Deland McCullough
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Deland McCullough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He had been both a running back and a defensive back in high school, and there was a great running back ahead of him for most of his career. So he was sort of like, oh, I'm just not good enough. That guy graduates, and all of a sudden he gets a lot more touches and is blowing people out of the water as a senior.
Bob Stoops is trying to come after him. Jim Trestle. Guys who are now essentially Hall of Famers, but were at the beginning of their careers. There's this moment, too, for him where he's deeply embarrassed by his family's situation. He understands how hard it is for his mom, but he also...
is so embarrassed to have these big-name coaches in his living room where they have a giant orange extension cord snaking out of the house, through the window, and into their neighbors to borrow electricity because they can't afford it. They don't have hot water.
He doesn't have a phone until his senior year, which becomes very important as he's taking recruiting calls that they actually do have a working phone. So he's sitting in class, and he looks out the window, and he sees this cherry-apple-red Mercedes
And a moment later, he gets a pink slip to go to the office, and the guy that came out of the car was actually there to see him.
Sherman Smith had played for the Seahawks and stayed after to coach and had just left Seattle for Miami of Ohio to go coach at his alma mater, and he drove out this car that he bought from an up-and-coming rapper named Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Yeah, yeah, me too. But yeah, he goes to the office and meets this guy Sherman, and he realizes that this aura is coming from someone who had really made it, was from Youngstown, was like him, but had gone on to the NFL. And now he was talking to a guy that had been a star at the highest level and who believed that he might be that too.
Well, Sherman drives back to Youngstown to pick them up and then takes them there over Christmas break. And a lot of folks are home, but there's a couple teammates around. Introduced him to the rest of the coaching staff, walked him around. Like, he loved this school, the facilities, the campus.
And then also the character that Sherman showed Adele, Dillon's adoptive mom, just a good guy who cared about his education, wanted to be a good role model for him. That really impacted them too. Adele wanted to make sure he went somewhere that if he got hurt or if it didn't work out, he still got an education.
Well, he's going to be a running back. And so in the weeks before he arrives, they tell him, we're actually going to put you at flanker. He's going to get a lot of playing time. And he was in practice one day. They're getting ready for their last kind of scrimmage.
And so we went to meet with Sherman Smith and said, I'd rather take a redshirt year and really work to be a running back than be a flanker. So we did that. He actually stepped away from playing time to get to do the thing he wanted to do most, which meant being on the scout team, being a redshirt, and having to sit and watch for a whole season.
Just a real player's coach, an inspiring guy with really high standards, extremely high standards. He would say to every team at the beginning of the season, None of you asked me to be a father, but I'm going to treat you like you're my sons. He cared as much about how do I make these players full human beings that are going to be successful in life as he did about the football side.
And so even though Dillon is mostly working with assistants because the starters are the ones who get most of the time with the running backs coach and the head coach, he still goes after practice and spends a lot of time just connecting with Sherman and really asking him for advice.
And he doesn't want to go at first, but the rest of the coaching staff says, like, this is a great opportunity. You got to go.
Well, everyone was convinced he was getting drafted. This was a guy whose numbers were up there with the top running back prospects. And he was sitting with his agent on draft night watching, expecting to be called, you know, maybe third or fourth round.
The Cincinnati Bengals call him early in the draft and they're like, hey man, you excited? He's like, yeah. And they're like, all right, we're thinking about you. He's like, whoa, okay. He doesn't get drafted. A couple teams call right when the draft ends and, you know, extend the training camp offers. He ends up with the Bengals. It is the best situation because of their depth chart.
He is going to make the surprise move of an undrafted guy making that roster. He's leading the NFL in preseason rushing yards.
Every kind of damage, you know, compound fracture, MCLAC, all that stuff. And he, over the next couple of years, really puts his time in to try to make it back to the NFL. Then the CFL, and at one point even gives a little time to the XFL. The XFL.
He really wanted to try to make it work as a player. But ultimately, this guy just keeps getting handed a tough deal and finding a way through it, finding resilience. And he actually wanted to get into education to help kids who had come up in tough times like he did. So while he's trying to make it in football, he's working his way at residential centers for at-risk youth.
Then he goes into teaching and he's trying to help kids and then he becomes a principal. So like all these ways he's trying to learn how to be an impactful male figure in the lives of young people, especially those who have tough childhoods. And football starts sneaking its way and everybody hears that he was the big football player.
Showing 21–40 of 90 · page 2 of 5
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