money Michigan football recruited Mike Sainristil to play corner as his career comes full circle
On Jan. 22, 2018, Michigan football offered a scholarship to three-star prospect Mike Sainristil from Everett High School in Massachusetts. He attended a recruiting event at Virginia Tech five days later and, two weeks after that, committed to the Hokies as a wide receiver/cornerback.
But Sainristil kept his recruitment open and made an official visit to Michigan four months later. He remained committed to Virginia Tech through most of the fall before flipping his pledge to U-M in November and signing with the Wolverines in December. Defensive coordinator Don Brown was the primary recruiter.
“Coach Brown recruited me to play defense here,” Sainristil said. “When I got here, I said I’d rather play offense. Pretty much everywhere I was getting recruited was either offense or defense. I’m pretty sure the decision was going to end up being in my hands anyway. I just always wanted to play offense simply because I like having the ball in my hands. I like making plays.”
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That Michigan recruited Sainristil as a defensive back might be surprising to fans who watched him play receiver his first three years in Ann Arbor. But the idea that Sainristil always had Division I potential at corner adds important context to the coaching staff’s decision to try him at nickelback earlier this year. Sainristil, who held additional scholarship offers from North Carolina, Ole Miss, Wisconsin and Boston College, among others, quickly dusted off the skills that enticed the Wolverines during his high school career and entered fall camp as the starter.
With a little more than a week until the season opener, Sainristil said his practice reps in the second half of training camp have skewed toward defense, where he is expected to play alongside perimeter corners DJ Turner and Gemon Green.
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“I understand the defense,” Sainristil said. “I know base personnel, nickel personnel, dime personnel. I’m comfortable in practice right now, of course, but I still have no games played under my belt. So until then, I won’t know how comfortable I really am. And even then, games are gonna go along and I’m going to be put in different situations I’ve never been in, simply because I’m on a new side of the ball. Will I ever be 100% comfortable this year? Who’s to say? But I’m going to play to my best ability at all times.”
Even though he began his career by choosing wide receiver over corner, Sainristil said he has always lobbied for the chance to make a cameo in the secondary. Mike Zordich, who was Michigan’s defensive backs coach when Sainristil arrived in Ann Arbor, began teaching him aspects of the defense during the 2020 season.
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Sainristil made sure to pass the message along to last year’s coaching staff.
“I was joking around with Coach Clink (Steve Clinkscale) and coach Mike Macdonald saying, ‘Put me on defense!’” Sainristil recalled. “Even the Ohio State week I was saying, ‘Put me on defense!’ Did I know it was actually going to happen? No. But I’m glad it did. I like where I’m at playing defense right now and I know it’s going to help me at the next level. I’m enjoying the process.”
‘Old Michigan’
At Big Ten media days in Indianapolis, coach Jim Harbaugh outlined his team’s goals for this season: “Let’s beat Michigan State and Ohio State in the same year. Let’s win the Big Ten championship and let’s win the national championship. Those are our four goals, and let’s go attack them.”
The unspoken and underlying theme connecting those four goals is proving to the college football world that what the Wolverines did last season — beating Ohio State for the first time since 2011; winning the program’s first Big Ten title since 2004; reaching the College Football Playoff for the first time ever — wasn’t an aberration, that U-M has restored itself as a national power.
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It’s a concept quarterback Cade McNamara referenced earlier this summer during an appearance on the athletic department’s podcast. McNamara told the show’s host, Jon Jansen, that “it’s Team 143’s job to make sure that it wasn’t a fluke with Team 142 in that we carry the mentality, we carry that tradition of winning on into this season. That’s going to be really important for us.”
Another successful campaign would begin to erode a reputation that has largely dimmed in the last two decades. The Wolverines have posted consecutive 10-win seasons just twice since the turn of the century and haven’t captured consecutive Big Ten titles since 2003-04, when the ’04 crown was shared with Iowa.
“Last year was more, you know, like beating our rivals,” wideout Roman Wilson said. “This year is more like we want it all. We want to beat our rivals, go to the playoffs, Big Ten championship — all that. We want to come for it all. We don’t want to be what old Michigan was. We want to set a new standard for us.
“It’s no surprise that we haven’t done that well in the past years. We want to take our game up here. We want to be considered one of the best when we leave this program.”
Lingering pain
In a cruel stroke of misfortune, Wilson’s best performance of the 2022 season — six catches for 81 yards against Wisconsin — was curtailed by a wrist injury that sidelined him for most of two games and bothered him through the College Football Playoff. The protective covering he wore made it harder to secure passes, and he was often spotted wearing a cast or brace between games.
The nature of the injury remains undisclosed, but Wilson told reporters some of the damage is permanent.
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“I can still feel it,” Wilson said. “It still hurts. I can’t do pushups and when I push off (from defenders), I can’t really bend it. But I wouldn’t say it bothers me though. It’s just gonna be like this for the rest of my life. I just gotta deal with it.”
Contact Michael Cohen at mcohen@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Cohen13.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan football's mission: Prove the 2021 success was no fluke
