Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Basketball’s loss
DE’s love for football, work ethic unquestioned
Dave Hyde: New Dolphin known for work ethic.
They were all there in Raytown, Mo., as Charles Harris became a Miami Dolphin. His father, William, whose long-haul truck drives across the Midwest, provided his son’s work ethic. His mother, Deborah Clark, who has battled multiple sclerosis, added a layer of toughness.
There, too, in the Harris home was his high school coach, Lee Allen, who begged Harris to try football for his first couple years at Lincoln Preparatory in Kansas City, “thinking of every trick in the book to get him to play.”
“He’s this tall, lanky, wiry kid who’d only play basketball, and I’d tell him, ‘There are only 15 players on a [NBA] team in basketball while there are 53 players in football,’ ” Allen recalled Friday morning. “I’d say, ‘You’re 6-3 in a sport you need to be 6-10.’
“I thought of everything. Nothing worked.”
Harris jokes he started out with an ‘A’ grade in Allen’s math class, but saw it sink to a ‘B’ and then a ‘C’ when he didn’t try football. So when Harris actually showed up unannounced for a football practice a couple of games into his junior season, Allen had a normal reaction: “Why are you here?”
The previous day, Harris had sat in a classroom where the football team assem-
bled before a game. Allen finally announced whoever wasn’t on the team had to leave. As Harris left, a couple of players snickered at him and said he was “too scared to play football.”
So the next day, there Harris was, ready to go.
“If I’d known that’s all it took, I’d have said that two years earlier,” Allen says.
Everyone arrives with a story, and that’s the opening scene of how Harris became the Dolphins’ hope for a young pass rusher. By the next high school game, he was on the field. By the season’s end, Allen told him he could get a college scholarship if he committed.
This is where you start to see who the Dolphins picked in the first round of the NFL draft Thursday night.
Harris took up track in part to work on his first couple of steps out of a runner’s block — steps that could help him propel from a three-point football stance.
“We’d have to kick him out of the weight room,” Allen said.
That wasn’t just a high school story.
“He’s the hardest working player — and maybe the smartest player — I’ve ever had,” said Craig Kuligowski, the University of Miami’s defensive line coach, who worked with Harris for three years at Missouri.
Kuligowski’s praise covers some ground. He coached five defensive linemen at Missouri who were first-round picks and 12 who were drafted. If none worked as hard as Harris, none started as raw, either. A two-star recruit due to his late start, Harris got Missouri’s final scholarship that year.
It was his only Division-I offer, and upon looking at him, Missouri coaches weren’t sure if he was tight end, linebacker or defensive end.
“Once we decided he was a defensive end, he was like a sponge. He wanted so much to get better,” Kuligowski said. “You might tell a guy, ‘Hey, you should watch film of this or that, you could learn something.’ Most guys are, ‘Oh, OK.’ They might occasionally look at it.
“He’s the kind of guy who if he’s told something will help; he’ll work at it for hours.”
Problems against the run with his 253-pound frame? Kuligkowski points to Harris leading the Southeastern Conference with 18 1⁄2 tackles for a loss his redshirt sophomore season. Harris’ numbers declined at the start of this past season, perhaps because Missouri changed from an attacking to a read-and-react system with a new coaching staff.
Harris’ new line coach last year? Jackie Shipp, the Dolphins’ top pick in 1984 who is best remembered for being among the franchise’s top draft disappointments. Shipp was fired by Missouri in November of last season. But the larger issue was the system didn’t match Harris’ style.
“It was the difference between the Miami Hurricanes defense from 2015 to 2016,” Kuligkowski said of the attacking versus the reactive systems. “There’s a lot of way to do things, but we always want to be aggressive, moving upfield, blow up and disrupt. That’s what Charles does best.”
Harris also had another side of his persona come to light at this time. He was one of the team leaders of a boycott of practice or games after they felt Missouri president Tim Wolfe didn’t respond adequately to a series of racial incidents on campus. Wolfe resigned in part because of the boycott.
Dolphins owner Steve Ross backed players who took a knee during the national anthem last season to protest social injustice, but the team’s attraction to Harris was more his passrushing skill and “obvious love of football,” general manager Chris Grier said.
The Dolphins sent their normal layers of scouting. The area scout for Missouri, Chris Buford, was followed by the national scout, Adam Engroff, and the director of college scouting, Joe Schoen. Their ideas were confirmed on tape and in an interview at the scouting combine in February.
Grier said defensive coordinator Matt Burke has some interesting ways to use Harris. And why not? He played all along Missouri’s defensive line. More importantly, as Kuligkowski says, the Dolphins’ wide-nine system allows Harris to play to his strength of outside rush rather than occupied with controlling gaps.
“He’s not a prototype [end],” Grier said. “But he has outstanding traits. His leverage. His bend. His athletic ability. You don’t want to eliminate good players because of how they look in the underwear Olympics.”
Harris took the Dolphins’ call in Raytown, a Kansas City suburb, rather than at the NFL draft in Philadelphia in good part because his mother couldn’t travel. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997. She kept working for the next decade. Now 48, she’s in a wheelchair.
“You looked around that house, at all the good people, and you saw why Charles has become the man he is,” Allen said. “He’s had good people around him the whole way.”