As in life, Florida State's Derwin James plays it the way he sees it (2024)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Along one of the walls of Derwin James’ bedroom is an accidental shrine to the promise of what’s to come. There is a fish tank featuring clean water and a working pump and rocks and decorative wallpaper lining the back of it. There are, alas, zero fish inside. James knows he should remedy this, and he thinks he might start with a big Oscar fish. He will get what he wants. He just hasn’t yet.

Above the tank hangs a white dry-erase calendar on which James writes notes and reminders for the applicable days.

It stands to reason that one of the nation’s best college football players, someone who has not competed in a game in 357 days due to a freak knee injury, might highlight Sept. 2 on that calendar. That is the day No. 3 Florida State takes the field against top-ranked Alabama in arguably the best season-opener of all time. James instead calls attention to the message scribbled in black marker on Thursday, Aug. 31. Get ready to leave, it says.

That is the day James and his Seminoles depart campus, bound for Atlanta and the Saturday showdown with the Crimson Tide. If it is not game day, exactly, packing a bag and loading a bus is nevertheless the ritual that at long last marries his desires with reality: It means Florida State’s multifarious star safety is about to get what he wants. “It’s going to be everything I picture every day,” James says, leaning forward on a couch in an athletic department office. “I’m not nervous. I’m just ready to go.”

He has not played competitively since tearing his meniscus in Week 2 of the 2016 season, which means this is likely the most tantalizing, consequential return in the sport this fall. At the instant James felt a jam in his left knee against Charleston Southern last Sept. 10, he already was a pupil-dilating talent equipped to menace offenses from basically everywhere on the field.

Now, after having little choice but to binge on film and exercise his mind while his body idled, James is a pupil-dilating talent equipped to menace offenses from basically everywhere who also actually knows what he’s doing. “Man, I’m not lost,” he says.

Apremier preview

What we see from an anxious, previously dominant player coming off knee surgery may forge the contours of an entire college football season. And if we don’t know precisely what it is we’ll see from Derwin James, that is sort of precisely the point.

A propulsive start in September may presage a December in which Florida State occupies a Playoff spot and James occupies a front-row seat for Heisman festivities. It is not a breathlessly exaggerated scenario; one glance at a Seminoles practice was effectively a teaser trailer for it.

On a recent Thursday, after the prospect of thunderstorms chased the team indoors, James began in a customary spot, running through warm-ups at the back end of the first-unit defense. A few moments later, he meandered into a queue of wide receivers catching short passes, taking a turn to snag a ball and then deliver a casual headbutt to junior Nyqwan Murray when he reached the line on the other end of the drill. “Derwin is that good an athlete — if he really wanted to, if he dedicated his time to playing receiver, he would be a lot of teams’ No. 1 receiver,” Seminoles tailback Jacques Patrick says.

Not long after that, James sprinted to the far end of the field, clapping as he went, setting up to return kickoffs. On the first rep, he burst through a wedge set up by would-be blockers.

The question of how Florida State uses Derwin James has an apparent answer: As needed. “His intelligence level, his ability to adapt and to understand all situations, is his greatest strength,” Seminoles coach Jimbo Fisher says. “He asks for more. He embraces all of it.”

The question of how Derwin James would use Derwin James is likewise easily if diplomatically answered: Find a weakness and sic him on it. He says he will help anywhere. That may be more of a literal proposition than he intends to mean. “I like the ball in my hands,” James says. “Whenever I get the ball in my hands it’s very exciting. I always had the ball in my hands my whole life. It just brings back the old memories.”

Pushing limits

Should the curiosity about what to expect come Saturday prove overwhelming, some of those old memories may help approximate James’ approach to his return. James ought to appreciate, for example, the opportunities afforded him and, especially, the consequences of squandering them. One long-since-forgotten childhood indiscretion earned James a tour of the juvenile detention center where his stepfather worked. “He let me go in there for a couple days and see how they lived,” James says. “It was bad. You have no freedom.”

Another misdeed prompted a week of observing the work done at Holmes Funeral Home in his hometown of Haines City, Fla. The director, Claude Holmes, was a friend of the family and arranged for an ad hoc scared-straight program. Derwin James had no job duties; he was merely meant to watch the bodies carried in, to see how and where they were stored, to witness the staff prepare the corpses for services. James still cannot shake the odor of the backroom that week. “It had a smell to it that I’ll never forget,” he says. “It’s nothing you want to smell.”

Occasionally, the spasms of obstinacy were constructive, at least in the very long term. Three times as a child, James was hit by a car while riding his bike around the neighborhood, though the car wasn’t exactly at fault on the most serious collision. Racing home to make curfew and avoid censure once the streetlights flickered on, James sped around a corner oblivious to traffic. His bike had no brakes. So the car rolling into the median stopped him. Eight staples to the head later, James’ mother insisted he stopped riding the bike. Recounting all this, James rubs the patch of scalp in question and smiles. “I got right back on the same bike my Mom told me to stay off,” he says.

Perhaps not the most sensible approach as a pre-teen. But years later, as medical staffers implored him to slow down after knee surgery and take a day-by-day approach to recovery, it should have been no surprise that James would not decelerate by choice.

Recovery time last year was set at 12 to 14 weeks. After five weeks, James covertly slipped into the weight room to do squats. (“Just the bar,” he explains. “Then I tried to sneak on 10 pounds each side.”) At about the 12-week mark of what was supposed to be a painstakingly careful rehab for a very important knee, Florida State staffers discovered a video posted on social media. Derwin James was on a basketball court. And he was dunking.

Suffice it to say this post did not receive a “like.”

“It’s more than yelling,” James says of the football staff’s reaction. “They said some crazy words.”

Anticipation building

No one can know for certain what Derwin James will do now, as the date he highlighted on that bedroom calendar nears. But it appears safe to guess.

He should be the player who amassed 91 tackles — including 9.5 for a loss and 4.5 sacks — and five pass breakups as a freshman. He should be a player who no longer leans on abundant talent alone, after standing by long enough to do the coaches’ jobs of explaining to teammates why they needed to position themselves outside more, or why they shouldn’t backpedal so fast.

“I see things before they happen,” James says. “Now I know what I have to do, and I know what the offense is trying to do to me.” He should be the player confronted with an abrupt halt to everything, that busted knee like a bike hitting a car, who gets told what he can’t do … only to find himself entirely unable to abide that, because he knows what he’s missing out there.

He should be a little bit of everything Florida State needs. Early in preseason camp, James lingered on the field with Seminoles kicker Ricky Aguayo and, once more indifferent to whatever role is intended for him, the team’s star safety sized up the uprights from 45 yards out. He only made one of five — one attempt sailed clear into the stands, actually — but Derwin James kicked a 45-yard field goal. Now he occasionally warms up with the kicker’s net on the sideline before practice.

“I’m telling you,” James says, “if the toe connects right, we’re good.”

After this weekend, he’ll clear the calendar he looks at every morning, every day when he wakes up and his first thought is, Is it here yet? Maybe he’ll finally fill that fish tank with some inhabitants, too. It’s all imagination, Derwin James says. Anything is possible.

Lead photo by Ross Obley, FSU Sports Information

Want your college football season to last all year long? Subscribe to The All-American.

Brian Hamilton joined The Athletic as a senior writer after three-plus years as a national college reporter for Sports Illustrated. Previously, he spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune, covering everything from Notre Dame to the Stanley Cup Final to the Olympics. Follow Brian on Twitter @_Brian_Hamilton