When DJ Giddens isn’t on the football field there is a good chance you will find him at Milford Lake casting a line into the water near his hometown of Junction City.
The Kansas State running back has several “low-key spots” out there that only the most avid fishermen know about, and he visits them often. Earlier this summer, he reeled in a 30-pound blue catfish, and it made him feel like he had just scored a game-winning touchdown.
“The feeling was pretty much the same,” Giddens said. “You can’t beat either one.”
You won’t find many college athletes who get the same kind of adrenaline rush from fishing as they do from football. But you won’t find many college athletes like Giddens, either.
He is a bruising 6-foot-1 and 212-pound runner who amassed 1,549 yards and found the end zone 13 times for the Wildcats last season. He is also a quiet, shy, mild-mannered young man who spends most of his free time far away from the football field.
Ask him who his favorite football team was growing up, and he says he didn’t have one. Why? Because he refused to watch a minute of the sport on TV. He didn’t want to waste his weekends with that stuff when there were friends to play with in his neighborhood and fish to catch at the lake.
That approach to sports made him an almost unknown recruit.
Zero-star recruit
Giddens didn’t play football at all as a sophomore in high school. Then, after Junction City coach Randall Zimmerman added him to the roster as an upperclassman, he spent most of his junior year injured. No one showed him any recruiting love until the bitter end of his senior campaign.
Even then, the calls came mostly from junior colleges.
It may sound hard to believe now that Giddens has transformed himself into one of the best running backs in the Big 12, if not the nation, but you couldn’t find a recruiting profile on him three years ago. Seriously, typing his name into Google accomplished nothing. He didn’t go to college camps or take campus visits, so nobody thought to scout him. He was a zero-star recruit, according to 247Sports .
“My focus was all about showing what I could do during the season,” Giddens said. “I worked as hard as I could during the offseason, but my focus was never on seven-on-seven or camps. I worked to make sure that when I got the opportunity as a senior I was ready to really show what I could do in games.”
K-State noticed. The Wildcats gave Giddens his one and only scholarship offer in the summer of 2021.
When he accepted, most of EMAW nation responded by collectively asking “Who?”
“They didn’t even have to sell me, because I didn’t get recruited out of high school,” Giddens said. “Kansas State was my only option.”
Making the grade
The opportunity to play college football 20 minutes away from his mother and friends felt like a gift from above when it was presented to Giddens.
But make no mistake, he worked hard for it. Both on the field and in the classroom.
Giddens could be described as a lost soul early on in high school. He wasn’t a star athlete. His grades were abysmal.
That didn’t make sense to Zimmerman, his old football coach. He could tell Giddens was smart. He also thought he had college and maybe even NFL potential. But he was going nowhere.
Turns out, something was missing: motivation.
That changed when Giddens was told he was good enough to play for a college like K-State ... if he applied himself.
All of a sudden, Giddens had something to strive for. In order to play at the next level, though, he would need to get stronger in the weight room and faster on the field. But he would also need to improve his GPA. That turned out to be his biggest obstacle.
Giddens was on a mission from that point on.
He had a monster senior year with the Bluejays and he put up huge numbers in games against strong opponents like Derby and Manhattan. Zimmerman urged college coaches to start recruiting Giddens, but they mostly stayed away because of his grades. Few thought he would qualify for anything more than junior college.
K-State was the lone school that maintained interest. But that was enough for Giddens. If he could boost his grades, he saw a future for himself with the Wildcats.
With that in mind, Giddens enrolled in every college-level course imaginable. He remembers two English classes, physics, math and more.
There were times when it looked like his efforts were going to be too little, too late. But he eventually persevered.
“I use DJ as an example for some of our administrators,” Zimmerman said. “He struggled academically and he got discouraged and he got a little bit down and he didn’t have a lot of confidence in himself. But we plugged away with him and he eventually took off. Then he really, really, really battled late and he got to Kansas State. Look at him now. We should never give up on kids, because you never know how many more like DJ are out there.”
Hungry for more
It will be interesting to see where Giddens goes from here.
Now that his grades are up and he has made a name for himself at K-State, just about anything seems possible for his football future. The junior running back should be a focal point for offensive coordinator Conor Riley, who had his own unique journey to coaching , this season. He could be an All-Big 12 player and then a NFL Draft prospect.
He seems ready for anything.
“I want to start showing that I can catch the ball and that I have open-field speed,” Giddens said. “I want to have breakaway runs. I want to prove that I can make long touchdown runs, catch the ball out of the backfield and catch the ball downfield. I want to show that I can do more than just run between the tackles.”
Those all seem like attainable goals. Thing is, he is still flying under the radar.
Giddens almost single-handedly won a game for K-State last season by rushing for 207 yards and four touchdowns against UCF . He also dominated against North Carolina State at the Pop-Tarts Bowl . But there seems to be much more preseason excitement surrounding K-State quarterback Avery Johnson and fellow running back Dylan Edwards.
He also sometimes gets lost in the Big 12 shuffle of running backs behind Ollie Gordon, Devin Neal and Tahj Brooks.
Those who are around Giddens everyday think too many people are sleeping on him.
“DJ is so unheralded,” K-State coach Chris Klieman said. “I don’t think he gets the respect that he deserves, because he proved himself against North Carolina State. We had to get him the ball, and he rolled.”
Running backs coach Brian Anderson thinks he is only going to get better.
“From the moment he first got here he has been a hard guy to tackle,” Anderson said. “He showed unbelievable contact balance and unbelievable ball skills. Now his football IQ is really high and there’s no stopping him.”
Gone fishin’
The transition from high school to college was surprisingly easy for Giddens.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Giddens said. “Maybe having to work so hard my senior year is what prepared me for this. All I know is I wouldn’t be here without the support of people around me. Shoutout to Coach Zimmerman. If it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t be in this position right now.”
He can also thank Deuce Vaughn.
Giddens spent his first year at K-State on the sideline with a redshirt, and that gave him an up-close view at one of the top rushers in school history. Giddens learned so much playing behind Vaughn that he was able to complement him as a runner when he became a redshirt freshman by rushing for 518 yards and six touchdowns.
Then he took over as the team’s workhorse runner last season and popularized the phrase “turnt” when he used it to describe the emotions of wining the Sunflower Showdown.
Today, young running backs look up to him.
There was a time when it looked like Giddens wouldn’t make the grades for college football. But now that he has put in the work, he makes it look easy.
Just like fishing.
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