The Group of Five's Next Breakout Star is Probably Coming From a Program Like Southern Miss
If you are going to war and if you get to pick first, choose Southern Mississippi. Don’t fight Southern Mississippi. No matter how hard you fight, these folks will fight harder.
- Mickey Spagnola, former Jackson sports writer
Hello pigs, welcome back. Let’s skip the small talk formalities and jump right into it, shall we?
Last week I wrote a piece about the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors Run-N-Shoot for 2025. In it, I told a story about 2021 WR/RB Calvin Turner and the heroic performance he put forth vs. New Mexico State to pull my College Fantasy team ahead of my opponent. If you didn’t get a chance to read it, here it is.
Shortly after the publication of this article, I was made aware that the man himself, Mr. Calvin Turner, is in fact, currently in my city. Like, actually—he’s probably in one of these high-rise condos I walk by every day here in Toronto.
Turner currently plays for the Toronto Argonauts CFL team, and lucky me, the CFL season has just kicked off. So, I plan to attend a game in the near future and hopefully purchase a Calvin Turner Argonauts jersey. And if presented the opportunity, I will fanboy over him verbally when crossing paths in the stadium (and I may ask him to sign my forehead if I’m feeling extra courageous).
That 2021 roster is my favourite fantasy squad of all time (and it will never be outdone, most likely). It was a hodgepodge of misfit CFB players that were absolutely dynamite that season. I can only imagine the stratosphere of CFF excellence this roster could have attained had PJ Fleck’s sledgehammer du jour, Mo Ibrahim, not gone down in week one with a torn Achilles (non-contact too!).
It was a collection of players who had transferred up a level (back when it was cool before everybody was doing it). Calvin Turner was a Georgia kid who played as an OPTION QB at Jacksonville college (not to be confused with Jacksonville State) at the FCS level and absolutely tore up that league, before transferring to Hawaii to play RB. He was my kind of player.
Despite being listed as a RB on Hawaii’s roster, Turner was used as both runner and receiver in 2020. Thus, I watched anxiously all offseason in 2021 to see if Fantrax would strip him of his WR eligibility (spoiler: they didn’t) and happily drafted him in the mid-rounds.
I rostered only four receivers on this squad all season long: Turner, Ball State’s Justin Hall (who was very similar to Turner), WKU’s Jerreth Sterns (2021 CFF WR1, triple crown winner), and… *drum roll* Utah State’s diminutive stud Deven Thompkins. If I’m not mistaken, I believe Turner was the only one of the four who was at least six feet tall, and all four were primarily slot receivers.
The whole WR group were Group of Five players… I don’t know that I appreciated that enough in the moment but now I see it clearly: that was gangster AF.
Hall and Turner were kind of carbon copies of each other; they both received passes, ran the ball (particularly in the redzone—LFG), and returned kicks (this league counted return yardage and TDs).
Sterns was his own animal in that WKU system, and Thompkins was more of a classic, vanilla type of stud in CFF. He didn’t have any abnormal usage patterns, but he caught a lot of long passes.
The head coach of that Utah State team was one I was familiar with from the year prior. Blake Anderson was his name, and I rostered a WR of his from the Arkansas State Red Wolves—another one of my all time favourites: Jonathan “the BULLY” Adams.
DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR AND WATCH THESE HIGHLIGHTS.
Anderson’s MO at Arkansas State was that he’d always have an alpha receiver, but that this player was a big, ‘X’ receiver on the outside.
So, that offseason, when assessing the Aggies, it wasn’t obvious who would emerge as Anderson’s go-to guy at Utah State. They didn’t really have any big-time players returning who fit the profile, and this confounded even the sharpest CFF minds, such as myself (that’s meant to read as a joke).
And I’m not going to lie, I didn’t draft Deven Thompkins. I saw him emerge as somewhat of a go-to guy in Utah State’s week one matchup vs. P5/4 opponent Washington State (eight receptions, 94 yards, one TD), and decided to go stealth mode and pick him up for week two. I needed a #4 at WR to sub in when the ‘A’ team guys had a BYE anyways, and so this was seemingly a good fit so long as Thompkins could earn his keep.
He obviously did more than that, finishing the year second behind only his VP colleague, Sterns, in receiving yards. I should also point out that Thompkins did his part for the squad in the story I wrote about in last week’s article (a cheeky six reception, 104 yards receiving and 91 yards returning performance).
Fun fact: Jerreth Sterns is also in the CFL playing for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, so maybe I’ll have to find a game when they’re in town to channel the 2021 vibes in full effect. Unfortunately, Hall is in the UFL and I have no idea what Thompkins is up to these days.
Anyways, the reason I bring all this up is because Mr. Anderson (Blake), is now the OC at Southern Miss. This is a movement CFFers should make a note of because Anderson’s offences have been fuego for the better part of the last decade.
And because it’s Southern Miss and impossible to get information on, I feel like this is fertile ground for one of those CFF studs that comes out of nowhere in week one or two (you know the kind that we all know and love), while we scratch our heads pondering how we all missed it in the offseason.
There is a lot of familiarity in the receiver room, both from the head coach’s perspective (transfers from Marshall), and Anderson’s with Micah Davis coming over after spending the 2023 season in Utah. Here are the top five receivers on the depth chart according to Rotowire: