CORAL GABLES, Fla. (AP) — Miami tight end Cam McCormick said Thursday that he is coming back for a ninth season of college football.
He is believed to be the first with a ninth season granted by the NCAA. McCormick’s career was derailed multiple times by season-ending injuries, some of which earned him a medical redshirt from the NCAA, and all players who participated in college athletics in 2020 got another year of eligibility because of the pandemic.
McCormick spent the first seven of his college seasons at Oregon, transferred to Miami for the 2023 season and will keep playing in 2024.
East Tennessee State said former linebacker Jared Folks was the NCAA’s first eighth-year player when he played for the Bucs in 2021. There have been multiple athletes with seven years of college eligibility, including Isis Young — a women’s basketball player who appeared for Florida, Fordham, Syracuse and Siena over her seven seasons and decided against getting an eighth year.
But McCormick — who has undergone at least six surgeries because of football injuries — seems to be the first with nine, and certainly the first at the major college football level.
He missed most of his senior season of high school in 2015 because of an injury, then redshirted after enrolling at Oregon in 2016 and appeared in all 13 of Oregon’s games in 2017. Over the next four years, he played in exactly three games.
McCormick played in one game before a season-ending injury in 2018, missed all of the 2019 season with injury, missed the 2020 season because of injury and the pandemic, and then played in two games in 2021 before another season-ending injury.
But he made it through the 2022 season at Oregon, the 2023 season at Miami and now will try for one more year. He has played for five different head coaches and caught passes from six different quarterbacks in college; the first one he caught a pass from was Justin Herbert, who has already been in the NFL for four seasons.