J.K. Dobbins has been built for heavy workload since middle school

No cell phones on the sidelines. Simple rule, really.

Matt Kates had to request his own rule be ignored for the debut of a seventh-grade running back.

The kid’s name? J.K. Dobbins.

“It sounds kind of funny, I’m going into my 19th year of coaching and 10th as a head coach, and in these towns, we see ’em coming from kindergarten,” Matt Kates, Dobbins’ coach at LaGrange (Texas) High School, told Lettermen Row. “Obviously with his name and his dad [Lawrence Dobbins] being a great athlete here, it was like, ‘Oh, he’s going to be good.’ But his seventh grade year is the time you go, ‘Oh, God, OK he’s going to be really special.’

“I don’t let coaches text on the sideline or anything. But I did say ‘Text me at halftime of his first-ever seventh-grade game.’ It was a road game, started at 5, and by 5:15, I had a text saying he had 180 yards, two touchdowns. I said, ‘OK, there we go.’”

By the end of Dobbins’ sophomore season, the scholarship offers for the 5-foot-10, 217-pounder had started to trickle into LaGrange. Texas Christian and Gary Patterson had been first; Oklahoma, Texas A&M and a bevy of other powerhouse programs responded soon after Dobbins’ 2,200-yard, 37-touchdown breakout campaign.

This after Dobbins started every game of his high school freshman season as a cornerback because LaGrange already had a college-bound tailback.

“We knew as eighth-grader, coming into his freshman year, what everybody did, that he would be varsity as a freshman — just too talented, and he needed to play up from beginning,” Kates said. “We asked where was he going to help? He started at corner and played a lot of slot receiver.”

By season’s end, Dobbins showcased what would become a staple of his prep career.

“We were 13-1, ran into a state juggernaut in the semifinals, and he probably got 10 to 15 carries all year long, but even those flashes were like ‘Oh, my God!’,” Kates said. “We were losing by three touchdowns in the semifinal game, late in the fourth, and we gave him the football a couple times, a jet sweep the first time. There’s four minutes to go versus the team that’s now six-time state champions, Carthage, a hell of a program, and he takes it 60 yards.

“My brother, Will, is the offensive coordinator, and he just starts saying, ‘God, I’m stupid. I’m stupid.’ I had to tell him, ‘Will, we’re 13-0 and in the semis.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but did you see that?’”

The Kates brothers and all of Texas prep football got to see a transcendent prep career unfold for Dobbins, who closed with more than 5,100 rushing yards and 74 touchdowns despite a broken bone in his foot precluding Dobbins from his senior season.

By that time, Dobbins had been pledged a year to the Buckeyes and made all the necessary sacrifices to graduate high school as a mid-year enrollee at Ohio State.

“He’s such a great kid, intelligent, always had A’s and B’s, had Stanford in the mix, Notre Dame, had some hard-to-get-into places as a normal student,” Kates said. “He had all of those. He kind of had to make those decisions [about being an early graduate]. Some of those schools, like Stanford, they don’t take early transfers and freshmen early, and he really wanted to be an early enrollee because he knew he could play early anywhere — not conceitedly, but confidence-wise.”

Having seen Ezekiel Elliott blossom into a star, Kates said, Dobbins kept looking at Ohio State. And the Buckeyes kept looking at Dobbins but also made clear their space was limited and their recruiting territory spanned the nation.

“Being at Ohio State, Tony [Alford] made no bones about it,” Kates said. “He’s got two spots and is recruiting the whole country. When it’s a numbers game like that, you’ve got to be smart in commitments.

“Ultimately, Tony did a heck of a job, but so did a lot of schools. A lot of them did their job, but it was just a matter of Tony being a big part of it and also the prestige that Ohio State is going to take just one running back. When you have Cam Akers one week on campus and Najee Harris the week before and if this is place, that’s kind of one of the conversations we had. Which one would you just be sick about if they took a commitment and your spot was gone? And that was Ohio State.”

Last fall, as Ohio State battled TCU in an early-season national college football showcase game in Dallas at AT&T Stadium, Kates saw once again the player Dobbins has become. The person? Dobbins hasn’t changed there, either.

“Being an old Emmitt Smith Cowboys fan, to see J.K. still run it up their face to finish off the game was pretty fun to watch, especially in this day and age with how many times teams are throwing the football,” Kates said. “He is family to us. I’ve known him since he was in fourth grade. I couldn’t be more proud of him.

“We all know how good a football player he is, but the type of young man he is, I’m way more proud of that than anything else. He’s got his priorities in line and takes care of the classroom and his talent takes care of the football.”

In other words, J.K. Dobbins is the type of player that can make a coach break his own rules.