'It wasn't a surprise': After three years out of action, WSU WR Devin Ellison has finally arrived

Mar. 25—PULLMAN — Devin Ellison was in a junior college weight room when his life's trajectory changed forever.

It was last October, midway through his breakout season catching passes for Monterey Peninsula in California. After three seasons of academic ineligibility, Ellison had received his first offer.

It came from Wayne State, a Division II school in Detroit.

"He cried like a little baby," said Ronnie Palmer, Lobos head coach at the time. "It was a special moment to know that this thing was gonna pay off."

Before he knew what was to come, before he knew the offer was the first of 31 to come his way during the next two months, Ellison broke down in the best kind of emotion.

He didn't know he would become Washington State's highest-profile commit of the class when he signed with the Cougars in early January or that he would become a coveted recruit of Boise State, which made the College Football Playoff last season.

All he knew was that he had spent the past three years on the shelf, watching the game he loves go on without him, and now his work was beginning to pay off.

"He's learning," WSU coach Jimmy Rogers said of Ellison last weekend. "This is a completely different system, and the amount of coaches that are coaching him, and he is growing like a weed. He's gonna be a really good player here, and excited for his future. Still a lot of potential left in him to get tapped. So I'm excited for him and what he can do for us."

At WSU, Ellison appears poised for a coming-out party, the type he figured he would have enjoyed years prior. He's joining a Cougars receiver corps with plenty of experience, but without a bona fide star. Part of the reason he signed with WSU, Ellison said, is that's the kind of role coaches envision for him.

It's taken Ellison a lot to get to Pullman, but it took even more for him to lead Monterey Peninsula to an 11-0 season, breaking the state junior college record with 16 touchdown receptions along the way. A native of the Atlanta area, Ellison spent the 2021 and 2022 seasons at FCS Southern University, where he never saw the field due to academic issues. Those followed him to Monterey Peninsula, where he was also ineligible for the 2023 season.

He only found out about an hour before the Lobos' season opener. The team had just completed the 3 1/2 -hour bus ride from Monterey to Yuba City, and the players filed into the locker room to get dressed. That's about when Palmer got an alert from the program's compliance director, notifying him that Ellison and five of his teammates would be ineligible for varying amounts of time.

Ellison missed the whole season because, as then-offensive coordinator Adrian Gallegos explained it, Southern hadn't sent over Ellison's transcripts to Monterey Peninsula in time. So Palmer pulled Ellison and the teammates out of the locker room and off to the side, where he delivered the news.

"There was some tears, and then after the tears, there was a lot of excitement for their teammates. It worked out for Devin in that way," Palmer said. "It took him a little while to kind of get over that. And then once he was over that, he was a really good person in '23. I think that's what made '24 the year it was."

"It was tough to just sit there and watch," Ellison said, "knowing that I could go out there and make some big plays and contribute to the team."

All told, Ellison was set to miss his third consecutive year of action. A class of 2021 high school prospect out of Jasper, Georgia, Ellison was entering his third year of college — and he still hadn't played. He had taken the junior college route in an effort to refocus himself on academics. His mother, Priscilla Peoples, took a third job to help pay for his cost of attendance at Monterey Peninsula. And right when he figured he had put himself in a position to recenter himself, an hour before his first game at that level, the rug was pulled from under him.

"He was pretty heartbroken," Gallegos said.

But before he turned the page, before he became such a menace on the Lobos' scout team that Gallegos daydreamed about what his offense could look like with Ellison in the fold, he had to think about his place in the world. In the days and weeks that followed that evening in September 2023, Ellison's mind wandered toward the existential side. Was football even meant for him?

He's always kept close contact with Priscilla — "She means everything," Devin said, "and she's the reason why I'm here" — but around that time, they stayed especially close. Devin confided in Priscilla, telling her he wondered if he was supposed to be on the football field in the first place.

"He went through that a lot," Priscilla said. "And I was like, well, sometimes everybody's journey is different. You're seeing it glorified on TV with other people, when everybody's journey was different. You can't base your journey off other people.

"When you started at Southern, you didn't focus in school, so it led you to not play. You have to think about the actions that made the consequences, you know what I mean? So you have to think about that. And if you can make that up, you're gonna have to fight for it. Giving up is easier, but fighting for it is harder."

Before long, Ellison changed his outlook on the situation. It might have been a disappointment, Ellison reasoned, but he decided to stop considering it a punishment. Besides, he had never worried about his abilities on the football field. His habits in the classroom were the issue — and he could solve those with sharper focus and deeper commitment.

When he did, when he finally got on the field, he blossomed into the star he always figured he would be.

Last fall, as Ellison was collecting offers and opposing defenses double-teamed him and the Lobos kept winning, he went through a small drought. After Monterey Peninsula won its first few games of the season, opponents started bracketing Ellison, causing his numbers to dwindle. Things were working out for the team, which is what Ellison cared most about, but Lobo coaches scratched their heads.

"That was kind of where we changed things, and we kind of adjusted to understanding how special he was," Gallegos, now Monterey Peninsula's interim head coach after Palmer departed to be Arizona's defensive line coach. "It was me kind of realizing how special of a player I had, and we needed to get him the ball. So he had a two-week stretch where I was a little like, 'Man, what am I doing?' "

It was dawning on Palmer, Gallegos and the rest of the Monterey Peninsula staff the kind of gem they had on their hands, a special kind of prospect who only comes around once in a long while.

Gallegos decided to move Ellison around the formation, putting him in motion so defenses couldn't double- and triple-team him so easily.

It paid dividends almost immediately. On several occasions, Ellison hauled in several touchdowns in the first half, allowing the Lobos to cruise in the second. In one four-game stretch, Monterey Peninsula defeated Galivan 64-13, Hartnell 63-0, Merced 63-0 and Cabrillo 62-17. Ellison totaled eight touchdowns in those contests.

Around that time, Priscilla could tell her son was maturing, that he was taking care of his classwork and was growing up in the ways that mattered most. He did well enough in the classroom to stay on the field. He stayed in shape, both when he was ineligible and eligible. It was easy to notice for Priscilla.

"Because he didn't need me as much," Priscilla said. "He wasn't calling me as much about all the things that's going on. He wasn't reaching out to me, just being the mom, just looking for mom. He just did it on his own. I was calling him, like, 'What's going on? What you doing?' I knew then, and just not being dependent on me so much mentally."

What struck Palmer and Lobos coaches most, though, wasn't just that Ellison was combining his physical play and elusiveness to shred secondaries. It was that he was OK with taking a backseat to let his teammates do the same. When games like those got out of hand, Palmer and Gallegos said, Ellison made a habit of encouraging them to get younger Lobos involved in the offense.

"I honestly feel like it wasn't a surprise to me when everything started working out," Ellison said, "because that time being when I had academic issues, I was also putting the work in in the weight room, on the field, not being able to play, being on scout team, helping the team get better. So when all the things started happening for me, I didn't look at it as a surprise, because I knew I put the work in for it."

In some ways, Ellison's willingness to let others shine might register as a surprise. He had just missed three consecutive years of football. He was finally back on the field, and the more he flourished, the more offers rolled in. By mid-November, he had collected eight offers, including his first from FBS, which came from UTEP. It seemed he would want to play as much as possible.

From a watch party in Tucson, where the Arizona coaches were watching their Wildcats come back to beat Oregon in Sunday's NCAA Tournament thriller, Palmer made sense of it. Ellison is a competitor, but after such a long time out of commission, he was happy just to be on the field. The mountain of success was just gravy.

"If you look at the adversity he had already been through in the two years he was with us," Palmer said, "I think it really made it easier to just say, 'Hey, this is not even an issue. This is actually a great problem.' First half, you had over 100 yards and three touchdowns. Second half, we're gonna probably focus more on our run game and get ready for the next opponent. So I think his mindset was very mature and selfless."

But not until the season ended did Ellison's recruitment take off in earnest, at least at the highest levels. On Dec. 18, Nevada extended an offer. Four days later, Hawaii did the same, and the next day, UCF followed suit. Three days into the new year, about a week after Rogers took over the reins at WSU and brought over many of his coaches at South Dakota State, they identified Ellison as a target.

At the time, Devin and Priscilla were in Orlando, Florida, on Devin's official visit to the Golden Knights' program. That's about when he got a call from Jake Menage, the Cougars' new wide receivers coach. Menage wanted to offer Devin a scholarship and set up a visit to Pullman. Ellison didn't know much about WSU, but he liked what he heard from Menage, who had worked with Rogers and the WSU scouting department to find Ellison.

After going home to Georgia for a few days, Devin and Priscilla flew to Spokane, where Menage picked them up and made the 90-minute trek to Pullman. It was only a daylong visit — most recruits take weekend visits — but it was enough to sell Ellison. He dined with Menage, toured campus, met the rest of the coaching staff, all ready to address the questions that had been on his mind.

"Being through what (he's) been through, you have more questions," Priscilla said.

In his final meeting of the visit, Ellison headed to Rogers' office in the Cougar Football Complex for a 1-on-1 conversation. He had plenty of questions for Rogers in that setting, such as where he would fit into the offense and how WSU coaches would develop him. After Rogers addressed those questions, he received the news he was hoping for: Ellison told him he was ready to be a Coug. He made an oral commitment during the meeting.

"Just having a conversation with everybody 1-on-1, yeah, it kind of gave me a feel of where I wanted to be," Ellison said, "and it was just a great experience on the visit, so I just made a decision to commit."

"He was very emotional. He was emotional to me, to each other, we were," Priscilla said. "He takes it really serious. Like, Devin is really serious about it. He don't play games about what he's doing right now. He's really focused."

Ellison followed through on his scheduled visit to Boise State, where he even posted photos to social media of himself in Broncos gear. But he had made a quiet commitment to WSU, and at 11 a.m. on Jan. 10, he made the announcement publicly: "Committed. Let's work," he wrote, adding a wheatfield emoji in a nod to the Palouse setting.

Two months later, as WSU rolls through spring ball, Ellison is capturing the eyes of Rogers, Menage and his teammates. He figures to be in line for a starting role come this fall. But the eyeballs he might hope to capture most belong to younger athletes, players who find themselves in the kinds of ruts he was in years ago.

"I think of my why every time I come here. Before I hit a workout, before practice, I think, like, 'Why am I doing it?' " Ellison said. "I wouldn't be out here for no reason. I've got people that are counting on me. I wanna just give the youth motivation that it could be you, too. Coming from where I come from, I've been through a lot. Where I'm from, most people don't make it to this point, so it's just a blessing to be here. And I just wanna show people, if you want it, you can do it."

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'It wasn't a surprise': After three years out of action, WSU WR Devin Ellison has finally arrived

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