'I'm a zero star.' How JMU transfer Mikail Kamara evolved into pass rusher IU craves.

BLOOMINGTON — Indiana football defensive end Mikail Kamara likes to tease Curt Cignetti about the coach’s reluctance to offer him a scholarship.

Back in 2020, Cignetti expressed reservations about Kamara’s size. They were the same kind of doubts Kamara had grown used to hearing on the recruiting trail as an edge rusher who was 6-feet tall and weighed less than 240 pounds.

“We talk about it all the time,” Kamara said in an interview during fall camp. “We talked about it a month ago. He was like, 'Man, I was sitting in the office and going to take your offer away, look at us now?'”

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That meeting Cignetti mentioned included Kamara’s parents as well. His father, Hassan Kamara, left the sit down thinking there was no way his son would verbally commit to James Madison.

“You want to play for this guy?" Hassan said with a laugh. "(Cignetti) didn't seem like he wanted him. He didn't think Mikail was up to it. He seemed a little snobbish.”

Mikail had a different reaction.

"I was drawn to him, it was like an 'it' factor,” Mikail said, echoing what many Indiana players have said about the coach in recent months. “I knew I was good, he knew I was good. He was still like, we'll take you. We don't need you, but we'll take you. I was like bro, I could come here and dominate.”

Kamara became the impact player he envisioned while transforming his body — his playing weight in fall camp was 265 pounds and he had the lowest body fat (15%) of his career — and helping JMU reach the program’s first bowl game last fall.

It might have happened even earlier if not for a recurring shoulder injury, but the delayed success only made Cignetti’s unprompted praise of Kamara last week sound that much sweeter.

“I think the one guy that's really upped his game is Kamara,” Cignetti said. “We saw that in the spring. We saw that in fall. He's just playing at another level.”

IU football's Mikail Kamara has never backed down from a challenge

Mikail Kamara didn’t have much time for action figures growing up. At 5 years old, he started carrying around a football everywhere he went.

Some of his earliest memories are of his parents scolding him for knocking items off the shelves on their trips to the grocery store with that same football.

Kamara, who is the oldest of four brothers, paired his love of football with an intense competitive streak that also formed at a young age. He vividly remembers attending a family reunion growing up at the Potomac Park in Maryland and dragging his father out onto an open field after his distant cousins started talking a little trash.

“You can’t check us,” Kamara said of their taunt. “I was like Pops you go play quarterback and I’ll play receiver.' We had to show them a little something.”

It’s a story Indiana running back Justice Ellison doesn’t have a hard time believing. Ellison played in the same youth football and basketball leagues as Kamara in Ashburn, Virginia and they got to know each other off the field after their fathers struck up a friendship.

Ellison said they initially “bumped heads” as competitors.

“He was a real skinny guy,” Ellison said with a smile at Big Ten Media Days. “But he got his shots in. We had a lot of fun. We were trying to be the best and the goal is still the same today.”

Kamara’s primary position as a youngster was running back.

He remained on offense through his sophomore season at Stone Bridge High School. There’s still highlights on Kamara’s Hudl page of the fleet-footed freshman breaking tackles with spin moves, running the Wildcat and making leaping grabs out of the backfield.

Kamara was ready to make the full-time jump to varsity in 2018, but the team had a crowded running back room thanks to the arrival of talented transfer Jared Cole, who went on to play for Rutgers.

Stone Bridge coach Mickey Thompson wanted Kamara to be a full-time starter and proposed moving him to linebacker or safety. After spending a few days thinking it over, Kamara had an idea of his own.

“How about defensive end?” Kamara asked.

The suggestion helped Stone Bridge reach consecutive title games in 2018 and 2019. Kamara racked up a series of individual honors including Region 5A defensive player of the year as a senior and had 31 sacks during that stretch.

Kamara’s natural athleticism set him up for success — one of the most memorable moments of his preps career came when he burst through the line to block a punt in the 2019 state semifinals against North Stafford — but he didn’t leave anything to chance.

He spent the entire summer leading up to his junior year repping a short list of drills his defensive line coach gave him and working on the one-man sled at his high school. He also squeezed in as much film study as he could that season even if that meant annoying a few of his teachers.

“I would be sitting in class on my phone watching 1-on-1s of Von Miller,” Kamara said with a laugh. “He was my favorite guy back then, and it helped the game slow down.”

His father noticed everything clicking into place for Mikail once he made the position change.

“That's when he started thinking he could play next level,” Hassan said. “He started taking it a lot more seriously.”

Mikail Kamara's recruitment was series of false starts

Kamara pulls up his barren 247Sports profile from high school when he’s in need of a little motivation. There’s a headshot on the page now, but that wasn’t the case during his preps career.

There’s no information about the offers he received and no stars next to his name. The spot reserved for a signee’s national and state rankings says: “N/A"

“There’s nothing,” Kamara says. “I’m a zero star. I can't lie, I pull it up every year when the draft comes up and they put up guys like Travis Kelce, some of those no star or 3-star guys. When I get drafted, that's what they are going to put up for me."

Kamara described his recruitment process as one false start after another. He performed well at various camps and impressed a handful of visiting assistants that stopped by Stone Bridge’s practices.

When a Power Four program expressed interest, it always ended in disappointment. He inevitably sat across from a head coach listening to them praise his skill set only to stop short of offering him a scholarship.

“We can go down the line right now,” Kamara said, ticking off schools like Maryland and UVA on his fingers.

The feedback he received was always the same.

“They just weren’t high on the size,” Hassan said. “If you didn't fit a certain profile for that position, they didn't think you had the ability to play. They liked everything they saw, but thought he needed to be taller."

Kent State was an exception as one of just two FBS teams (Charlotte) to offer Mikail a scholarship. The Mid-American Conference team capped off a five-win turnaround that season with a 51-41 win over Utah State in the Frisco Bowl and then-coach Sean Lewis made Kamara a priority.

Kamara locked in an official visit to Kent State in June 2019 that his father thought would be the family’s final stop on the recruiting trail. It might have been if Mikail hadn’t scheduled a visit to Harrisonsburg, Virginia one week before that.

“James Madison was one of the better FCS programs recruiting him,” Hassan said. “He had come from a winning program, and wanted to continue to be at a winning program.”

IU offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan has always been in Kamara's corner

Mikail Kamara’s family credits Indiana offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan as the unsung hero of his recruitment. He spoke with JMU’s then-receivers coach on a near daily basis after the staff was hired earlier that year.

"Just very explosive,” Shanahan told The Herald-Times. “He was new to playing defensive end, he had been a running back. I knew there was growth potential.”

Shanahan was also convinced Kamara would be a good fit for the culture Cignetti wanted to build at JMU. It’s the same one the coach outlined for Indiana during his introductory news conference back in December where normal “equals average.”

“Average is the enemy, and to be great, you've got to have special focus, special commitment, special preparation, and discipline,” Cignetti said at the time.

Shanahan thought Kamara would thrive in that environment.

“A great kid, came from a great high school program and was coached hard every day,” Shanahan said. “You could tell he was very serious. He was pretty quiet on his visit, but he was locked in."

Shanahan showed Kamara’s family around campus and spent much of the weekend with him back in 2019. He wasn’t part of their sit down with Cignetti and chuckled when he heard about the coach expressing some doubts over Mikail’s scholarship offer.

“We don’t typically sit it on those meetings,” Shanahan said.

He’s very deferential to his head coach — he was promoted to offensive coordinator at JMU in 2022 and landed the same role when Cignetti came over to IU — but he acknowledged making a strong case on Kamara’s behalf at the time.

"It's definitely something you want to stand tall for,” Shanahan said. “At the end of the day, it's coach Cignetti's program, but as you get to know a kid and their story more so than what's on tape, you want to go to bat for guys that are good fits."

Kamara never made it to Kent State for that other official visit. He verbally committed to JMU a few days after his meeting with Cignetti and was the staff’s first commitment of the 2020 recruiting cycle.

Mikail Kamara shoulders through years-long injury woes

As a true freshman, Kamara sat at his locker after most of JMU’s games unable to lift his arms over his head. His shoulders started popping out of place on a near weekly basis and the injury got so bad that he couldn’t even remove his own shoulder pads without the help of the team’s training staff.

On Sundays, he would need one of his teammates to drive him to the practice facility.

“The next day is worse, the next morning,” Kamara said. “I couldn’t lift my arms up to the steering wheel to drive.”

Kamara's shoulder problems started in middle school when he suffered a broken clavicle in his left arm playing youth football.

The same shoulder gave him problems as an upperclassman at Stone Bridge and the standard physical he received as a mid-year enrollee at JMU in 2020 detected a partially torn labrum. He went under the knife again to repair the ligament once the Coastal Athletic Association moved the 2020 season from the fall to the spring in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kamara played in JMU's opener that spring, but he felt a familiar sensation in his shoulders (yes, plural) within a few weeks. He can still recall in exacting detail each time they popped out of place.

“When we played Elon, oh boy, they both popped out twice each,” Kamara said. “I'm like dog, I don't know what to do.”

It started on the game’s first series.

“It was just me and the running back, I put my shoulder down to tackle him and boom it popped out,” Kamara said. “Two plays after that, I slipped the tackle with a swim move and the other one popped out.”

They each slid out of place again in the second half, but Kamara still played 42 defensive snaps in the 20-17 win.

Kamara shakes his head in disapproval looking back at what he put himself through. He was convinced the playing time he was getting with JMU’s top pass-rushers Abi Nwabuoku-Okonji and Jalen Green sidelined — they were both recovering from torn ACLs — was more important than any discomfort he felt.

“It was a huge opportunity I couldn't pass up on,” Kamara said. “I was never 100%, but I was like I would rather get all this experience and thug it out than miss this opportunity."

The turning point for Kamara came in the opening round of the playoffs against VMI when he ended up in a pile up after chasing down a ball carrier on a screen. His left arm popped out of place and went numb from his neck down to his fingers for a solid five minutes.

As JMU’s postseason run continued, Kamara met with doctors at UVA University Hospital and faced the daunting prospect of having surgery on both his shoulders in a six-week span and a years long rehab process.

"He didn't want to do it at first,” his mother Samantha said. “He was thinking he might not come back as powerful as he was. We had to convince him it was the right choice and he would come back stronger. He was really down.”

The prospect of being able to get his full range of motion back and not having to wear the cumbersome shoulder braces he wore in 2021 were powerful motivators. He got up from his seat to demonstrate how those braces prevented him from fully extending his arms whenever he locked up with an opposing offensive lineman. He still had 15 quarterback pressures including three sacks despite those limitations.

“I was only showing everybody a snippet of what I could do,” Kamara said.

Kamara along with teammates Jamree Kromah and Tyrique Tucker formed an informal workout group in the summer of 2022.

James Madison’s strength and conditioning coach Derek Owings would put the whole team through morning workouts. The trio of defensive linemen would gather in the locker room during the afternoons to go through various position drills.

Kromah told The Herald-Times one of his fondest memories from college was one of those workouts that took place in the midst of a rainstorm.

“We wanted to be better, we wanted more for ourselves,” Kromah said in a phone interview a week before reporting for the Chicago Bears’ training camp. “Rain or shine, we couldn’t let it slow us down. That’s the grind.”

It was a meaningful moment for Kamara as well nearly a year removed from his shoulder surgeries.

“I'm blessed,” Kamara said. “The injuries taught me that every single time I get up on that field I go 100%. You never know when it could be taken away. This is practice, lifts, extra work, I got to go 100% every time."

It’s how Kamara worked his way back to shape after his shoulder surgeries. He wasn’t allowed to do any strenuous activities for nearly six months and put on 30-plus pounds. He spent months getting treatment three times a day for up to six hours before getting cleared to exercise.

Kamara’s planned comeback in 2022 got cut short thanks to a pair of high ankle sprains that were the result of an offensive lineman falling on him, but those fluke injuries couldn’t put a dent in his positive outlook.

“He went into camp the next year full healthy and was just ready to go, he was walking different and talking different,” Hassan said. “He didn't doubt himself anymore."

Kamara earned second team All-Sun Belt honors in 2023 with 41 quarterback pressures, 18.5 tackles for loss, 7.5 sacks and four forced fumbles. According to Pro Football Focus, he had a 9.2% pass-rush win rate that ranked among the top 100 edge-rushers in the FBS.

He's built on that momentum throughout IU's offseason as a wrecking ball in practice.

"He's a hassle, man," Indiana offensive lineman Carter Smith said. "He's a really good defensive lineman. He's probably the guy I have the most trouble. He's just so unpredictable. There's so much to his game, it's so hard to read."

He's come a long way from the under-sized defensive lineman very few coaches believed in.

"The year he had last year and how he looks right now is unbelievable,” Shanahan said. “He's just a grinder. He's always in here working on something. I'm just really happy for him."

The doubts Kamara faced are part of the reason he found Indiana such an intriguing landing spot. Pittsburgh defensive line coach Charlie Partridge, who later left the program for the Indianapolis Colts, made a strong push to land Kamara when he was in the transfer portal.

Kamara opted to put those surgically repaired shoulders to work lifting up a long-suffering Hoosiers fanbase that remains skeptical of the football program.

“I want us to win, I want to turn this program around,” Kamara said when he spoke to reporters during fall camp. “... No one really believes in us. People may say they believe in us and they are excited for Cig to be here and they are excited for a new program, but they don't really believe in us. That's the first thing I want to do, I want to put us on the map.”

Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here .

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: 'I'm a zero star.' How JMU transfer Mikail Kamara evolved into pass rusher IU craves.