Porch steps up for Hokies with Morgan out

By DARRYL SLATER
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
Published: October 1, 2008

BLACKSBURG - While his Virginia Tech teammates ran sprints at the end of Monday’s practice, Davon Morgan limped off the field, a football cradled in his right arm, a crutch tucked under his left—the cruel image of a kid divided between the game he loves and the reality he hates accepting.

Morgan, Tech’s starting rover, tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee Saturday while returning a kickoff in the second quarter of Tech’s 35-30 win at Nebraska. A sophomore from Varina High, Morgan will have season-ending surgery next week and probably will not be able to redshirt because he has played more than four games this season.

Junior Dorian Porch will take Morgan’s place in the lineup, beginning with Saturday’s 1:30 p.m. home game against Western Kentucky. Though Porch has played about a quarter of the snaps this season, he has never started. He might not even be at Tech if he hadn’t heeded his mother’s advice in high school and declined a $300,000 contract offer from the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Morgan approached Porch before Nebraska kicked off with 10:45 left in the second quarter and told him he was going to break loose on the return. As the ball tumbled through the air, it sailed toward Kenny Lewis Jr., Tech’s other kick returner. Morgan caught it anyway.

He tried to cut, but his foot stuck in the FieldTurf. He heard a pop and collapsed to the ground. Porch took notice on the sideline. “Maybe it’s just something minor,“ he thought.

Team trainer Mike Goforth felt less optimistic. He saw Morgan’s leg wiggle, then buckle—the telltale signs. “We knew he tore his ACL before he even hit the ground,“ Goforth said.

Writhing on the turf, Morgan knew something was wrong, but he wasn’t sure exactly what. His knee throbbed, pain shooting through like lightning. “I just knew I was done,“ he said.

Morgan spent the flight home staring out the window into the darkness, trying to rationalize this insanity. “I kind of took it as a task from God,“ he said. “I feel like he put this in my life because I must be satisfied with something.“

In another seat on the plane, Jim Cavanaugh, Morgan’s position coach, already had chosen Porch as Morgan’s successor. It was a simple decision. Morgan and Porch entered preseason practice on equal footing, and no defensive-position battle during August was closer.

Porch started slowly because he spent the summer interning at a property-management company in Washington, D.C., where he lifted weights regularly but found it difficult to mimic the intensity of a workout supervised by Tech’s strength and conditioning coaches.

When he returned to Blacksburg, he also practiced as the backup free safety, while Morgan worked only at rover. “Quite frankly, that hurt him at rover because he had to do both,“ Cavanaugh said.

But because the competition for the starting rover was so close, Cavanaugh is confident that “there shouldn’t be any dropoff between Porch and Davon.“ Porch played 36 of 51 snaps Saturday and “didn’t have any major technique flaws,“ Cavanaugh said.

Porch, 5-11 and 210 pounds, is a natural athlete. He was such a prodigious baseball center fielder at Gordon Central High in Calhoun, Ga., that during his senior year the Diamondbacks offered him a two-year free-agent contract worth $300,000. He would have immediately joined their Double-A affiliate.

But there was a catch: If baseball didn’t work out and Porch decided to attend college, the Diamondbacks wouldn’t pay his tuition, as the Cincinnati Reds did for Lewis when he left their organization. Partly because of that, Porch’s mom, Lynette Porch, thought her son shouldn’t sign the deal because it wasn’t secure enough.

Porch accepted her suggestion. He didn’t want to disappoint her, though part of him still wonders where baseball’s path might have taken him.

“I don’t know what she was thinking,“ he said. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Three-hundred thousand? Yes, right now. I’m ready.‘ It’s definitely something I think about every now and then. It would have been nice, but I think I made the right decision.“

Contact Darryl Slater at (804) 649-6026 or .