Dixon's Long-Winding Journey to UW Involved COVID, Will Harris and More

Sometimes junior-college football players get a bad rap, that the reason they have to go the two-year route is because they're bad students.

That's not the case for Thaddeus Dixon, the University of Washington's newly arrived cornerback from Long Beach City College.

He's a history major.

Well-versed on Montlake secondary musings. Intimately acquainted with the Jimmy Lake Lockdown Era. A believer in the Trent McDuffie Crusades.

Just listen to him quote his UW research findings, as if he's giving a post-graduate football dissertation.

"I feel like that's the standard, that's always been the standard here at Washington — corners who can cover, especially man to man," Dixon said. "We've been running that pretty much the last 10 years. That's what expected out of me. If you can't do that, you can't play."

We?

The 6-foot-1, 190-pound from Los Angeles has been on campus all of 90 days.

Well, Dixon is knee-deep in Husky defensive backfield lore now as Kalen DeBoer's staff gives the cornerback position — clearly the program's Achilles heel during a 2022 season of excellence otherwise — a prolonged and conscientious makeover.

If anything, Dixon, even with only JC credentials on his football balance sheet, might be the most confident of the long line of serious cornerback job applicants, who by fall camp will include three holdover players, three high school signees, a portal transfer and him.

"I feel I'm real sticky in coverage," he said. "If you're watching me, I just want you to know I'm always going to be on my guy. You're always going to see me around the ball, around the guy, making plays on the ball."

Dixon blames COVID for making him take the long road to the UW and the Pac-12. While at La Mirada High School, he held offers from Wyoming and Oregon State, and was committed to the Beavers at one point. As a junior, he even took a recruiting trip to the UW in 2019, with departed defensive-backs coach Will Harris his Husky point of contact.

Once the pandemic was raging, he never heard from any of those college coaches again who were pursuing him, which wasn't unusual for a lot of recruits during those crisis times.

Available after finishing up at LBCC this past winter, Dixon heard from the Huskies, Oregon State and USC, with the latter making a strong push for him..

"They wanted me to stay and be a hometown hero," he said of the Trojans, "but I was ready to branch out and see something new and have a change of scenery."

And now, in feeding his football impulses and attending UW classes, Dixon might be considered a geography major.

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