The college football world sat in front of the television on the evening of Sept. 1, energized by the Week 0 matchup between West Virginia and Pitt. Our favorite sport was back, and we were being ushered into the joy of fall by watching the renewal of the Backyard Brawl that featured prominent quarterback transfers JT Daniels and Kedon Slovis. We were blessed with an instant classic, a game featuring a tie-breaking pick-six with three minutes remaining and a last-minute drive that ended with a thrilling incomplete pass at the goal line with 22 seconds left.
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That was the epitome of what makes college football beautiful.
A star may have also been born that night.
There was a true freshman running back for West Virginia very few people had heard of. He came out running hard and got stronger as the game went on. He had only seven carries but managed to run for 125 yards and one touchdown. He averaged 17.9 yards per carry. He also blocked a punt.
His name is CJ Donaldson.
DO IT ALL CJ‼️ TOUCHDOWN MOUNTAINEERS‼️💪#WVUvsPitt pic.twitter.com/HkL1RfeP57
— West Virginia Football (@WVUfootball) September 2, 2022
Where did this kid come from? A quick Google search for his 247Sports recruiting profile the night of the game came up with no matches, only later to be explained by the fact that it was under his real first name, De’Carlo. When you finally access his profile, you’ll see he was a three-star prospect who ranked as the No. 933 overall player and the No. 52 tight end in the 2023 class in the 247Sports Composite. A tight end? This true freshman running back galloping all over the field was listed as a tight end in his recruiting profile?
“You know what’s crazy? ” Donaldson said during an interview with The Athletic last week. “I’ve never played tight end in my entire life.”
That’s only part of the story about how a player with this much raw talent and potential slipped through the cracks in a recruiting ecosystem designed to find players like him. As he continues to put up big yardage and score touchdowns for the Mountaineers every week, these questions have to be answered:
How did we miss this guy? How did West Virginia find him? And what can we expect from him when the Mountaineers play Virginia Tech on Thursday night?
During West Virginia’s open week in mid-October last season, head coach Neal Brown and tight ends coach Travis Trickett flew to South Florida to visit linebacker commitment Travious Lathan of Miami Gulliver Prep. They were sitting in the office of head coach Earl Sims. To kill time, Sims — as all high school coaches do — was pitching the West Virginia staff on another kid he had on his roster. That kid was Donaldson.
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Donaldson, who was committed to Tulane at the time, was playing receiver for Gulliver Prep but featured a skill set that enabled him to star at basically any position. He could catch, block, run, whatever. Moments later, Donaldson coincidentally walked by the office, and Brown got a look at him. Brown immediately saw his lower body and his 6-foot-2 frame and asked, “Who is that?” Sims said that was the kid he was literally just talking about.
Luckily the door was open, right?
“I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s the receiver you were just telling us about?’” Brown said.
Brown and Trickett — who is now the offensive coordinator at South Florida — got back in the car after the visit and hit the typical Miami traffic. As Brown sat in the passenger seat, he decided to look at more tape of Donaldson. He couldn’t believe that the player Sims was describing was the same player he saw in the hallway. Someone built like Donaldson isn’t supposed to have that skill set.
That’s when it occurred to Brown: What if West Virginia used Donaldson the same way Oklahoma utilized former tight end Jeremiah Hall? While scouting other teams in the Big 12, Brown had been impressed with how the Sooners deployed the 6-foot-2, 248-pound jumbo athlete. He was difficult to prepare for. Even if Donaldson didn’t have a natural position, per se, Brown could find a way to utilize him somewhere on West Virginia’s roster.
“With a guy like that, you can be in one personnel group and do a variety of different things,” Brown told The Athletic. “And they had CJ playing like an H-Back, playing inside receiver and outside receiver. He’s physical on the perimeter, he’s blocking, they’re getting him the ball a bunch. If you look back at his stats as as a receiver and how they were using him last year, man, he was really, really productive. … And so we track guys every Friday. We started tracking him for the next three or four weeks. He was just productive every week. We eventually offered him. We did a home visit, he officially visited in December and we signed him.”
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This recruitment has so many interesting angles. First, Brown and his staff decided to offer Donaldson after watching his senior tape. In recruiting nowadays, players are receiving so much attention earlier in their careers that they are typically established prospects before they become high school seniors. Donaldson proved to be the rare prospect who didn’t emerge as a Power 5 asset until after his senior season started.
Secondly, Donaldson was pigeon-holed into his position. Assistants from all over the country would come into Gulliver Prep and see him listed as a tight end and not recruit him because he doesn’t have the prototypical body type for the position. Others would see his tape and watch him play receiver but question his body type. That’s how a player with this much natural ability garners so little attention.
“We are so position-oriented with how we take guys at certain spots, it can be a blind spot,” Brown said. “So if a receivers coach is watching him, they’re probably questioning his top-end speed. If they are looking at him as a tight end, he may not have length. And he didn’t carry the ball in high school. That’s how people like him get missed.”
Brown has never been more thankful for a traffic jam. A little extra time in the car looking at the back end of a Toyota Corolla helped him see the light on Donaldson.
But Brown, as much as he’d like to take credit for being the mastermind behind discovering this running back, still needed a little nudge. Had West Virginia not lost running back Lyn-J Dixon in the transfer portal, it wouldn’t have had a need at the position. So with the Mountaineers light in numbers, Brown decided to give Donaldson a look in the backfield.
It’s not typical for a three-star prospect with a light offers list to come in at a position he’s never played and make this big of a difference this soon in his career. Developmental prospects typically take years to, well, develop. But Donaldson was a natural from the second he took his first rep at the position.
CJ Donaldson's hot start
| Opponent | Att | Yds | AVG | TD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Pitt | 7 | 125 | 17.9 | 1 |
Kansas | 13 | 48 | 3.7 | 2 |
Towson | 9 | 101 | 11.2 | 3 |
Totals | 29 | 274 | 9.4 | 6 |
“I don’t think we have to classify guys, honestly,” Brown said. “He is a football player. On offense, he can block and you want to get the ball in his hands, whether you are throwing it to him or handing it off to him. He is versatile enough. He can help you on all four special teams. … We took him thinking he was going to grow into a hybrid tight end-receiver. You could tell from the second he got here that he had a really good feel for football. So he’s a running back, especially with where we’re at personnel-wise. You’re going to see his role increase as the season goes on. He can do a lot of things.
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“He was never going to be a hand-down tight end. He was always going to be a guy we tried to get the ball to. We weren’t sure if it was going to be at running back, but here we are.”
Donaldson believes he was meant to play at West Virginia, like it was some sort of divine intervention.
When he was in high school, he often did class projects on football players. He did one on Tavon Austin. He gave a presentation on Geno Smith. He wrote an article on Pacman Jones. Without realizing it, he kept picking guys who played their college ball at West Virginia. Another tie to the Mountaineers: His former trainer in Miami, Antonio Brown, played for WVU in the early 2000s.
“I knew I was going to West Virginia before I knew I was going to West Virginia,” Donaldson said.
That might be true, but for a while he was committed to Tulane. Despite feeling as though he had the athletic tools to be a Power 5 player, Donaldson kept getting overlooked. Then Brown and Trickett made that trip to Gulliver Prep and the wheels started moving toward West Virginia. The Mountaineers offered on Oct. 28. So did Florida. Less than two weeks later, he decommitted from Tulane, took an official visit to West Virginia and announced his decision to head to Morgantown shortly after.
Perhaps his recruitment could have been different. He had 1,000 yards receiving as a freshman in high school but suffered a major injury as a sophomore and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Though it was clear he had athletic potential, he didn’t have much film and, of course, didn’t have a natural position. People refer to Donaldson as a “Swiss Army Knife,” which is appropriate. Brown recognized that. But it wasn’t just Brown’s faith in Donaldson that got him to West Virginia.
“As soon as I came, it was more the team than anything,” Donaldson said. “Everything I do, I have to be with the team, and I connected with the team so well. My cousin (Ja’Corey Hammett) is on the team, too. And when I met the coaches, it felt like a family. It didn’t feel like I was playing football. It felt like I was spending time with my family and that I wasn’t away from home. A lot of the team is from Florida. These are people who understand me. I don’t know how to explain it. It feels like home. It doesn’t feel like I’m away from Miami.”
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You probably couldn’t find two places that have less in common than Miami and Morgantown, W.Va.
But when he’s on the football field — scoring six times through his first three college games — it all feels normal.
“It’s been crazy to get off to this start,” he said, “but I’m just taking it day by day.”
Soon enough everyone in college football may know his name. Not bad for a three-star tight end, right?
(Photo: Mark Alberti/ Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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