Detroit is still chasing NFL greatness, but some Detroiters are already there

Detroit hasn’t experienced a professional football championship in nearly 70 years. That’s our pain, as a community, and it revisits, cruelly, each year as the NFL season gets started. The questions burn like fires. Will this finally be our year? 

But that doesn’t mean everything about football is a fumble in the Motor City. In fact, there are bright spots – even at the NFL level – that are worth celebrating. From a Super Bowl champion to an NFL Rookie of the Year, Detroit is actually producing an abundance of homegrown talent that reaches football’s highest achievements. 

Underrated as three-star recruits coming out of high school, Martin Luther King Jr. High School’s very own Avonte Maddox and Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner are now covering the league’s best wide receivers. And Cass Technical High School senior and 2026 four-star athlete CJ Sadler just committed to Bill Belichick and North Carolina.

Cass Tech and King high schools have emerged in the past couple of decades as among the state’s best. There’s not another Michigan high school with as many active NFL players. 

Just three miles apart, King reigns from the east side of Detroit and Cass Tech is just northwest of the city’s downtown. It’s an in-town rivalry that dates back to 1950, and the King Crusaders maintain a slight advantage in the all-time series between these two programs with a 39-35 lead in their 74 meetings.

Terel Patrick, head coach for King, said in a recent interview with BridgeDetroit that the light-hearted competition between the teams is a positive. 

“At the end of the day, if you really peel it back, there’s a lot of respect underneath the surface, because we’re both fighting for equal outcomes with our young men,” he said. “On paper, there’s a winner and a loser, but when you collectively send as many people to college and to the NFL as our programs have, it’s a win for the city overall.”

Over the past couple of decades, few high schools in the state have produced more Division 1 collegiate and professional-level talent. Throughout that span, the only high schools to win as many or more football state championships than Cass Tech or King are private Catholic high schools — De La Salle (5), Brother Rice (4), and Orchard St. Lake Mary’s (4). 

The football programs at Cass Tech and King have maintained a strong sense of continuity, starting at the youth level, according to the teams’ coaching staff.

Patrick, with King, and Marvin Rushing, head coach for Cass Tech, told BridgeDetroit that they credit the foundation of inner-city youth leagues like Detroit PAL, Boys & Girls clubs, N Zone Sports and the Detroit Youth Football League, for getting kids involved in sports at a young age. 

Consistency is also a factor. Patrick has been on staff at King since 2009 and said he had been around the program since he was four years old, when he was a ball boy for the team. 

He worked alongside his father, Tony Patrick, who had been an offensive line coach since 1979. Terel Patrick was in charge of the offense, while Tyrone Spencer, a previous head coach, was in charge of the defense. Spencer guided the Crusaders to Division 2 and three Division 3 state championships over eight seasons before he departed after the 2023 season to coach the East Kentwood Falcons.

Patrick said it’s special to be part of the school’s storied football program and build “a big sense of community” with lifelong friendships and decades-long connections. 

“I have people who I played with and I’m coaching their kids now. It’s rare,” Patrick said. “It’s rare because of the turnover, you don’t get the long, 10-year coaches out of the city as you might with some of the other programs. The fact that we can have something that’s been established for close to 40 years is amazing.” 

Both programs are churning out collegiate All-Americans and NFL talent: Since 2005, around two dozen graduates from Cass Tech and King have made their mark in the NFL.

Since 2000, King has won six state championships and Cass Tech has won four. In the 2024 season, the schools split on the gridiron. King won the regular season matchup at Cass Tech — 18-12 in overtime. But the Technicians rallied in the Detroit Public School League championship — prevailing 30-14 at Ford Field.

Rushing, Cass Tech’s head coach, formerly played quarterback for the team under Thomas Wilcher and spent over a decade coaching on the sidelines with him before taking over in 2021. Wilcher was the head football coach at Cass Tech for 24 years, from 1997-2017. He was inducted into the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

“When I first joined this staff in 2012, I was shocked about the level of competition in practice. It took me back to college, that was the last time I’ve seen that level of talent, effort, and competitiveness,” Rushing said. “Honestly, everyone here is driven. People succeed amongst others who are driven.

“We got a saying here — ‘Cass Tech one, second to none.’ That’s the mindset on and off-the-field,” he said.

King’s Patrick said after joining the football team staff in 2009, he began to learn what made the group “rise above” in practices and at games.

“There’s a tradition of alumni support for our players here,” he said. “We’ve moved up and down between divisions because of the enrollment threshold. At this point, it doesn’t matter to me what division we play in.

“All of our assistant coaches stayed with the program when I took over last season, and most of them are King graduates,” he added. “It’s been a unique situation to maintain that stability on staff despite the change. We’re a program that prides itself from within.”

Rushing said one thing that makes the Cass team special is its coaching legacy. 

“Starting with my head coach Sherrell Roland, who was a Wayne State graduate and the first to win a football city title here at Cass Tech. Then he handed it off to Thomas Wilcher, who took it to the next level,” Rushing said. 

“When you look at how the program’s been built — out of love, out of competition, about pushing people to their fullest. We got this thing called the push-pull methodology that we’re pushing and pulling each other forward, and challenging each other for growth,” he said. “And when you do all those things with a purpose to get the most out of people, it makes the best out of people and creates an environment where people want to be. They want to be somewhere they can succeed. They want to be somewhere they can fulfill all their dreams and goals. That can happen here off the field.”

Rushing said those principles are what Cass is founded on, both socially and academically. In recognition of the football team’s efforts, the Detroit Public Schools Community District board in January approved a new athletic field for Cass Tech. It’s been resodded with a synthetic turf field for this season. The Technicians play host to Toledo Central Catholic on Aug. 29.

Last season, Cass Tech quarterback Donald Tabron II led his team to glory as a freshman. The 2028 prospect holds several Division 1 scholarship offers including Michigan, Michigan State, and Penn State. Rushing believes he’s talented enough to go pro when all is said and done.

Not all talented players coming through the programs have had the outcomes the teams and coaches hoped for. 

Cass Tech quarterback Jayru Campbell and King wide receiver Donnie Corley were high school standouts and expected to reach the next level as well but both were sidelined by off-the-field issues.

An incident involving Campbell body-slamming a security guard in the high school ruined his chance at playing Division 1. He pleaded guilty in May 2014 to aggravated assault, spent 60 days in jail and was sentenced to 15 months of probation. However, he received a second chance by virtue of the junior college, a two-year institution that offers academic and athletic opportunities, at Garden City Community College in Kansas. Campbell ended his college career as the Division 2 National Player of the Year and a National Champion at Ferris State. 

Corley, a 2016 graduate, was the No. 3 rated player in the state. He chose to attend Michigan State University over 54 other scholarship offers. As a Spartan, his career ended after just 12 games because of an alleged sexual assault at a campus party. He and two others pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Corley got a chance at redemption playing at the FCS level for Texas Southern in 2019. He made the most of it with a 1,000-yard receiving season.

Overall, Rushing said the Cass Tech’s football program aims to prepare its players for the physical demands of being college athletes and the “strong and tough” mindset to be leaders. 

“Last, obviously it’s about developing the bodies to be able to play 14 games, to have success, and pass the eye test for the colleges,” he said. 

Patrick added that students who want to play Division 1 football should be mindful of the commitment that it takes to succeed. 

“For the most part during the (college) season your time is 100% allocated for academics and football with very few free hours in between,” he said. “You have to have great time organization, you have to remain very sound academically and you have to have a love for the game.”