DETROIT — Usually when a three-star comes into any college football program, you don’t expect to see them play right away. Especially in Ann Arbor at the running back position, the expectation for Columbia (S.C.) Hammond School tailback C.J. Stokes was that he would take some time to develop before he got some run.
However, in the first three games of 2022, Stokes managed 20 carries for 114 yards and a touchdown, and suddenly, his name was on the lips of every ardent maize and blue fan.
He didn’t quite have the staying power, but it was his first year at the college level, after all. And he was playing behind star running backs Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards, who together ran for nearly 2,500 yards in 14 games.
Now entering his second year, while Stokes has the benefit of hindsight, he already had a good head on his shoulders. He didn’t come to Ann Arbor expecting to do too much, yet, he still had to work around the typical freshman pratfalls that potentially befall first-year players.
“I learned a multitude of things,” Stokes told WolverinesWire. “I say the biggest thing I learned was struggling with patience in the running back room. It’s really hard to just come in and start. It’s virtually impossible with the guys I got in front of me. So it was kind of like, you gotta be patient and learn that your time could come any week.
“Your time could come any week and as well as you just being ready and learning from the guys in front of you. Like you got to be able to take those mental reps and work on them as far as — if you’re watching Blake, you’re watching Dono, you got to learn from them any way you can, even if you’re not in the drill. So I’d say the biggest thing I took away from it was patience and learning from older guys.”
Learning patience is one thing, but it’s another when suddenly the press and fan base are singing your praises.
It’s easy to get a big head, but Stokes never did. To him, coming from SEC country and not being a household name in recruiting, he had to make a name for himself in a winged helmet. Something he was sure he would do due to his work ethic and playing style — attributes he suggests will continue to endear him to the fans when his time does come.
“Coming in, it was like I was a low-rent guy, was a three-star, I was from across the country. Not a lot of people knew about me,” Stokes said. “And if they did their opinion wasn’t that high, because they probably never saw me play, or don’t know anybody who saw me play. So a lot of the fans didn’t even know me. So I think just getting out there and just playing how I play gravitates people towards me. Because I play hard. And I feel like people can resonate with that. Even if they don’t play the game, they like to see somebody who plays hard.
“So I just play hard. Being a fan favorite — OK, but at the same time being a fan favorite if you do something wrong — like Week 4, I fumbled against Maryland. Being a fan favorite wasn’t good that week, but the weeks before that, it was good. So I don’t really pay attention to what the fans think is more important what the coaches think week in, week out.”
The fumble did appear to be the turning point in the season for Stokes. It was his only carry in Week 4, and it came after he had just broken through a hole in the offensive line. After Week 3, Stokes only got 35 more carries (11 of which came in the Week 12 contest against Illinois after Corum was injured) and 159 yards for the rest of the season.
But it wasn’t just because the coaches saw enough against the Terrapins and decided to shut him down. Stokes says that he was much harder on himself than the coaches were on him after his mishap, because they’re well aware of what he’s capable of, and that fumble wasn’t one of his tendencies in practice.
“When I fumbled, the coaches weren’t even — people think the coaches benched me or whatever, because of the fumble or whatever, or they were hard on me,” Stokes said. “I was harder on myself than the coaches, where I didn’t get yelled at anything like that. Because the coaches know that I don’t fumble a lot because they’ve seen me in practice. So they know it was a freak thing that happened. It was just crazy, because it was my first Big Ten carry. And that game, if anybody remembers, we weren’t killing Maryland by any means. So that fumble mattered.
“So it was just kind of thing like my first Big Ten carry, I’m a freshman, I’m just starting to get run, it was just kind of — I had to mentally pull myself back in and think, OK, you’ve had some success. Don’t let this one failure derail the whole season. So it was kind of one of those things.”
Stokes is now battling for that No. 3 spot, still behind Corum and Edwards. He hopes to get more run this upcoming season as he takes what he learned in year one and expands it in his sophomore season.
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