Culture
Michigan’s Alex Orji is a ‘one in a million’ athlete. Now it’s time to prove he can play QB
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Nick Saban, Lincoln Riley and Deion Sanders all wanted Alex Orji. But Orji wanted something else.
Orji, a quarterback whose athletic traits have captivated coaches at every step of his career, will make his first start Saturday when No. 18 Michigan faces No. 11 USC. The coach on the other sideline, Riley, personally offered Orji a scholarship when he was at Oklahoma, Orji’s father said. Saban also wanted Orji at Alabama, but there was a catch.
Willy Orji, Alex’s father, remembers a conversation with Saban that happened during a recruiting visit to Tuscaloosa. Saban told Alex he could have a scholarship offer from Alabama but only if he was open to switching positions. Alex looked at Saban, looked at his father, and explained that he’d worked too hard at becoming a quarterback to give up on the dream.
“There were a lot of people that talked to him,” said Red Behrens, Orji’s coach at Sachse High School in Texas. “I’m talking about big schools, all the head coaches. The thing that Alex wanted to hear from them was, ‘We’re going to give you a strong chance to be a quarterback.’”
Before college football fans were introduced to Coach Prime, Sanders tried to get Orji on his team, too. Sanders had a youth football program called Truth Sports in the Dallas metroplex, and Orji grew up playing on teams with Sanders’ sons, Shilo and Shedeur. Before he became the head coach at Jackson State, Sanders was on the staff at Trinity Christian Academy near Dallas, the school his sons attended.
Deion wanted Orji to play for Trinity Christian, Willy said, but there was one problem. Shedeur was the quarterback, and nobody was beating him out. To get on the field at Trinity, Orji would have had to play a different position. Instead, he decided to play at Sachse, where his quarterback highlights became the stuff of legend.
There was a time when Deion Sanders recruited Alex Orji to play for his high school team in the Dallas area. (Photo courtesy of Willy Orji)
Mention one play in particular to Behrens, and he’ll describe it as if it happened yesterday. Orji got flushed out of the pocket and scrambled toward the end zone. All he had to do was lower his shoulder and plow through a defensive back, but he decided to take a different route, leaping up and over the defender with inches to spare.
“Athletically, he’s one in a million,” Behrens said.
With so many coaches salivating over Orji’s potential, it was only a matter of time before one of them figured out how to get him on the field. And yet, Orji’s debut as Michigan’s starter comes with more than a little trepidation. Three weeks ago, Michigan evaluated its quarterback competition and decided to go with Davis Warren. It was only after Warren threw six interceptions in three games that the Wolverines changed course and named Orji the starter.
The question with Orji is the same as it’s always been: Is he polished enough as a passer to play quarterback at the highest level?
“He’s got great arm strength,” coach Sherrone Moore said. “The accuracy has improved tremendously. It’s going to take great prep mentally, physically and spiritually this week to get him where we need to be, and I think he’ll do that.”
Orji was one of those high school athletes who could do a little bit of everything. He was a sprinter, a high jumper, a basketball player, a safety, a wide receiver, a linebacker and a punter. Early on, he didn’t see himself as a quarterback.
Orji has two older brothers, Alston and Anfernee, who played linebacker at Vanderbilt. Anfernee signed with the New Orleans Saints as an undrafted free agent in 2023, spent last year on the practice squad and has appeared in both of the Saints games this season.
Orji is built like a linebacker at 6 feet 3 and 235 pounds, and it was natural to assume he’d follow his brothers’ footsteps on defense. When he was in middle school, he started training with Kevin Mathis, who played with Deion in Dallas and has coached with him throughout his career. Mathis, now the cornerbacks coach at Colorado, was the one who pitched Orji on playing quarterback.
“He kept trying to get him to do it,” Willy said. “Alex was comfortable with what he’d always done, being able to outrun kids, being able to push kids around.”
Orji started playing quarterback in middle school, but it wasn’t until his junior season at Sachse that his future at the position came into focus. He transferred to Sachse during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Behrens didn’t have many opportunities to evaluate him before the season started. Behrens put him at quarterback and quickly discovered he had a weapon.
“People that tried to grab him or arm tackle him, he broke through those and spun out of them and just kept rolling,” Behrens said. “Most high school kids didn’t like stepping in front of him.”
As a senior at Sachse, Orji rushed for more than 1,000 yards and threw for more than 2,000 while completing 51 percent of his passes. He was being recruited by a bunch of big-time schools, but most of them wanted him as an athlete, not a quarterback. One exception was Virginia Tech, which ran an offense similar to the one Orji played in at Sachse.
Orji committed to the Hokies as a three-star recruit in the Class of 2022. A few weeks before signing day, Virginia Tech fired Justin Fuente and he decided to reevaluate his options. He visited Michigan and met with coach Jim Harbaugh, who said it would be up to Orji to decide if and when he wanted to try another position. If Orji wanted to play quarterback, Michigan was committed to giving him the opportunity.
“As long as I’m here, we’re going to develop you and get you to where you need to be,” Willy remembers Harbaugh saying.
Michigan had a package of plays for Orji last season and used him in big moments, including the Rose Bowl and the Ohio State game. When Harbaugh left for the NFL and J.J. McCarthy declared for the draft, Michigan’s starting quarterback job was there for the taking. Orji didn’t win the job in the spring, but most signs pointed to him as the player who would take the first snap of Michigan’s season.
“Even if we’re on top of college football, I want to keep taking us higher,” Orji said in the spring. “Whoever goes out on Saturdays, whatever 11 take the field, I want to make sure I’m doing whatever I can to be selfless in my pursuit of excellence.”
By most accounts, Orji had a strong start to preseason camp. Midway through, he hit a rough patch and committed too many turnovers. Warren played better down the stretch and won the starting job.
Naturally, Willy wanted to know what happened. Did Orji let his foot off the gas? Was he overconfident? Did he not work hard enough? Orji chided his dad, reminding him that there were more important things than being the starter. Orji vowed to be a good teammate, support Warren however he could and keep working for his opportunity.
“When you’re a dad and your child is trying to teach you something, you listen,” Willy said.
Michigan’s first drive of the season ended with Orji throwing a 3-yard touchdown pass to Donovan Edwards. The Wolverines used him for a snap or two at a time as a change of pace, but Warren was the primary quarterback. Despite throwing two interceptions against Texas, Warren remained the starter against Arkansas State and took every snap of the first half. Late in the third quarter, after Warren’s third interception of the game, Michigan made the switch to Orji.
Moore was noncommittal after the game, but he arrived at his Monday news conference with an announcement: Orji was taking over as Michigan’s starting quarterback. The public announcement came as a surprise to some, including two Michigan players who met with reporters after Moore spoke. Moore made it clear that the job belonged to Orji and that he had the team’s full backing.
“We have a plan in place for Alex, and we’re ready to put it on display,” Moore said.
Disappointment would have been a natural reaction when Orji didn’t win the job in camp, despite being viewed as the front-runner for most of the offseason. If Orji was stung by the decision, his father didn’t see it. Moore said he saw no change in Orji’s confidence or demeanor after informing the quarterbacks that Warren would open the season as the starter.
“His attitude never wavered,” Moore said. “Obviously he was disappointed. He’s a competitor. He’s a kid who wants to be the starting guy. If I was a quarterback competing for the job, I’d want to do it, too. But the way he led, the way he acted, the way he presented himself, was no different than it is now.”
No one is sure how Orji’s first start is going to go. He has thrown seven passes in his career, and it’s still not clear how his athleticism will translate in the role of a full-time quarterback. The only way to answer that question is to put the ball in his hands and see what he can do.
For Michigan, the time to find out is now.
“There were a lot of schools, but they always seemed to go back to, ‘We’ll find somewhere for you to play,’” Behrens said. “He wanted to hear, ‘We’re going to give you a true shot at quarterback.’ Michigan gave him that opportunity.”
(Top photo: Rick Osentoski / Imagn Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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