Nation's Top TE Beat Huskies, Never Received Offer from Them
Colston Loveland, after two seasons at Michigan, is now considered the nation's top tight end, especially with Georgia's Brock Bowers making himself available for the NFL Draft.
Last month in Houston, he looked every bit the part against the University of Washington in the College Football Playoff national championship game, showing off plenty of speed and athleticism in catching 3 passes for 64 yards, including a 41-yarder, in the Wolverines' 34-13 victory.
The 6-foot-5, 245-pound Loveland hails from Gooding, Idaho, a smallish community of 3,567 christened after Frank Gooding, a local sheep rancher turned governor and U.S. senator.
The town is located 592 miles from Seattle and Husky Stadium, which is about 1,200 miles closer than, say, Ann Arbor.
Providing further evidence that UW football recruiting efforts were struggling in a big way back then, Loveland got only so far with the Jimmy Lake coaching staff.
"Yeah, I was recruited, but never got an offer or nothing," he said. "Coach [Derham] Kato, who I think was the tight-ends coach, he was talking to me a little bit."
Last season as a Michigan sophomore, Loveland finished with 45 receptions for 649 yards and 4 touchdowns for the 15-0 national champs while receiving first-team All-Big Ten honors.
He came up with high school seasons in which he caught 12, 91, 69 and 62 passes — including 19 receptions in a single game — so Loveland was hard to miss, even if he was from small-town Idaho.
Loveland ultimately received 15 scholarship offers, with Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Utah, UCLA and even Boise State among his most ardent pursuers.
He also picked up an offer from Arizona, which had a first-year coach back then in Jedd Fisch, now running the show in Montlake.
Yet nothing was presented to Loveland by the Huskies, who would go through an in-season coaching change with Lake and stumble through a 4-8 season. Still, the tight end found it a little surprising the Northwest team didn't come at him a little harder and offer him.
"Yeah, maybe a little bit," he said. "Yeah, but ever since I visited Michigan, that's the only spot I wanted to be."
Loveland will get a chance to see what he missed, at least in terms of the game-day atmosphere, when Michigan visits Husky Stadium on Oct. 5.
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