QUINIX Sport News: Where did Jalen Royals come from?

Whenever he is selected by one of the 32 NFL franchises in the 2025 NFL Draft, Utah State wide receiver Jalen Royals will become the first Aggie since Jordan Love in 2020 to hear his name called.

While that has felt like an eventuality for a couple of years now, Royals wasn’t always a guaranteed future pro, nor even was a collegiate career at Utah State anything close to a foregone conclusion for the Powder Springs, Georgia native.

So how did Royals get here? How did the Aggie standout go from being an under-recruited high school prospect to a junior college transfer who hardly played at that level to a star at Utah State who will now likely be taken in either the second, third or fourth rounds of the NFL draft?

From three-sport prep athlete to Georgia Military College?

Royals’ high school athletics career — he played basketball and football and also ran track — was good.

He was an all-state high jumper in the 7A classification in Georgia and finished sixth overall at the state championships.

He was also a solid football player, especially as a senior, with multiple 100-yard receiving games.

In his final season at Hillgrove High School, Royals had more 50-plus yard receiving games than he didn’t and he averaged under three receptions a game.

He wasn’t a highly-touted prospect or anything — neither Rivals nor 247Sports rated him coming out of high school — but Royals wasn’t a complete unknown.

Scholarship offers weren’t really coming in, though. Not from Division 1 schools, at least.

Then the pandemic hit and the NCAA ruled that all current college football players would be afforded an additional year of eligibility, which only limited the potential for offers that Royals could get.

Making matters worse, the NCAA transfer portal had started to heat up in a major way for the first time. Hundreds if not thousands of college football players were on the move and available to be had, rendering a high school prospect like Royals even more undesirable.

Royals didn’t give up on his dream of playing college football and in the NFL after that, but the lack of interest and the lack options definitely hurt.

“Seeing that there are no offers and that things weren’t really going my way, you start to think that this might not work out,” Royals told the Deseret News.

Still, Royals put out feelers, tried to get his name out there to schools. It worked, kind of.

LSU and Florida State both showed interest in Royals coming on as a walk-on. Multiple historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were interested in bringing him aboard, and there were numerous Division II schools that wanted Royals to come play for them.

There wasn’t more interest from DI schools at either the Group of Five or Power Five level, though, despite Royals being listed at 6-feet and weighting more than 200 pounds with obvious athleticism.

Instead of walking on somewhere, Royals ultimately elected to bet on himself and chose to attend Georgia Military College, a junior college in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Royals reasoned that if things didn’t work out for him in junior college, he could always then go walk-on at a DI or DII school.

Attending Georgia Military College ended up being something of a seminal moment in Royals’ football career. He was stunned by the environment. JUCO football is not DI football and Royals learned that in a hurry.

“The difference between JUCO and other colleges was shocking,” Royals said.

Royals did get his associates degree while at Georgia Military College but he made a negligible impact his one and only year there — he appeared in 11 games in 2021 and hauled in just seven catches for 92 yards and two touchdowns.

He’d always believed he’d have a shot at playing in the NFL, like almost every high school football standout, but his time in junior college nearly convinced him that that dream would never come to fruition.

“In my JUCO days, (my NFL dream) was more just sucked out, I guess,” Royals said.

How did Jalen Royals wind up at Utah State?

Following his season at Georgia Military College, Royals still sought out a way to get to play DI football.

He went to a camp in the summer of 2021 that brought in a lot of programs hopeful to find some players, and then he got an email from Dave Roberson, at that time the director of player personnel at Utah State.

Royals thought it may have been because Utah State had seen his film or seen him at the aforementioned camp, but in actuality it was a mass email sent out by the Aggies to high schools and junior colleges with the dates of Utah State’s summer camps.

That mass email was enough to get Royals and his father DeAndre to take a flight to Salt Lake City and then make the drive up to Logan so Jalen could in effect try out for Utah State football.

No one at Utah State really knew who he was, until Jalen introduced himself to then-USU wide receivers coach Kyle Cefalo.

Cefalo was stunned that Royals had made the trip to Logan. The camp he attended was primarily for high school football players in and around the state of Utah, a chance for them to be coached up, albeit briefly, by Utah State football coaches.

A player from Georgia making the trip out was practically unheard of.

And then Royals started doing drills.

“The workout was incredible,” Cefalo told KSL Sports’ Scott Garrard and Hans Olsen earlier this week. “He jogged a 4.28 to 4.29 second 40-yard dash and then broad jumped 10-plus feet and then we got to the drills.

“It was smooth, and the whole time, I’m watching this kid I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. Why is this kid coming out all the way to Utah State for a workout? He should have a million offers already.”

Cefalo quickly got then USU-head coach Blake Anderson and then-offensive coordinator Anthony Tucker to come watch Royals, along with a few others.

Royals ran another 40-yard dash for good measure — every stopwatch had him under a 4.3 second 40-yard dash — and then did more route-running and pass-catching drills with more eyes on him.

“He ran every route smooth and caught the ball incredibly well,” Cefalo said.

By the end of the day, Utah State had reached out to both Royals’ high school football coach and his coach at Georgia Military College, trying to figure out where Royals had come from.

“He just kind of magically appeared for us,” Cefalo said. “I had no idea he was going to be there. … It’s honestly just something I’ll never forget.”

It took less than a week for Utah State to offer Royals a scholarship, and he was on campus at Utah State ahead of the 2022 season in time for summer workouts.

But things weren’t immediately smooth sailing, as Royals didn’t record a single statistic during his sophomore season.

Come his junior year, though, Royals was the No. 1 wide receiver on the roster, or at least Cefalo believed he’d get there.

Cefalo was right, too. Royals had a record-breaking junior season and he followed that up with an incredible senior season that was cut short by injury.

In essentially a year and a half of production at Utah State, Royals proved himself arguably the best wide receiver to ever come through the program, at least in the Aggies’ Renaissance era (2009 through today).

“He truly is, in my eyes, one of a kind,” Cefalo said.

All told, Royals has one of the more incredible football origin stories, with the next chapter set to be written this weekend by whichever team decides to invest in his football future.

​

Whenever he is selected by one of the 32 NFL franchises in the 2025 NFL Draft, Utah State wide receiver Jalen Royals will become the first Aggie since Jordan Love in 2020 to hear his name called.

While that has felt like an eventuality for a couple of years now, Royals wasn’t always a guaranteed future pro, nor even was a collegiate career at Utah State anything close to a foregone conclusion for the Powder Springs, Georgia native.

So how did Royals get here? How did the Aggie standout go from being an under-recruited high school prospect to a junior college transfer who hardly played at that level to a star at Utah State who will now likely be taken in either the second, third or fourth rounds of the NFL draft?

From three-sport prep athlete to Georgia Military College?

Royals’ high school athletics career — he played basketball and football and also ran track — was good.

He was an all-state high jumper in the 7A classification in Georgia and finished sixth overall at the state championships.

He was also a solid football player, especially as a senior, with multiple 100-yard receiving games.

In his final season at Hillgrove High School, Royals had more 50-plus yard receiving games than he didn’t and he averaged under three receptions a game.

He wasn’t a highly-touted prospect or anything — neither Rivals nor 247Sports rated him coming out of high school — but Royals wasn’t a complete unknown.

Scholarship offers weren’t really coming in, though. Not from Division 1 schools, at least.

Then the pandemic hit and the NCAA ruled that all current college football players would be afforded an additional year of eligibility, which only limited the potential for offers that Royals could get.

Making matters worse, the NCAA transfer portal had started to heat up in a major way for the first time. Hundreds if not thousands of college football players were on the move and available to be had, rendering a high school prospect like Royals even more undesirable.

Royals didn’t give up on his dream of playing college football and in the NFL after that, but the lack of interest and the lack options definitely hurt.

“Seeing that there are no offers and that things weren’t really going my way, you start to think that this might not work out,” Royals told the Deseret News.

Still, Royals put out feelers, tried to get his name out there to schools. It worked, kind of.

LSU and Florida State both showed interest in Royals coming on as a walk-on. Multiple historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were interested in bringing him aboard, and there were numerous Division II schools that wanted Royals to come play for them.

There wasn’t more interest from DI schools at either the Group of Five or Power Five level, though, despite Royals being listed at 6-feet and weighting more than 200 pounds with obvious athleticism.

Instead of walking on somewhere, Royals ultimately elected to bet on himself and chose to attend Georgia Military College, a junior college in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Royals reasoned that if things didn’t work out for him in junior college, he could always then go walk-on at a DI or DII school.

Attending Georgia Military College ended up being something of a seminal moment in Royals’ football career. He was stunned by the environment. JUCO football is not DI football and Royals learned that in a hurry.

“The difference between JUCO and other colleges was shocking,” Royals said.

Royals did get his associates degree while at Georgia Military College but he made a negligible impact his one and only year there — he appeared in 11 games in 2021 and hauled in just seven catches for 92 yards and two touchdowns.

He’d always believed he’d have a shot at playing in the NFL, like almost every high school football standout, but his time in junior college nearly convinced him that that dream would never come to fruition.

“In my JUCO days, (my NFL dream) was more just sucked out, I guess,” Royals said.

How did Jalen Royals wind up at Utah State?

Following his season at Georgia Military College, Royals still sought out a way to get to play DI football.

He went to a camp in the summer of 2021 that brought in a lot of programs hopeful to find some players, and then he got an email from Dave Roberson, at that time the director of player personnel at Utah State.

Royals thought it may have been because Utah State had seen his film or seen him at the aforementioned camp, but in actuality it was a mass email sent out by the Aggies to high schools and junior colleges with the dates of Utah State’s summer camps.

That mass email was enough to get Royals and his father DeAndre to take a flight to Salt Lake City and then make the drive up to Logan so Jalen could in effect try out for Utah State football.

No one at Utah State really knew who he was, until Jalen introduced himself to then-USU wide receivers coach Kyle Cefalo.

Cefalo was stunned that Royals had made the trip to Logan. The camp he attended was primarily for high school football players in and around the state of Utah, a chance for them to be coached up, albeit briefly, by Utah State football coaches.

A player from Georgia making the trip out was practically unheard of.

And then Royals started doing drills.

“The workout was incredible,” Cefalo told KSL Sports’ Scott Garrard and Hans Olsen earlier this week. “He jogged a 4.28 to 4.29 second 40-yard dash and then broad jumped 10-plus feet and then we got to the drills.

“It was smooth, and the whole time, I’m watching this kid I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. Why is this kid coming out all the way to Utah State for a workout? He should have a million offers already.”

Cefalo quickly got then USU-head coach Blake Anderson and then-offensive coordinator Anthony Tucker to come watch Royals, along with a few others.

Royals ran another 40-yard dash for good measure — every stopwatch had him under a 4.3 second 40-yard dash — and then did more route-running and pass-catching drills with more eyes on him.

“He ran every route smooth and caught the ball incredibly well,” Cefalo said.

By the end of the day, Utah State had reached out to both Royals’ high school football coach and his coach at Georgia Military College, trying to figure out where Royals had come from.

“He just kind of magically appeared for us,” Cefalo said. “I had no idea he was going to be there. … It’s honestly just something I’ll never forget.”

It took less than a week for Utah State to offer Royals a scholarship, and he was on campus at Utah State ahead of the 2022 season in time for summer workouts.

But things weren’t immediately smooth sailing, as Royals didn’t record a single statistic during his sophomore season.

Come his junior year, though, Royals was the No. 1 wide receiver on the roster, or at least Cefalo believed he’d get there.

Cefalo was right, too. Royals had a record-breaking junior season and he followed that up with an incredible senior season that was cut short by injury.

In essentially a year and a half of production at Utah State, Royals proved himself arguably the best wide receiver to ever come through the program, at least in the Aggies’ Renaissance era (2009 through today).

“He truly is, in my eyes, one of a kind,” Cefalo said.

All told, Royals has one of the more incredible football origin stories, with the next chapter set to be written this weekend by whichever team decides to invest in his football future.