With renewed sense of purpose, Michigan's Donovan Edwards ready to seize opportunity

INDIANAPOLIS — Bedecked in Dior sneakers and an off-white linen suit fit for a tropical wedding, Michigan running back Donovan Edwards bounded onto a platform at Big Ten Media Days on Thursday with his trademark smile and puckish charm in tow. He took a moment to position himself behind a microphone and nameplate all his own and then cast his gaze onto a group of reporters thicker than the crowds for most players throughout the week. 

"What's going on, everybody?" Edwards said. "I didn't expect all of y'all to be up here."

The unfeigned naïveté was in keeping with the boyish demeanor that has endeared Edwards to teammates and coaches from the minute he arrived on campus as a highly touted recruit. That he would be one of the most sought-after interviews at Lucas Oil Stadium this week genuinely surprised him, even though Edwards is both the featured tailback for the defending national champions and a cover athlete for the wildly popular EA Sports "College Football 25" video game, having posed alongside Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers and Colorado cornerback/wide receiver Travis Hunter. The combined significance of those two things make Edwards one of the more recognizable players in the sport. 

For as blissfully unaware of his own importance as Edwards seemed to be, the position he currently occupies is exactly what he's always wanted since joining the Wolverines. Gone is Hassan Haskins, the bruising battering ram who anchored Michigan's offense during Edwards' freshman season in 2021. Gone is Blake Corum, the two-time All-American who inherited Haskins' throne and kept Edwards waiting by putting together one of the best careers by a running back in program history, twice rushing for more than 1,200 yards in a season and reaching the end zone 61 times. The depth chart is finally clear for Edwards to be the unquestioned leader in the room.     

"I've always been the No. 1 back, I've always been having my number called on," Edwards said of his experience prior to enrolling at Michigan. "I had to take a backseat to that. Most people, I believe, they would have transferred out. But I wasn't. I was going to stay the course and stay patient. And ultimately it was going to pay off for me."

As Edwards enters his senior season, there's an element of now or never if he wants to realize his immense potential and stabilize a career that has unfolded in fits and starts both on and off the field. A former five-star prospect and the No. 33 overall player in the 2021 recruiting class, Edwards was an in-state phenomenon from nearby West Bloomfield, Michigan, a northwestern suburb of Detroit. He had his choice of scholarship offers from blue-blood programs across the country — Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oregon and USC, to name a few — and ultimately chose the Wolverines over the Buckeyes. His commitment was seen as one of the biggest recruiting wins former coach Jim Harbaugh ever had in Ann Arbor. 

But Edwards' road toward realizing that potential has been thorny, a head-scratching blend of breathless cameos and puzzling ineffectiveness, of injury woes and off-field gaffes, of heartfelt admissions about his mental health and a heroic performance in the national championship game against Washington, whose defense he shredded for touchdown runs of 41 and 46 yards in the first quarter of an eventual 34-13 win last January. It became increasingly difficult to ascertain the caliber of player he really was — or wasn't.

"I'm always confident," Edwards said. "But I may have been a little bit arrogant, especially coming off of a great sophomore year. I told [The Detroit News] that I wanted to go to the NFL after that year. But I've grown a lot, and I know that I've matured a lot. You can hear it in my voice when I'm talking to you now, you know what I'm saying?"

— As a freshman, Edwards cried in the locker room following a 31-10 bludgeoning of Washington as Haskins (27 rushes for 155 yards and 1 TD) and Corum (21 rushes for 171 yards and 3 TDs) combined to carry the ball 47 more times than he did. He missed multiple games with an undisclosed injury and lost a fumble during the win over Northwestern. He also caught 10 passes for 170 yards and a touchdown against Maryland in a dazzling display of versatility that left the Terrapins' defense chasing ghosts. His position coach, former Michigan legend Mike Hart, would later say that Edwards could start at slot receiver for "most teams in the country." Edwards finished the year with 35 carries for 174 yards and three touchdowns to go along with 20 receptions for 265 yards and one score. 

— As a sophomore, Edwards broke loose for 100-yard games against Penn State and Rutgers before ascending to the No. 1 tailback role after Corum suffered a season-ending injury. He raced his way into the annals of Michigan's rivalry with Ohio State by dismantling the Buckeyes for 216 yards and two touchdowns while sporting a cast to protect a surgically repaired thumb and with a partially torn patellar tendon in his knee, though the latter wouldn't be disclosed for months. Then he rumbled for 185 yards and a touchdown the next week in the Big Ten Championship game against Purdue, thrusting the Wolverines into their second consecutive College Football Playoff. But much of his success was overshadowed by a rash of negative headlines after he shared a clip of rapper Kanye West using antisemitic language on social media. Edwards would issue multiple apologies in the coming months, and the Wolverines later visited the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, as a team. 

— As a junior, Edwards made it known that he planned for the 2023 campaign to be his last at Michigan in anticipation of forgoing his final season of eligibility to enter the NFL Draft. He'd carried 140 times for 991 yards and seven touchdowns as Corum's backup the year prior and played some of the best football of his career in the biggest moments. He even went on a podcast hosted by Pro Football Focus and said, "I will go down as one of the greatest running backs to ever play the game. I'll be up there with Walter Payton, Barry Sanders. I believe I will revolutionize the game and the position." What followed was the worst statistical season of Edwards' career, in which he failed to run for more than 52 yards across Michigan's first 14 games and dropped more passes (three) than in the previous two seasons combined (one). During a media session prior to the national championship game, Edwards told reporters he had begun seeing a therapist to address the ups and downs of his career. 

"It was all these factors like I'm not getting the ball as much as I want to, I know I'm only going to go in on third down," Edwards said. "If you know that you're talented, you've proved something already. You want to be in the game more. Which is whatever, like, I think that's what shaped me into who I am today. But ultimately, I had the choice to — as Coach [Jim] Harbaugh would say — be bitter or get better. And I chose getting better. I continued to root my teammates on. I didn't care who was getting the touches.

"And ultimately, you know, I realized I put a lot of expectations on myself. I wanted to get drafted after the season knowing like, yeah, it might not happen [based on how poorly I was playing]. I put a lot of expectations on myself that I'm not going to do ever again."

In his lowest moments, Edwards said he leaned on a trio of Michigan's coaches for support: Hart, then-offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore and offensive analyst Fred Jackson, a former running backs coach under Harbaugh. That Moore continued to imbue him with confidence amid the worst stretch of his career is one of the reasons why Edwards has been so vocal in his support of the first-year head coach. It was Edwards who stood up and clapped after Moore's speech at Big Ten Media Days on Thursday afternoon. 

A season's worth of demons were exorcised in the national championship game as Edwards carried six times for 104 yards and two scores, delivering once again when the Wolverines needed him most. And in that moment, Edwards said, he felt like all of his patience had finally paid off. His comportment in the locker room and his approach to the game had never wavered, even if his confidence surely did. He trusted that his time would come. 

"He's the same energetic person he's been since I saw him in high school walking the hallways, dapping everybody up, smiling, laughing, on the field making the plays," Moore said. "He's just become more mature, really grown in his spirituality and his faith. And that's probably the biggest thing. And then as a leader — he's always been a leader — but now he's a leader of men in college and has really done a good job of that. He hasn't changed from the personality he is, but just matured a little bit."

And now the 2024 season should be his. 

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. Follow him on Twitter at @Michael_Cohen13.