In the middle of the University of Arizona’s 2024 football season, a veteran coach took an ineligible player for a walk around the practice field in Tucson. Jacory Croskey-Merritt had played one game for the Wildcats that fall. He wowed everyone by ripping through New Mexico, his former team. In the weeks since, he hadn’t played a snap. He was caught up in an NCAA rules issue. His senior season was slipping away. He worried his NFL dream might be, too.
In stepped Alonzo Carter, the Wildcats’ running backs coach and an old-school football sage. As they walked, Carter asked Croskey-Merritt to look around. Tucson is beautiful in the fall. Take in the facilities. Consider whom you’re surrounded with.
“I said: ‘Hey, man. You know how people go and train for the combine?’” Carter recalled this week by phone. “‘Let’s just say you got a two-month jump start. But the difference is, you don’t have to go home. You don’t have to fly to Florida or someplace. You’re getting to do it right here where you’re comfortable, with the people that love you and people that are going to support you.’ … From then on, he never left the facility.”
By so many measures, Croskey-Merritt’s rise in popularity - among the Washington Commanders’ fan base, with fantasy football owners and within his own locker room - is one of the least likely stories in the infancy of this NFL season. He played just that one game in his final year of college, which came at his third school. He was selected in the seventh and final round of the draft, after 244 players and 24 running backs had been taken before him. He made plays throughout the Commanders’ offseason workouts, gained 70 yards on 18 carries and scored a touchdown in two preseason games to secure a roster spot. He essentially made three-year starter Brian Robinson Jr. expendable by trade.
On Sunday in his NFL debut, Croskey-Merritt ran 10 times for 82 yards against the New York Giants. The list of rushers who gained more yards in Week 1: Derrick Henry of Baltimore, Travis Etienne of Jacksonville and Breece Hall of the New York Jets. Combined regular-season games for those three: 228. To varying degrees, they’re experienced stars featured in their offenses for years. Croskey-Merritt arrived as a borderline nobody.
No matter. He scored his first regular-season touchdown. He burst free for a 42-yard, fourth-quarter run that nearly put the Giants away. He heard the Northwest Stadium crowd chant his nickname - “Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!” - like it was something out of a movie.
“This is what I wanted,” Croskey-Merritt said. “Just to be able to show the world that I can play football.”
He’s showing at least a slice of the world, in the nation’s capital, where he is already adored. Still, this zero-star recruit who spent three years at Alabama State University in his hometown of Montgomery and then had his senior year all but erased is one of the most impactful NFL rookies thus far?
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Carter said. “Not one bit.”
“They’re going to chant his name for a long time,” said Donald Hill-Eley, Croskey-Merritt’s coach at Alabama State. “That kid’s got a great upside. He’s going to play some good football.”
We’re one week in. Sixteen games over four months stretch out ahead. There’s temptation to resist the hype, to downplay Croskey-Merritt’s potential.
Then you listen to the people who know him.
“This is a kid who came from very humble beginnings,” said Hill-Eley, who recruited Croskey-Merritt out of Sidney Lanier High in Montgomery. “Jacory grew up in one of the impoverished, low-income places over there and is a success story in itself. Kept his nose clean. Didn’t succumb to the streets or all the other stuff that was going on in Montgomery. A lot of folks would say that kids from that area, the only way they can make it was leave town. He proved them wrong.”
Not without some significant hiccups.
What happened at Alabama State remains murky. The school’s stats show Croskey-Merritt played in four games as a freshman, which would have made him eligible to redshirt. Other statistical sites show he played in several more, which would have burned his redshirt year. The school argued another running back wore Croskey-Merritt’s jersey number. Neither the NCAA nor Arizona was sure, and after Croskey-Merritt ran for 106 yards on 13 carries - including a 36-yard touchdown - in the 2024 season opener against New Mexico, Wildcats officials began holding him out.
“It was so much going on,” Hill-Eley said of Croskey-Merritt’s freshman year at Alabama State. “With everything else that’s going on, I’m not even at liberty to talk about it. It’s still an ongoing matter. But how it was, whatever happened was unfortunate. For right now, all of it is behind him, and he’s moving forward.”
Arizona officials did not respond to an email requesting clarity. Croskey-Merritt called it a misunderstanding.
“I didn’t even ask about it,” Carter said. “I didn’t even talk about it.”
Carter’s job then became to keep Croskey-Merritt engaged. NFL scouts were still visiting Arizona’s practices.
“That was the carrot I had over his head - the scouts,” Carter said. “They’re all asking about you. Just because you’re not playing in the games, that don’t mean you’re still not being evaluated. Your games are practice.”
Carter said Croskey-Merritt, running behind a scout-team offensive line, regularly turned broken plays into 50- and 60-yard touchdown runs against Arizona’s first-team defense.
“With his vision, his ability to cut back and see is rare,” Carter said. “It’s a special trait that he has that you don’t normally see in most people.”
Still, there were moments when Croskey-Merritt pushed back. Carter made him sit in the front row of the meeting room, taking notes. Croskey-Merritt sometimes wondered why he was taking notes on a game plan if he wasn’t going to play. That walk around the practice field, just coach and player, became necessary. Scouts would see him. How would he respond?
“They want to see how you deal with this adversity,” Carter asked. “Do you shut down? Do you go in the tank?”
From there, Croskey-Merritt was all in. Carter came to understand that if he approached his office and the lights were out, Croskey-Merritt was napping on his couch, waiting so they could go over plays. He wanted to impress scouts with his understanding, too. During that season, Commanders scout Peter Picerelli took Carter to lunch.
“He was just really detailed, asking a lot of personal questions, just all the positive things that Bill brought to the table,” Carter said. “He came a couple of times. He’d seen it, just the talent. But he wanted to know about the person, too.”
Now, we’ve all seen it. Jacory Croskey-Merritt - sorry, Bill, because as a kid he looked like cartoon character Little Bill - was a practice-only running back who is becoming a prime-time player. That happened because he has ability people didn’t get to see on TV last fall. It also happened because, when he couldn’t play, he got better anyway.
“I kind of knew what I was fighting for,” Croskey-Merritt said. “I was fighting for moments like this, knowing it was going to come. And when it came, I was going to make sure I was ready.”
Next up: Green Bay on Thursday night. For the first time in the regular season, a national television audience will see this kid with the hyphenated name who goes by Bill. People will almost certainly see his ability. They should know his story, too.