Ferris State OL Lawrence Hattar Has Committed to Michigan

Michigan’s been looking for portal help on the offensive line, but in portal world it’s often more about who you know, and Michigan missed out on some top targets who had closer connections to other programs.

This works both ways. D-II powerhouse Ferris State was shaped by son-of-a-Mad Magician former AD Perk Weisenburger and has all kinds of Michigan connections, including Steve Casula, who was their OC and TE coach when Lawrence Hattar (hut-TAR) was in high school.

Those connections likely helped them grab the star lineman from college football’s other reigning national champions.

🏠 pic.twitter.com/jOHKNreCW9

— Lawrence Hattar (@lawrence_hattar) January 5, 2025

Hattar is listed at 6’5/335, was a first-team Division II All-American, and was also being recruited by Wisconsin, UNC, Pitt, and MSU. All of those teams have been in the market for guards, which is almost certainly what Hattar is coming in to play. He started at both left tackle and left guard the last two seasons, winning Ferris their third national title in his four years on campus last month before entering the portal. They had him at LG in this year’s D-II championship game, which you can watch:

From a brief skim through that game Hattar looks like a D2 Keegan: tall, big, smart, not extremely athletic.

There’s some disagreement in reports about how much eligibility he has left—he redshirted in 2021 and played in 2 games in 2022—but he reported one year when he entered the portal. Before Ferris he played at Livonia Churchill, meaning my college roommate and I both finally have football players from our high schools on scholarship at Michigan. Late-90s SE Michigan doormats, represent!

Historically not many OL have made the jump up from a lower division to a power conference, and fewer have fared well. Ryan Ramczyk (one of my all-time best Draftageddon picks) was 6’6″ and had a plausible backstory, starring almost as soon as he hit the field for D-III Wisconsin-Stevens Point and then earning a season of hype while sitting out his transfer year with Wisconsin-Madison. For a more relevant comp for Hattar, Maryland got an okay right tackle out of a COVID year for Frostburg State’s 6’4″/309 Gottlieb Ayedze (74 pass block grade to PFF, 68 overall) in 2023. On the down, Indiana brought up Parker Hanna from West Texas A&M a few years ago and that didn’t go well. Blake Bustard, a 6’7″ OT for Wayne State in 2023, was the #1 D-II transfer but was just okay (63 pass block grade to PFF) as a starter for EMU this past season. D-III center Zach Greenburg couldn’t win a job at UNC.