The Carolina Panthers rookie standout has been to the WSU campus a few times, Denham said: “He’s come to visit whenever he had some free time. He helped me move one summer and then two weeks before the Super Bowl, he came to watch one of our games.”
People likely noticed the 6-foot-4, 230-pound Funchess in the small crowds that attend Raider games at the Nutter Center, but Denham said, “He’s a laid-back guy and nobody really recognized him.”
Come Super Bowl Sunday, plenty of folks did. Denham said she and her roommate, fellow guard Kim Demmings, threw a Super Bowl party “in his honor.”
“Most of the other girls on our team came and we invited a bunch of other athletes and friends from the area,” she said. “We had a couple of big-screen TVs and we made Buffalo chicken dip … all the normal Super Bowl party stuff.”
And whenever Funchess appeared on the TV screens in the Panthers’ 24-10 loss — he had two catches on the day, 36 for the season — he was celebrated by Denham and the others.
So what’s the connection between the NFL player from the University of Michigan and the Raiders senior from Northland High School in Columbus?
Well, if you search the back of her closet you might find some of her own maize and gold gear.
Once, Denham was a Michigan Wolverine, too.
Coming out of high school she said she was recruited by “the middle and lower half of the Big Ten,” every Mid-American Conference school and several others. She said she visited schools such as Indiana, Bowling Green, Toledo several times, Dayton a couple of times and Michigan twice, as well.
“Michigan was just a perfect fit at the time,” she said. “The school was top tier, the coaching staff was great, the campus was beautiful. It just felt right for me.”
But two months after she committed, everything started to change.
In January of her senior season she tore her ACL and was sidelined for the rest of the year. Then in April, Kevin Borseth, the Michigan coach who had recruited her, resigned to go back to his old job at Green Bay.
Denham was still recovering from surgery when she moved to Ann Arbor to begin summer classes and meet the new coaches. That’s when she also met Funchess, who was a much-touted football recruit out of Detroit.
“He was literally the first person I met on campus,” she said Wednesday. “We had an English class together during the summer and we just hit it off. We’re both Geminis and I’ll tell you, that Zodiac stuff is real. We’ve got personalities that are a lot alike and we just hit it off.”
She shook her head at the obvious question:
“No, he’s not my boyfriend. He’s more like my brother. We’re just really tight.”
Funchess had a glowing career in his three years at Michigan. His first year the Football Writers of American Association named him to its freshman All America team as a tight end, his sophomore season he was the Big Ten’s tight end of the year, and as a junior he switched to wide receiver, led the team in catches and won second team All-Big Ten honors.
Denham, meanwhile, was struggling.
She was coming off a serious injury, had new coaches who hadn’t recruited her and soon realized “I needed a change to be as successful as I wanted to be.”
She played in one game for the Wolverines, stayed through the fall semester and then, with the help of the Michigan coaches — “There weren’t any burned bridges between us, I understood” — she looked to transfer.
Wanting to be in a new school by the next semester, she had three weeks to find one. She said she visited Stetson University in Florida and Wright State, which had shown some interest in her coming out of high school.
She soon decided to stay closer to home, in part, she said, to be nearer her grandmother, who was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer.
She said she also was swayed by the sales pitch of Raiders coach Mike Bradbury.
“Anybody who talks to Bradbury, obviously you know he’s a smooth talker,” she grinned. “But he basically told me, ‘If you come here, you’re just gonna have to trust me and, while you might not be able to tell it now, you’ve got to believe that the program is on the upswing.’
“He said, ‘Lots of people want to transfer to a place where they’ve won tons of rings in the past — they just want to be part of that — but how much better would it be to be able to build something?’
“He promised we’d be good if he could get people to buy in and trust him and that’s just what happened.”
After Denham sat out a year — from December to December — to meet NCAA transfer rules, she joined the Raiders two seasons ago and was part of a 26-9 campaign that included the Horizon League tournament title and the program’s first NCAA Tournament bid.
“Bradbury promised we’d be good and we were,” she said.
Denham has now started 61 of her 86 games as a Raider, including all 29 in this 20-9 season, and has scored 400 points and grabbed 256 rebounds. She’s second on this year’s team in minutes, third in assists and fifth in scoring (5.8 ppg).
She’s had some big games over the years, including 17 points against the No. 21 Miami Hurricanes in Florida this season, 19 against Cleveland State in the Horizon League tournament last year and 11 points and 10 rebounds against Valparaiso earlier in that season.
“She can score better than most people give her credit for, but that’s not really her primary role here,” Bradbury said. “She’s a very good defender and she’s a team leader. She’s just a great kid. She’s been really good for this program.”
Denham has two regular season games left in her college career — tonight’s with Cleveland State at the Nutter Center and Sunday afternoon’s Senior Day finale at home against Youngstown State. She and Demmings will be honored that day.
Her parents, siblings, some nieces, cousins and friends will all be there, Denham said.
“I’ll have an entire entourage,” she grinned.
And she may have one more supporter.
Funchess already had planned to come to her May graduation, but Wednesday afternoon she said he may be there for Senior Day, too:
“I just talked to him today. He may or may not be here. We’re working on that and I think it would be fun. And I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll bet this time some people will know who he is.”
If not because of his stellar rookie season and his appearance in the NFL championship game, it will be because he’s part of Symone Denham’s entourage.
And around Wright State that is pretty super.
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