How JUCO wide receiver Young went from a walk-on offer at Albany to Miami in just 1 year
Colbie Young was all ready to go play for the Albany Great Danes. The only problem was, the FCS program was out of scholarships to give. The COVID-19 pandemic and the extra year of eligibility it granted every player in the country meant Albany couldn’t find room for the wide receiver a year ago. He could either go walk on and get to be a Division I athlete, or take a shot at a junior college and see where it might lead.
He could have never imagined it would end with him playing for the Miami Hurricanes.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I knew JUCO could help me get Power 5 offers and stuff like that, but at first ... I really didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Next week, it will become official. Young orally committed to Miami on Sunday as he wrapped up an official visit in Coral
Gables, and he’s slated to be back down in South Florida on Wednesday or Thursday to move in. He’ll officially begin classes next Monday and be eligible to suit up for the Hurricanes when they begin practice in August.
It brings an ending to one of the wildest recruitments of the past few months. Young was basically unknown when he graduated from New York’s Binghamton in 2020, so much so he took a year off from school entirely. He spent a year at home in upstate New York and Devin Young, his older brother, did the same, opting out of the COVID season for the
FCS Maine Black Bears. The two receivers spent most days together, running routes and trying to get ready for whatever 2021 would hold.
The elder Young went back to Maine — he had 594 receiving yards as a senior — and the younger enrolled at JUCO Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The competition was a step up from high school and Young proved he could handle it, while also learning he had to do more than just rely on his 6-foot-4, 220-pound frame.
“He had to start to understand that technique was important,” said Lackawanna coach Mark Duda, who also coached former Miami offensive lineman Bryant McKinnie with the Falcons in the late 1990s. “It really wasn’t important where he was before because, let’s face it, nobody could leap with the kid.”
Added Young: “I was just an athlete. I could outperform everybody in this small town.”
In his lone season at Lackawanna, Young caught 24 passes for 472 yards and nine touchdowns, and spent his practices going up against
Tyrece Mills, who’s now a defensive back for the Penn State Nittany Lions. Eventually, it led to interest from some of those schools he could have never imagined.
The Virginia Tech Hokies were the first to offer him a scholarship in March. A few weeks later, he visited Penn State, and those coaches realized they could get him immediately eligible because his GPA was good enough and he could get a waiver to not need any standardized tests because of the coronavirus.
His recruitment finally took off. The Pittsburgh Panthers and Tennessee Volunteers offered him in May. The Hurricanes offered June 3.
A few weeks ago, Young was certain he’d be back with the Falcons for one more year. Now he’s getting ready to move to Florida.
“If he didn’t get the thing he wanted, he would just come back,” Duda said. “He’d be a first-team All-American probably.
He’d come back and he’d get, I don’t know, 80 offers.”
At Miami, the selling points are largely about football. He understands there’s a need on the roster for larger wideouts and he already feels comfortable with the offense because, coincidentally, Lackawanna frequently watched cut-ups of the Nittany Lions’ offense from when offensive coordinator Josh Gattis was their wide receivers coach.
“I can easily just get the playbook and get on the field as soon as possible,” Young said.
He has three seasons of eligibility remaining and three years to use them, and there’s a path to him contributing right away as a sophomore, even though he’s unranked in the 247Sports.com composite rankings.
At 6-4, Young will be the tallest wideout on the roster, and there’s only one other scholarship wide receiver taller than 6-2 and only two taller than 6-1. He and fellow wide receiver Frank Ladson Jr. are the Hurricanes’ two most natural red-zone targets.
Young and Ladson, coincidentally, have a connection, too: When Young was a sophomore, he went to one of the Clemson Tigers’ camps and wound up on a 7-on-7 team with Ladson.
Young, of course, was an unknown and Ladson one of Clemson’s top targets, eventually committing there and playing three seasons in South Carolina before he transferred home to Miami in January.
Even though Young thinks he can contribute right away, playing for the Hurricanes brings an added benefit: He gets to learn from players like Ladson, who have spent basically their whole lives going up against competition stiffer than anything Young has faced.
“It’s a different level, so I can’t just be running straight,” Young said. “It’s really learning the game at a higher level now. The older guys being in the same room — trying to learn from the guys that played at bigger teams.”