• Video Below: Watch an interview with NU coach Bo Pelini during Saturday’s football practice

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LINCOLN — The path was beaten so many times from Northwestern High School to the University of Miami that Lavonte David just believed he would be among the next to walk it.

The Hurricanes were going to sign eight players off the powerhouse Miami Northwestern team that won the Florida Class 6A state championship and was ranked No. 1 nationally after the 2007 prep season.

David just wasn't going to be one of them.

And he struggled to understand why.

"It kind of bothered him, because he felt like he did what he was supposed to do as a player," said Roland Smith, the former Northwestern head coach.

Miami wanted Sean Spence, David's close friend and fellow linebacker, and got him. It also snatched quarterback Jacory Harris, offensive lineman Brandon Washington and others off that unbeaten team.

"Michael Barrow was at the University of Miami at that time and he was saying, 'I need to get Sean Spence. I need to get Sean Spence,'" Smith said. "I said, 'Coach, I got three linebackers better than you got. Don't sleep on these other two guys as well.' Lavonte probably just got overlooked because of that team that he was on."

So David was left to up and leave the only place he had ever known — the area around Northwestern High that was poor, run down and dangerous, but home nonetheless.

Where was he supposed to go? What was he supposed to do?

All that he was sure about was that he wasn't going to add to the broken dreams around him. So he reported to small-town Kansas, tried to break Brandon Kinnie in half during his first practice at Fort Scott Community College (more on that later) and generally has spent the past three football seasons punishing people for underestimating him.

"Maybe that's why he's so good, because he's always been trying to show people that he was," former Fort Scott head coach Jeff Sims said.

David heads into his senior season at Nebraska as a Butkus Award candidate. The 6-foot-1, 225-pounder set the Husker single-season record with 152 tackles a year ago, and the bad news for opponents is that he will be more polished and schooled in the system this year.

"As phenomenal a year as he had last year, I think he can be even better," NU head coach Bo Pelini said. "I think he'd be the first one to tell you that. He's going to grow as a player.

"What he was able to do in such a short amount of time last year was pretty extraordinary."

David has found a home in Nebraska only because Miami passed on him not once, but twice. Sims tried to sell the Hurricanes on him again after his sophomore season at Fort Scott, deducing that David's heart might still be with UM because "he wore a Miami jacket 99 percent of the time."

"The hardest thing about coaching Lavonte David was to get other people to believe how good Lavonte David was," said Sims, who now heads quality control for recruiting at Indiana.

Even though he was coming off a second-team high school All-America season, it's not a total mystery as to why David slipped past Miami and a list of other schools as they put together their 2008 signing classes.

His smallish size for a linebacker was one factor — David still weighed only about 215 when he signed with Nebraska as part of the 2010 recruiting class. Academic concerns also came into play. Some schools bailed because they feared David would not qualify.

Out of high school, he initially signed with Middle Tennessee State, but Sims and Fort Scott kept after him through former Fort Scott assistant coach Eddie Brown, a Miami native who was familiar with the Northwestern staff.

Perhaps after a stop at junior college, the Canes would come calling.

"That was my goal, to go to the University of Miami," David said. "Unfortunately things didn't work out, but things still ended up fine for me. I ended up at a great place like Nebraska. Everything worked out for me."

But first there was the stop at Fort Scott.

It would have been hard to imagine David and Kinnie together as Huskers based on their first encounter after David arrived on the plains of Kansas.

Kinnie was an established big name in the Fort Scott program, somebody not to be messed with during a noncontact seven-on-seven drill. New to the team, David paid that no heed as he came up from safety and leveled the receiver on a slant pattern, taking Kinnie into one of the garbage cans used as markers for the drill.

"I knew what I was doing, yeah," David said, smiling. He had arrived on campus late. Nobody knew who he was. "I just tried to make a statement," he said.

Kinnie started with some choice words for the newcomer and followed with several days of refusing to acknowledge that the new guy might actually have some game.

"He was No. 19 and I said, '19, come here,' because I didn't know who he was, but I didn't care," Kinnie said. "My roommate would say, 'Hey, that Lavonte dude is real, real good.' I said, 'Man, no he's not, he's not good at all,' because I was still bitter from that (hit). We went at it every day until I finally said, 'Look, man, I know you're good.'"

Kinnie said it was hard not to like David. He was humble and quiet and did all the right things. Plus, he had an unbelievable nose for the football and speed that got him to it fast.

His new NU teammates got to see both in his first season as a Husker, even though he sometimes strayed from the structure he didn't completely understand.

David started out with the Nos. 3 and 4 units upon arrival, standard procedure that he accepted. With Sean Fisher and Will Compton suffering August injuries, he was fast-tracked into an important position on a good defense, and the stage was set for a record-breaking season.

David started making plays immediately with 13 tackles in the season-opening game against Western Kentucky. There were seven more games with 10 or more tackles, including 17 in the Big 12 championship game against Oklahoma, 14 at Texas A&M; and a career-high 19 vs. South Dakota State.

Many happened when a teammate thought he was in position to make the play.

"He won't even be in your peripheral vision, and next thing you know he's got the guy on the ground and you're still 5 yards away," NU safety Austin Cassidy said. "He's the first one to the ball, no matter where the ball is. It's like he's a magician or something."

Cassidy had heard the stories of David's ball-hawking skills, but still ...

"Once he actually got here, you're going, 'Wow, he's better than even advertised,'" Cassidy said.

Other schools might have found that out, Smith said, had they pursued his linebacker the same way David chased down ball carriers. In addition to David and Spence, Northwestern also had South Florida signee Quavon Taylor, but Smith said David was the most versatile of his trio.

Larry Blustein, who covers Florida high school recruiting for the Miami Herald, simply replied to a World-Herald email about David by writing: "Miami should have gone after him" — all capitalized and with six exclamation points.

Despite the snub, Smith said David did the next best thing by simply going and proving people wrong.

"Once he got wherever he was going to get, he was the kind of kid who was never going to call and say he was unhappy or say he was homesick," Smith said. "He did what he had to do, and made the best out of every situation that was there in front of him."

David still talks regularly with Spence and sometimes about what it might have been like to play together in college. The second time David was available, he considered South Florida and Tennessee in addition to NU, but the Huskers were the team with David at the top of their list and the team that Smith said offered the best fit.

USF would have given David another avenue to get back home. But, David said, "home is not always the best place to go."

David is a criminal justice major who plans to graduate next spring or summer. When he's through with football, he could see himself being a parole officer for juveniles or working in some kind of mentoring role.

"From what I've been through, I can help a young guy out and make his life better," he said. "Just the environment I've been around, the places I've lived ... I've seen a lot of young guys in trouble. So I'd like to help those guys learn from that."

Someday he might come across the kid who wants to play for the hometown football team but doesn't get the chance. He can tackle that one with the voice of experience.

As you get older and more mature, David said, you start to understand why things happen. Football is a business. Schools figure out who they want and go after them.

Players then scramble to find what's best for them.

"He said that was a dream of his (to go to Miami), but he loves where he's at now," Kinnie said. "He would never change it. I believe that."

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• Video: See a video interview with NU coach Bo Pelini from Saturday’s football practice: