Through life, faith and career: How Donovan Edwards found his center

Just under a year ago, it was all going wrong for Donovan Edwards.

Coming off of a dazzling sophomore campaign in which he had rushed for 7.1 yards per carry and made emphatic, loud statements at the season’s close, the junior running back’s expectation was that he would do it again. He had shown he could be a star, he had stepped into the spotlight and delivered, and both he and the entire country expected him to do it again. 

And then he didn’t, and the weight of that crushed him.

“That was the death of me,” Edwards told The Michigan Daily. “I put expectations on myself, and if I didn’t exceed those expectations I would go into a cocoon of not being happy.”

As he trudged through the season with paltry statlines, oftentimes notching less than half of the yards per carry he had a year prior — it stung. He had seen who he could be, and it felt like something that he had earned and worked for had been taken away from him. He didn’t know why. 

Around that time, Edwards, a deeply and vocally religious person, says that he started reading the Old Testament Book of Job by chance. In that story of Job having and losing it all, he saw himself. 

“I was being tested last year,” Edwards said. “How faithful am I? How loyal am I. … Like Job questioned, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ I questioned too. It’s natural.”

At the time however, he couldn’t have known how fitting the analogy would be. At the end of the book, after agony and despair, Job’s blessings are doubled. And like him, at the end of last season after 14 weeks of frustration and confusion, Edwards returned to the level he had once reached — and then some. Not only did Edwards rush for over 100 yards and two touchdowns in the National Championship, not only did he catapult himself back into stardom, but he made himself one the literal faces of college football. In July, he was chosen to adorn the cover of EA Sports’ College Football 25 alongside Colorado’s Travis Hunter and Texas’ Quinn Ewers, who he faces this Saturday.

But after the National Championship as Edwards sat at an off of the main-stage podium and took questions from a small gaggle of reporters, his focus wasn’t on what the night would do or mean for him. Asked about what he played for, and why he pointed up when he had scored his touchdowns, Edwards gave a simple answer: His late mother and God.

While it sounds more than cliche for a football player to list family and faith as their purpose, the manifestations of each are key to understanding who Donovan Edwards is. His career up until this point has been nothing short of whiplash. He’s gone from a backup, to an immediate star, to a backup again. And just last week, as he entered what was expected to be his year, he again struggled in ways reminiscent of last year. 

But through it all, through the tumult of losing his mother as a child and growing up frustrated, to uncovering his potential in middle school and finding his path to stardom, then losing and regaining it, Edwards stays stable. Edwards stays centered. 

What keeps him centered is his story. 

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When Donovan Edwards was only two years old, his mother Donna succumbed to a battle with cancer, leaving Donovan, his father Kevin Sr. and his brother Kevin Jr. behind. With her absence, Donovan describes the early parts of his youth as “just a little bit misguided.” 

His father worked two jobs to provide for his sons, and having lost their mother, Donovan and his brother fought constantly, unsure of how to express themselves or make sense of the emotions they felt. 

Distinctly and vividly, Edwards remembers screaming in church during his brother’s baptism. He doesn’t know why now, and he couldn’t make sense of it then, but there was emotion and anger coursing through him.

“Me and my brother, we were bad,” Edwards said, chuckling. “My dad has two jobs to work and you know we were just misguided. We never had a motherly love figure. He tried his best, but as a man he couldn’t give a mother’s love.”

Even as he and his brother fought and bickered though, Donovan knew from experiencing loss how important his familial relationships were. But looking back now, he realizes that he didn’t comprehend even half of it then. 

The sacrifices his father made for him and his brothers, the work he put in to provide and care for them, all of it stands out to Donovan now and has shaped the person that he has become. 

“My dad is no ordinary dad,” Edwards said. “He had a choice to make when my mom died. He could have done anything. He could have gave us up for adoption, he could have been a deadbeat dad, but he stuck it through. … He was always like an idol, a role model to me. Is he perfect? No. But I think he’s the best dad ever.”

More than just for Donovan though, Kevin Sr. was a figure who the people in Donovan’s life took note of early on. Edwards’ childhood friend and high school teammate Mekhi Elam remembers Kevin Sr. for how he cared for him. Playing middle school football with Donovan, Elam lived further from the campus than most on the team — but after school every day he knew he had a home with the Edwards’.

“Every day after school, I mean literally every single day after school, he made sure we were fed, made sure that we had all of our equipment,” Elam told The Daily. “You know he was a father figure to me too. … He gave me money when we’d go to the movies, he cooked, he was outstanding.”

That effort and the mentality necessary to work two jobs and give time and money and love and care to family and friends is something that has stuck out to Donovan. It’s something that he says sticks with him to this day and impacts how he treats and cares for those in his life.

But even with Kevin Sr.’s efforts, Donovan still felt frustration as a child. He still felt the gap in his life from the passing of his mother viscerally. And when he first fell in love with football, he was equally falling in love with an outlet for his anger.

“My Mom died, so I had a lot of anger that I didn’t really know about,” Edwards said. “Just to be able to play football I could hit somebody, and I’m not going to jail for it. So ultimately it was the sport that I fell in love with.”

Football gave Donovan peace of mind. It allowed him to manifest the emotions that he felt — and he loved that. He needed that. But it wasn’t football that first got Donovan noticed. 

In 2015 or 2016, Ken Rys and Ron Bellamy — then respectively the assistant and head football coaches of West Bloomfield High School — coached a little bit of middle school basketball from time to time. Partially, the duo coached middle schoolers because of their genuine love for coaching. But as Rys tells it, there was a little bit of an ulterior motive involved — the two high school football coaches wanted to make sure that they found out about home-grown talent before the local private schools could poach them.

As the two watched Donovan dunk a basketball in seventh grade, it didn’t take much digging to find a diamond in the rough. Just two years later, after one game on JV in which he scored “four or five” touchdowns, Donovan was bumped up to varsity and didn’t look back.

At the end of that year, with a freshman Donovan playing a key role, West Bloomfield made it to the State Championship and lost a game that they had expected to win. Rys and Donovan both still remember that moment, and both still remember the promise that Donovan made. 

“After we lost the state championship in 2017 in the locker room he said, ‘Hey, this is not gonna happen again,’ ” Rys recounted. “ ‘I promise you guys, before I graduate, we’re gonna win it.”

For the next two years, the Lakers came up short. By his senior year, Donovan had already gotten himself a full-ride scholarship when the COVID-19 pandemic delayed his season into the new year — after he had already early-enrolled at Michigan. Frankly, Rys and fellow assistant coach Zach Hilbers would’ve understood it if Donovan moved on from high school, prioritized his career and left his overly-ambitious freshman year promises in the past. 

But Edwards wasn’t ready to give up. He petitioned the NCAA for a waiver, received an exemption, and showed up to every high school practice while training full time with the Wolverines — even with a dislocated thumb. 

“I was playing with a cast on my left hand and I was like, ‘I’m not sitting this out,’ ” Edwards said. “That’s just the type of person I am, I’m gonna finish what I started. My teammates, I would be letting them down if I didn’t participate in the rest of the season. What type of player am I for just looking out for my future? West Bloomfield had never won a state championship.”

With Edwards’ key performance, West Bloomfield won the State Championship. His promise was fulfilled, and he finally allowed himself to move fully onto his collegiate career.

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More than just his family and his work ethic, to know and interact with Donovan Edwards is to witness someone who is completely devoted to, and impacted by their faith. 

That’s not a rarity in football, nor is it a rarity in the world at large, but what is rare is how tangible Edwards says the manifestations in his life are. For example, when he was picking between several top-flight universities for college, Edwards said that he vividly felt a voice from above come to him and tell him not to worry. 

And again, before he made his name known for the first time against Ohio State in 2022, he ascribed his confidence — again — to a higher power asking him if his faith was genuine. He replied with a passage from the Bible affirming that it was, and he had the game of his career. Edwards’ faith is a key and fundamental component of who he is, and it too comes from his family. 

“When I turned 16, I was living with my Grandma at the time,” Edwards told The Daily. “All we were doing was reading scripture at the time, and she would have me read the scripture, or read a chapter with her.”

Those moments stuck with Edwards. No longer was he the child screaming in church at his brother’s baptism. He had found faith through his family in the confusion of his childhood. And those two things, his family and his faith, continue to center him to this day.

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After last weekend as Edwards trotted off of the field having posted just 27 yards on 11 carries, questions were raised about what type of player he’ll be this year. Some opined that Edwards is only capable of being a big game player — someone incapable of being a consistent lead back. 

The truth in that, as it pertains to this season, is yet to be seen. But what it won’t change is that Edwards is someone who his teammates want to be led by. 

“He was voted a team captain by his teammates, not the coaches, by his teammates,” Michigan running backs coach Tony Alford said Wednesday. “He was voted as someone that guys want to follow, and they want him to lead.”

Edwards could continue to struggle, or he could return to the heights he has been to multiple times already. But the variation, and the tumult of his career and the confusion that others might feel on the outside looking in is unlikely to phase him. 

Because from his family, through his faith and in his effort, Donovan Edwards has already found ways to center himself amid the tumultuous times he’s faced throughout his life — and it’s unlikely that one bad game will change that.

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