The jokes are easy. He’s the old man on campus. The University of Miami’s permanent tight end. The senior who never left. Football Van Wilder.
Here’s a far better one-liner to describe Cam McCormick: the most resilient player in the college game.
I prefer that one, after talking to McCormick this past week.
His story is unprecedented: A talented if unlucky transfer from Oregon who’s endured repeated season-ending setbacks, five surgeries, a Covid year, a new school, and now finds himself, at age 26, playing in his ninth year of college, scoring Miami’s first touchdown of the season in a road win over Florida.
Wait, what?
Yes, I’ll say that for you again: ninth year.
“Ninth-year senior” is typically a status for the fraternity layabout who likes beer pong so much that he can’t quite get the credits to join the real world.
That is not Cam McCormick. At all.
“I want to play football,” he explains. “I wasn’t going to be stopped from playing football—regardless of what I had to go through.”
Here’s a summary of what McCormick’s gone through, from his arrival in Eugene in 2016 (the same recruiting class as his former fellow Duck, Justin Herbert, who’s now in his fifth year starring in the NFL):
McCormick redshirted his freshman year, still recovering from an ACL injury he suffered in high school. He played in 2017, but then broke his left fibula and tore ankle ligaments in 2018. That—and complications from an anchor and screws in his ankle, he says—led to missing both 2019 and 2020. McCormick came back in 2021—only to tear his right Achilles versus Ohio State.
Improbably, he returned to play a full Ducks season in 2022—then transferred and played for Miami in 2023.
Now, in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules, the 6-foot-5, 260 pounds, McCormick is at last in his college football swan song.
His coaches marvel that he’s hung in so long.
“Ninety-nine percent of people in this situation would have folded up shop and gone on with their life,” says Cody Woodiel, McCormick’s tight ends coach, one of several Hurricanes assistants who followed head coach Mario Cristobal from Oregon.
To be clear: McCormick debated hanging it up. He says he came close in 2020, when he reinjured his ankle in a Ducks practice. Cam called his mother, Debra, and told her he was prepared to walk away.
I might be ready to be done with football, he remembers saying.
Debra McCormick, a single mother who raised her son with the help of her own mother and sister, has always been the most essential person in Cam’s life. They speak several times a day, whether it’s to assess practice or homework—during his extended schooling, Cam received a B.A. (journalism with a focus in advertising), and a Master’s (advertising and brand responsibility).
Or maybe Cam simply needs a refresher on his mom’s salsa recipe.
“If he’s cooking something, I talk to him a gazillion times,” she says.
On that glum day four years ago, Debra told Cam she was supportive of whatever path he decided. Privately, she felt it was time for her son to stop.
“I wanted him to walk away,” she admits. “But that wasn’t my decision.”
She tried to be measured, encouraging. If Cam wanted to keep at it, he should keep going. If he wanted to quit…
Cam heard the word quit and that was that.
“I’m glad she did that,” he says. “It lit a fire in me.”
In the movie version of this story, that would be the rock bottom moment, and Cam would pull himself up and return triumphantly to college football.
In the real life version, there was more drama, including that devastating Achilles injury in 2021, which made Debra scream when she watched it on television.
Cam was surprisingly upbeat, however. He called her from the medical tent and told her he got the first down despite getting hurt.
“He’s like, I’m OK,” Debra recalls. “I’m going to be fine.”
By then, Cam knew what it would take to come back. He credits his ability to persevere through his injuries to “neutral thinking”—a concept popularized by the late coach and author Trevor Moawad, in which the recovering athlete doesn’t get too low or high, but focuses on the hard facts of the situation, and incremental progress.
Miami strength and conditioning coach Aaron Feld—another Oregon expatriate—thinks McCormick embodies Moawad’s philosophy.
“Neutral thinking is all about helping people be present in the moment by removing the emotional,” Feld says.
“It sounds cheesy but it really does help,” McCormick says. “This is a fact: what are we going to do now?”
Further perspective came via tragedy: the loss of Spencer Webb, one of McCormick’s Oregon teammates, who died in an accidental fall in 2022. Webb, who was also a tight end, had been supportive of McCormick during his various rehabilitations, and his memory remains a driving force.
“When I go on that field, it’s for myself, but it’s also for him,” McCormick says.
On the field, these are far sunnier days. Scoring that opening week touchdown over the Gators was an affirmation for McCormick and everyone who’d encouraged him along the way.
“I absolutely lost it, man,” says Feld, the strength coach.
Debra McCormick was at a sports bar watching.
“I was screaming and hollering: That’s my boy!” she says. “Best surprise ever.”
What’s next? McCormick knows this: At season’s end, he will be done with college football, finally.
No. 7 Miami, which is 4-0 and plays Virginia Tech Friday, has playoff ambitions, and Cam retains his aspiration to compete at the NFL level. He maintains that any team that takes him will be getting “a fighter, a competitor, someone who’s determined.”
His coaches believe he has a shot. “I think he’s good enough,” says Feld.
Whenever McCormick’s ready to take off his pads for good, the Miami staff is certain their ninth-year man has a career path already lined up: coach. He’s already an unofficial mentor in the Canes facility, lending his patient wisdom to players who were in grade school when he began his prolonged college odyssey.
“I’m going to beg him,” says Cody Woodiel. “I think he’d be a great coach. He’s very knowledgeable. But he also understands what truly matters.”
