South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Born to be a Gator
Hard-hitting Miller making his mark on defense as linebacker
GAINESVILLE — Ventrell Miller’s first dose of competitive football left a bad taste.
The hunger and passion Florida’s star linebacker exhibits on the field has been there since Miller was 4 or 5 years old.
Flag football with the Lakeland Predators just wasn’t his cup of tea.
“He said, ‘I don’t want to go play the flag ball,’ ” Eva Davis recalled last week. “‘I want to go and hit somebody.’ ”
Billy Davis, listening to his wife, chuckles at the memory of their grandson.
SEC ball carriers surely cringe at the idea of Miller torpedoing every atom of his 6-foot, 221-pound frame in their direction.
“Since back in high school and even before that, I’ve just been a physical guy,” Miller said. “When I hit somebody, I either want him to stop or go backwards. I like to be the hammer.”
Missouri served as the nail last Saturday.
Miller’s 11-tackle day during a 24-17 win was as dominant and inspired a performance by a Gators defender in some time. Miller aimed to do it again Saturday night in the Swamp against LSU.
“I’m waiting on that,” he said after the Missouri game.
Staying power
Miller is no one-hit wonder. From the time he was a boy, nothing or no one got in Miller’s way.
This included his maternal grandmother’s cherished white picket fence at the Davis residence.
After the Miller boys knocked it down one too many times, Eva told Ventrell and older brother Antonio to hit the road.
“She said, ‘You can’t play in the yard anymore,’ ” Antonio said.
This was no small order. The
hard-hitting Miller always had a soft spot for Davis, and the feeling was mutual.
“He was a big grandma’s boy,” Antonio said. “Oh god, ‘grandma’s boy!’ Seriously. So if my grandma kicked him out of the front yard, just know she meant it.”
Undeterred, Miller took to the asphalt of Enterprise Street like a Mack Truck. Playing on the deadend road in front of his grandparents’ home, he held his own with older neighborhood boys when he wasn’t manhandling his age division in Pop Warner.
Football was a year-round pursuit and passion that would take the Millers a long way.
Antonio, 25, would become an All-MEAC linebacker in 2018 at Florida A&M.
Ventrell is the unquestioned tone-setter for the Gators.
“Ventrell is what being a University of Florida football player is all about,” first-year coach Billy Napier said. “He is the example.”
A long journey
The 23-year-old’s commitment, character and talent have been tested by scandal, injury and time.
Before Miller left for Gainesville, Billy Davis warned his grandson about life away from home. Yet the week before his first game, Miller was among nine players suspended for the 2017 season after making various purchases with stolen credit card numbers — in Miller’s case totaling $550.
“I don’t know for some reason or another he listened to the wrong voices,” Davis said. “That really taught him and helped him and grounded him and put him back in the right perspective. Everybody ain’t good or ain’t right, so you have to make good decisions.
“He was down for a minute. We tried to encourage him. He thought he had lost everything.”
Three years later, two of them as a starter, Miller’s career was derailed again.
After leading the 2020 Gators with 88 tackles, Miller tore his biceps tendon during a 2021 visit on Week 2 to USF and underwent season-end surgery.
Miller could have stood pat on a solid body of work, sold himself at the NFL Scouting Combine and Gator Pro Day, and likely been a late-round draft pick. Instead, he capitalized on the NCAA’s COVID waiver to play a sixth season.
Yet once again, injury quickly intruded.
A week after Miller recorded
9 tackles in the season-opening upset of Utah, he left the Kentucky game in the second half with a foot injury, 6 tackles and the Gators leading before falling 26-16.
After watching 24.5-point underdog USF gash the Gators for
286 rushing yards during a 3-point Florida win, Miller returned at around 70% capacity to tally 6 stops and force a fumble during a narrow defeat at Tennessee.
A regimen of rehab, icing and game-day injections have kept Miller playing.
“You’ve got extra time in the training room, you’ve got a number of things that you’re doing around the clock and got to get back in position to where you can do your job for the team,” Napier said. “It requires discipline, it requires toughness. Ventrell is a great example to a lot of people about how to go about your business.”
Finding his niche
Miller’s road from Lakeland to Gators team leader began with his commitment to UF in June 2016 prior to his senior season at Kathleen High.
At the time, Miller was a 3-star recruit on the fringe of the top 75 in-state recruits. Locally, though, he made his own mark at the alma mater of Ray Lewis located on the city’s west side and in the shadow of powerhouse Lakeland High.
“They weren’t used to seeing people hit hard every week like that,” Antonio said. “I still don’t understand how he wasn’t a 5-star.”
Miller starred for Irving Strickland’s 9-2 2015 squad. But as one of five boys of a struggling single parent, Miller did not make the summer camp circuit where reputations and rankings are made.
“There weren’t a lot of people that knew about him,” said
Anthony Troutman, Miller’s linebackers coach at Kathleen. “It’s gotten to the point where you go to the right camps and do a lot of camp drills, that’s what people look at. ‘Oh, he’s a 5-star.’ That’s just how it is now.”
A recruiting video available on YouTube showcases a succession of highlight-reel hits and game-changing moments during a 104-tackle season, including a goal-line interception in overtime against Tallahassee Leon. Miller’s senior season included a rare upset of crosstown rival Lakeland and ended with him named Polk County defensive player of the year.
“It just took time for people to really start to see,” Troutman said. “It’s what I mean by just keep playing. Opportunities start to come, but you have to be ready for those opportunities.”
Long before he became one of the SEC’s top linebackers, Miller was a hard-nosed running back capable of 300-yard games in Pop Warner. He could have run for more.
“Coaches used to get mad and would be hollering at him because whenever he ran the ball he loved to run people over,” Eva Davis said. “He would get the ball and he would find somebody. The coach wanted him to go for a touchdown and he wanted to tackle somebody.”
Miller saw his change to break away during summer workouts prior to his freshman season at Kathleen. Instead lining up with the running backs, Miller joined the linebackers.
“I’m like, ‘Bro what are you doing?’ ” recalled Antonio, then a junior starter. “He stayed over there and said, ‘I’m playing linebacker.’ I could not understand it for nothing in the world.’
Miller’s big bro and the college football world now understand: linebacker is Ventrell Miller’s calling.
“When you have a talent in an area, if you follow it up then you find out how good you are at it,” Billy Davis said. “He just had a natural love for it. All he wanted to do was to get out there and hit something.”