Gamecocks tailback commit has speed, energy. And no one calls him by his given name
Caleb McDowell never seemed to stay still.
The Lee County High School star running back was always bouncing around Friday night, even in pregame. He danced to the music and sped through drills, looking like he had a little extra energy to get out. And the moment he got on the field, he seemed to unleash a lot of it.
He reversed field on an outside run, slipped one tackler and shook another, and knifed through a Lithia Springs defense for 64 yards.
The energy never seemed to waiver, even on the sideline. If he was out, he was talking, joking with teammates. Well after the game was out of hand and he wasn’t taking offensive snaps, he raced across the field to congratulate fullback DeBo Roberts after catching a touchdown.
“He’s our leader. He sets the tone for the team,” Trojans coach Dean Fabrizio said. “Everybody follows him and he’s a great player.”
In a year, McDowell will be bringing his energy and considerable speed to the Gamecocks. He only carried the ball eight times against Lithia Springs. Four times he scored. He posted 120 yard and had a pair of nice punt returns.
“The start of the season has been going pretty good,” McDowell said. “We came out strong, two wins, blowouts. We had a tough game against Lowndes, No. 9 team in the nation, we lost our focus a little bit. It was a hiccup. We bounced back.
“We’re rolling from here.”
What stood out even more were some of the diverse ways Fabrizio chose to deploy McDowell. The senior is listed at 5-foot-10, 178 pounds, and he’s playing less defense than in the past year. But he sometimes shares the backfield with another tailback and was used on the wing at times, where tight ends often line up.
That put him in position to show off a different part of his skill set that he relishes.
“This first year is really like the first season since 2017 that we bought the wing back,” McDowell said. “So it’s really new back in Lee County, but recently we’ve been working with it a lot. But me, not caring about putting out and I’m the type of guy that likes to block, so it’s fixing well. It was the perfect scheme.”
Fabrizio pointed out that his star runner has a rare mix of top-end speed and short-space quickness.
The South Carolina staff is keeping in contact, showing him some of the different ways they might use him in Columbia. He admitted he’s a little anxious to join the team.
He said no one coach led his recruiting, but instead it was a team effort.
“That’s one thing I prized with South Carolina,” McDowell said. “They formed a bond with me from the get-go. Every single coach up there, and that’s something rare that you don’t find anywhere else in the country.”
He said his commitment was solid and no other schools have reached out to try to flip him.
He liked the toughness he saw out of South Carolina’s first game, a tight loss to Tennessee.
McDowell played out Friday’s game on the same field where current Gamecock Jammie Robinson comes back to work out when he’s home. The Gamecocks are building a bit of a pipeline to the Trojans with McDowell and with Robinson, who led the team to two state tiles and jumped into the Gamecocks lineup as a freshman. Plus they’re after four-star Lee County junior linebacker Jaron Willis.
But talk to folks in the program in Leesburg, a small town located just north of Albany, Georgia and 30 minutes off Interstate 75, and no one calls McDowell by the name Caleb.
It’s Ju-Ju for a specific reason.
“My first name, my government name is Caleb,” McDowell said. “Caleb is the warrior in the Bible. He derived from the village of Judah. So the Ju, the first Ju, that’s where Ju-Ju derives from.”
