Cook: I don’t know what recruiters saw in me

Connor Cook had a different look in the early days.

“You guys didn’t see the goofy, bigfoot guy I saw when I first came in,” fellow Michigan State fifth-year senior Shilique Calhoun said of Cook. “He’s adapted so much, man, and he’s grown up so much.”

In fact, Cook looks back and still wonders what primary recruiter Pat Narduzzi and the rest of Mark Dantonio’s Michigan State staff saw at first when he was a “three-star” quarterback out of Walsh Jesuit High in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

“You can pull out my highlight tape right now and it was just mediocre ... I really wasn’t all that, I was sort of tall, I was skinny, didn’t have that strong of an arm, didn’t have the crazy numbers to back it up,” said Cook, who completed 58.3% of his throws as a high school senior after finishing at 47.8% as a junior. “But I don’t know, it’s just something that coach (Dantonio) and the whole coaching staff, they have a knack for finding guys. I don’t know what it is they see in players. But they find ’em.”

In this case, Dantonio said, “tremendous upside” was the operative term.

“Well I saw a big-bodied quarterback who played at a good high school league, in a good program,” Dantonio said. “They were well-coached. I saw a rangy guy with a quick release and a strong arm. He did a nice job in (MSU’s prospects) camp, a really nice job in camp. And we saw the ability to run and take a bad play and make it a good one.”

Did you see a possible Heisman candidate or first-round pick, as many analysts project Cook for the 2016 draft?

“I see a first-round guy in every guy we recruit, I really do,” Dantonio said, “or we wouldn’t take them.”

As for the Heisman …

“If Connor Cook wins the Heisman, it means ... he had a great individual season,” Dantonio said. “More importantly, we (will) have won a lot of football games or have won the national championship or got in the (College Football) Playoff — because that’s what it will take. It will take a performance like that, which would catapult this whole program forward.”