationship with him. We talk about life in general, football, anything. I feel like I can talk to Coach J or any of the coaching staff about anything. It’s just that culture and that bond we built.

“I’m not a talkative person. I like to get comfortable with a person first before I really talk. But Coach J talking, him talking gets me hyped up. Anything he says just fires me up, especially on the pregame speeches. Man, it really makes you wanna be out there like, ‘Man, why can’t I be out there now?’”
 
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Couple things

This thread standing at just 7 pages is a travesty. This dude deserves better. He’s legit regardless of where he comes from but, with ‘Special Powers’ the sky is the limit.

Also......such a shame he isn’t an early enrollee. Woulda been a huge boost for him and the team.
 
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