Every year when Missouri takes the field against Tennessee, Tyler Badie takes a moment to think about how his home state’s flagship university never had any interest in him. He rushed for more than 1,000 yards his senior year of high school near Memphis. Tennessee never contacted him.
When he scored against Ole Miss in 2019, he thought about how badly he once wanted to play there, only for the Rebels to withhold their offer until their first-choice running back decommitted.
For games with the rest of the SEC or other teams he has no personal connection to or vendetta against, he reaches back into his past for motivation. He thinks about the recruiting services that rated him as a two-star prospect in high school, or the players he knew weren’t as talented as him but received more offers from major programs.
Badie has always been a thinker. The son of a doctor, he grew up in an academically focused house. School came first, football came second. He’s now a graduate student at Missouri working toward his master’s degree in counseling psychology after finishing his undergrad in three years.
As a kid, he and his dad, Shaun, watched Reggie Bush play at USC. Badie paid attention to and learned from Bush’s versatility and elusiveness. The Heisman winner became a model for how Badie wanted to play. As he got older, he began studying Alvin Kamara with a similar attention to detail.
For now, though, he’s thinking about how it’s finally his time at Missouri. He spent the first three years of his college career playing behind first Damarea Crockett, then Larry Rountree III.
Now, Badie’s the No. 1 option in the backfield for an SEC program, something that seemed impossible as recently as his senior year of high school. He’s in a position he always wanted, but his motivations haven’t changed since he was an undersized and under-recruited tailback.
“I’ve been dying for this moment,” he said. “It’s also a good thing, though. At the end of the day, I’m still fresh with a lot of experience. I haven’t taken a lot of hits on my body so I’m a fresh player, ready to go.”
In 34 games, Badie has accumulated 1,955 total yards from scrimmage and 16 career touchdowns as the second option. While Rountree was more of the traditional between-the-tackles power back, the 5-foot-9 Badie was a change of pace. Quicker and shiftier than Rountree, he often saw the field on third down and is capable of lining up at slot receiver.
That’s all in the past. Badie gained 10 to 12 pounds this offseason to prepare himself for increased usage and physicality. He weighs 200 pounds now.
He’s also more of a leader in the running back room after three years of quiet observation. Badie watched how Rountree led by example in practice and took mental notes: Rountree was available and willing to help the younger running backs. Now it’s Badie’s turn as the elder statesman of the group.
“He’s gonna be himself,” running backs coach Curtis Luper said. “He’s not gonna try to be anything that he’s not. He’s not gonna be Larry Rountree. He’s gonna be Tyler Badie, and that’s good enough.”
Growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, Badie’s first experience on the gridiron came at 6 years old on a flag football team. Shaun Badie still has the video of Tyler scoring on a cutback move far more advanced than the expectation at that level.
Shaun never played football himself, but he always made a point of encouraging, fostering and pushing Tyler toward his aspirations.
“Just that little extra motivation when at times you felt down or you didn’t feel like this might be the right path to take,” Shaun said. “And just having that extra bug in your ear so to speak, telling him, ‘You can do it. You gotta take the good with the bad, the negatives with the positives, and if you stick to something that you’re passionate about, then great things will come your way down the road.’”
As Tyler has grown older, the need for that extra motivation has faded, but Shaun still tries to prod him on occasion. On the wall above Shaun’s desk at home is a bulletin board. Whenever he spots something online that he perceives as disrespectful to Tyler — critical tweets, exclusions from top-10 SEC running back rankings — he prints it out and pins it to the board.
Shaun occasionally tells his son when the wall has a new addition, but Tyler doesn’t show the same outward frustration. It’s not that he doesn’t care as much, it’s just a more internal, quiet drive. He still remembers the insults.
When Tyler’s mom got a new job in Memphis before his junior year of high school, Shaun saw the change in scenery as an opportunity to move the needle on Tyler’s budding football career. At his high school in Baltimore, sports were seen as a more recreational activity. The move south allowed him to find a school with a football program that would give him more opportunities against good competition and expose him to more colleges.
Badie enrolled at Briarcrest Christian School in Eads, Tennessee. The Saints already had a two-year starter at running back, so Badie did what would become common for him over the next five years: focus on what he could control, work and soak up as much as possible.
“Never had a guy who loved to practice more than he did,” Briarcrest coach Brian Stewart said.
When a play ended in practice, no matter where he was on the field, Badie would sprint back to the line of scrimmage. If a teammate needed a spotter during a workout, Badie was there. If there was trash on the floor of the weight room, he was the one to pick it up.
With snaps in the backfield hard to come by, he played cornerback his junior season and excelled to the point that opposing quarterbacks rarely challenged him. His senior year, he was a full time running back. Still, Stewart got desperate one game when Briarcrest was getting picked apart through the air. Badie went back onto the field on defense, even though he hadn’t practiced at corner all season.
Running the ball was still his identity. It was what he loved most, it was what he knew would take him to the next level and, above all, he knew Briarcrest needed him to do it. He had 193 carries in 10 games his senior season.
The Saints were playing undefeated Hernando High School that September when Badie took a shot to the ribs at the end of a play. Trainers checked him out on the sideline. Their prognosis: no structural damage, but definitely not 100%.
“Zero to 10, Stewart said, “what’s your pain level?”
“Zero,” Badie responded. “I’m good, coach.”
Badie re-entered. Briarcrest scored the last 21 points of the game to win 34-28.
While Badie’s grit and leadership led to playing time and respect from his teammates, it did not lead to premier college offers, at least right away. College coaches didn’t think he had the size to take the consistent punishment of being a Power Five running back. He hadn’t played against elite competition in Maryland and wasn’t on coaches’ radars in the South because of his late move to Tennessee.
He still did everything he could to get his name out, following coaches on Twitter and sending his tape to whoever he could. He went to recruiting camps and often had the same experience: The coaches already had players in mind who they wanted to offer before the camps started, bigger players, with more recruiting stars than Badie.
Badie spent several weekends at camps in Oxford, Mississippi, and wanted to go to Ole Miss. It was close to home. It was a prestigious program. But every weekend ended the same way, with Badie driving back to Memphis, offerless and disappointed.
It was a frustrating time, but Badie’s analytical mind filed everything away. He knew he would get a shot eventually. He kept mental notes of which schools weren’t interested in him, filing it away for motivation later.
“A lot of times I was just in the shadows and I was seen as an underdog, but I knew in my head that I was a big dog,” he said. “So I was ready for anything. So anything that happened that didn’t go my way, it was OK.”
Former Missouri running backs coach Cornell Ford first discovered Badie, fittingly, while watching film on another prospect. Impressed by Badie’s speed and ability to change directions, Ford traveled to Memphis to see him.
“The other kids were probably a little bit bigger, but not as explosive, and we needed someone that could catch the ball out of the backfield, and maybe spread out at wide receiver and maybe be able to do some things there for us,” said Ford, now the cornerbacks coach at Toledo. “And he fit that build. He was better at it than the kids that were bigger than him, and I think he was a little quicker and a little faster than some of those other kids as well.”
Badie had committed to Memphis, his hometown school, that summer and was tepid when Ford contacted him. Missouri was unfamiliar. Memphis allowed him to stay close to home. The recruiting process had been difficult, and even if he hadn’t gotten the high-major looks he had wanted, an often-competitive Group of Five team wasn’t a bad spot to settle.
Ford saw things differently. “Does he not understand this opportunity?” he thought. Here was a kid with no Power Five offers being extended a lifeline into the best conference in the country, and he was considering turning it down?
“If the University of Missouri offered the trainer at Memphis a job, they would take it in a heartbeat,” he told Badie. “They probably wouldn’t think twice about it. If the head coach at Memphis had an opportunity to be the head coach at Missouri, he would take it in a heartbeat and wouldn’t think about it. Here it is. You’re a football player, you have this opportunity and you want to go to Memphis. You really need to consider this.”
Badie agreed to at least visit Missouri. He and Shaun came up that January.
“Him being such a bright, smart, sharp kid, you weren’t gonna change his mind,” Ford said. “You had to impress him.”
Badie and Ford had a deeper discussion into what his role would be in the offense. Badie went home and talked it over with Stewart and his parents. Later that month he decided to flip to Missouri. He would make it official on national signing day, Feb. 7.
On Feb. 6, his phone rang.
Ole Miss had just lost a commit and had one more scholarship available. Was he interested?
He had received the offer he had waited years for. Playing for Ole Miss would give him the same competition as Missouri but only 90 minutes from home. And the offer itself was vindication after so much frustration and disappointment.
But he had told the MU coaching staff he was coming. Missouri wanted him. He was a priority. Ole Miss had overlooked him the same way so many other schools did. Why should he play there when the coaching staff didn’t even want him until now?
The next day, with two black hats sitting on a table in front of him, he faked toward the Memphis hat and grabbed the one with the Missouri logo.
Almost four years later, he’s Missouri’s No. 1 back with more to prove. He knows he hasn’t shown that he can be an every-down running back in the SEC yet. He knows he’ll always be one of the smaller players on the field. Sometimes it’s too overwhelming, even for someone who likes to use criticism as motivation, and he deletes social media apps off his phone for a while.
When he does that, he uses the time to just focus on his game, on himself. The doubters from high school are locked in his mind anyway.
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September 03, 2021 at 06:00PM
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Badie's time: The running back is now Missouri's go-to in the backfield - Columbia Missourian
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