“Praise and Blame are all the same.” It’s one of my favorite quotes from the book, 5-Star QB. And it’s so much easier said than done. For Rutgers wideout KJ Duff, that is spot on as he is one of the nations top wideouts and not enough people know about him - until now.
I’ve called KJ Duff’s games the last two seasons, the one-handed grabs, the 241-yard afternoon against Purdue, but I’d never sat across from him until this past summer. So I did the only thing you might do if you met this star playmaker: I pulled up a video I knew he’d recognize and asked him to take me through it.
And that is where today’s Y-Option podcast, fueled by our founding sponsor 76, keeping you on the GO GO GO, begins.
The video is a ten-year-old on a Long Island youth field wearing one blue glove and the ball naturally coming his way. He tipped it to himself, caught it, and the clip ended up in a Colin Kaepernick Nike commercial before he’d ever played a down of high school ball. “Numbers started calling,” he told me. “I didn’t really think it was real.”
No NIL check was waiting for him back then. We laughed about that. But what stuck with me wasn’t the play, it was how careful he’s been since not to let it define him. “I never want to come across as the cocky guy,” he said.
“Play Big.”
That’s the phrase his receivers coach, Dave Brock, has drilled into him since a summer camp before Duff’s sophomore year of high school, back when most programs looked at a 6-foot-6, 200-pound kid and saw a tight end. One school told him to get to 250. Duff knew better. Coach Brock knew better too, and told him so before there was ever an offer on the table: keep working, we’re gonna keep watching. That’s the relationship that outlasted every other recruiting pitch he’d get.
Because here’s what he told me that he hadn’t said out loud before: this offseason, he was ready to leave. He called Coach Brock. He called Coach Greg Schiano. Instead of a hard sell, they asked him a question, figure out what actually matters MOST to you, and he did it the way he does everything, with a notebook, pros and cons, still sitting in a drawer at home. “I could go play in front of 105,000 people somewhere else,” he said. “But that atmosphere alone isn’t going to get me to the NFL. The people I’m around, that matters.” He didn’t dress up how hard the process was. “Some of the most stressful times of my life,” he said. “Back and forth, back and forth.”
He announced he was staying at a Rutgers basketball game in front of the AD and the governor. The standing ovation caught him off guard. I think it was the building thanking a young man for choosing to be home. Not just being another name in the portal at a new school for 6 months, but a player who was thinking about bringing his own children back here one day to remind them that Chasing What Matters, with clarity, confidence and discipline is not easy, but it is worth it.
I asked him, finally, what his intention is for this season. No pause.
“First intention is I want to win,” he said.
Praise and blame are all the same. Legacy is the stat that compounds.
Go play big KJ, I’ll be rooting for you.
Much love and stay steady,
Yogi
