Photo of Kirkland Michaux courtesy of University of Illinois Athletics/fightingillini.com
BELTON — Kirkland Michaux’s development as a quarterback has come about steadily over the last decade.
As a middle schooler, he was part of the first group of future Westlake quarterbacks mentored by the legendary Todd Dodge, who sits on the Mount Rushmore of Texas high school coaches. As a ninth-grader at Westlake High School, one of Texas’ unquestioned 6A powerhouses, he backed up a future NFL draft pick by the name of Sam Ehlinger, the ninth-ranked quarterback in the Class of 2017.
As a junior, he started the Chaparrals’ state semifinal against powerful Beaumont West Brook with starter Taylor Anderson out, and kept Westlake in contention, throwing for 215 yards.
A year later, in his final game in a Westlake uniform, Michaux became the school’s first signal-caller since Drew Brees to guide the Chaps to a state title, earning Offensive MVP honors after a 285-yard, 3-touchdown performance in a 24-0 shutout of Denton Guyer.
Then came a two-year hiatus from the sport in pursuit of a college baseball dream, before returning to football and once again settling in as a dependable, high-IQ quarterback. Only this time, he did it at the University of Illinois, spending three seasons on the roster of a Big 10 program, and one that closed last fall ranked No. 16 in the AP Top 25 Poll. The Fighting Illini’s third-string quarterback through much of the 2024 regular season, Michaux stood on the sidelines at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium last New Year’s Eve as the team’s backup, one play away from seeing the field in what turned out to be a 21-17 win over South Carolina in the Cheez-it-Bowl.
It has been a winding journey for the Austin native, and that’s only the cliffnotes version. Michaux is just days away from opening a brand-new chapter on the football field, and he won’t be in Champaign this fall. That’s because he’ll be playing in Belton.
The decision to enter the transfer portal in late January as a graduate student came about with much deliberation for the former Austin-area high school star. As Illinois climbed in pedigree over his three seasons with the program, Michaux had earned respect from the coaching staff and saw his name rise on the depth chart, reaching the No. 2 role against South Carolina after Donovan Leary put his name into the portal after the regular season. Even in the weeks following the Fighting Illini’s bowl win, he was in conversations with the coaching staff about possibly returning in 2025, which would likely mean competing for the backup job behind Preseason All-Big 10 honoree Luke Altmyer.
But with eligibility still remaining, Michaux desired an opportunity to push himself in different ways as a quarterback and compete for time under center in a new environment. There was just one problem: the transfer portal had already hit its peak by the time late January rolled around. In this new era of college football, at least in the FBS ranks, the final weeks of the regular season mark the point when portal intensifies. And it moves quickly. By the time Michaux’s name went in, the vast majority of D1s, both FBS and FCS, already had multiple quarterbacks in place for 2025. Roster spots were limited across the board, especially as rumors of an NCAA-imposed roster cap for 2025 gained more validity.
But then came an opportunity at UMHB. And The Cru stood out in a big way.
Taking his talents to Belton made sense for more than a few reasons, both personally and with football in mind. For one thing, his family owns a ranch in Salado, only about 15 minutes from the UMHB campus, so he has familiarity with the area and relatives living close by. The house he grew up in is only a little over an hour from Belton, bringing him far closer to his immediate family than he was in his previous three years at Illinois. And as for his relationship with new offensive coordinator Stephen Lee, Michaux and Lee’s family were already well-connected. Lee’s son, Jarrett, was Michaux’s quarterback coach through middle school, and Lee’s wife, Molly, worked with Michaux’s family’s ranch for some time. Everything seemed to line up just right when he considered what a future at UMHB could look like.
“We know Coach Lee and his family really well, and after going and meeting with him a few times, I felt like it was a great place for me,” Michaux recalled. “If I wasn’t going to play Division I football, UMHB was always at the top of that list. Just from that aspect of, 1) they’re going to compete for a national championship every year and I’ll have good players around me, and 2) the location and being close to home and family.”
Before he even finished high school, Michaux gained the experience of quarterbacking Westlake inside several prominent Texas stadiums, including Baylor’s McLane Stadium, San Antonio’s Alamodome, and AT&T Stadium in Arlington, the home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. Then at Illinois, he found himself in a similar position, dressing out for games at Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium, Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, and Autzen Stadium, home of then-No. 1-ranked Oregon.
But facilities weren’t necessarily the main focus as he went through the portal process and sought a new landing spot. Most of all, he wanted a program that would allow him to compete, and had good people leading the way, both around him on the field and within the coaching staff on the sidelines. Some of the other schools he visited played their home games at a high school, or had a simple grandstand as part of their home field. Then he stepped inside UMHB’s Crusader Stadium. “It’s fantastic,” Michaux said of the 7,671-seat stadium, the third-largest in Division III. “I can’t wait to see it for a gameday.” It’s nowhere close to your typical D3 stadium, and in a way, was a further indication that UMHB was different as he considered his available options.
“I think that was a big part of it too, having guys around me with the same goals and aspirations,” he added. “Going to UMHB, that should be the goal every year, to win a national championship. I haven’t gotten to meet a lot of the guys on the team, but all I can assume from meeting the coaches and the tradition that they have is that they’re going to have the same mindset. The end-all, be-all goal for every team in any level of college football should be to win championships, and I think UMHB gives me and the team a great opportunity to do all of that.”
These are the present-day thoughts of Kirkland Michaux, fully focused on making an impact over the time remaining in his college football career, and doing so with big goals. When you’re brought up in a high school program whose tradition includes five state titles and two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, high aspirations are part of everyday life. But four years ago, Michaux began his fall not by stepping on the gridiron, but on a pitching mound at Blinn Junior College. Football was behind him, part of his past, but not his future. Or so he thought.
The reason for pursuing college baseball was really quite simple, even as UTSA and a couple others came calling for his skill set as a quarterback. His senior year of football was almost magical, written with the storybook ending of confetti falling at midfield of the largest stadium he had ever played in, surrounded by his teammates and coaches, celebrating Westlake’s first state title since 1996.
His senior year of baseball had the beginnings of the same sort of storyline. But then the outlook dramatically changed. Sitting at 8-1 and considered amongst the strongest teams in 6A, Westlake dropped its first game at the elite Frisco Dr. Pepper Tournament on March 12, 2020. As it turned out, they never got the chance to bounce back. Almost overnight, the Covid pandemic shut down spring high school sports, ending Michaux’s hopes to hoist a baseball state championship trophy in heartbreaking fashion. It also left him with the feeling that he had more to give to a sport he had loved from the time he was six years old.
“I think I always wanted to play college baseball more than college football growing up when I was younger,” Michaux recalled. “Then ending on a state championship [in football], I felt like I had closure. In baseball, it was supposed to be a state championship year too.
“All my best friends I started playing baseball with. One of my best friends still to this day, we were on the same baseball team when we were six years old and we played football and baseball all the way through high school together. We had a very good team, and it got cut short. When the season got cancelled, we were a Top 20 team in the national for high school baseball, and a Top 5 team in the state. It was a really projectable season and we were really excited. When that got canceled, I didn’t have the same closure I had with football. So I felt like baseball was where my mind told me to go.”
Prior to his senior year, Michaux was the 91st-ranked right-handed pitcher in Texas in the Class of 2020 by Perfect Game, and in conversations with several upper-level Division I programs, including Texas A&M and Texas State. Even if he wasn’t offered a scholarship, they said, there were preferred walk-on spots available, and he could get an opportunity to prove himself with one of those. But Covid impacted that as well. With the NCAA granting an additional year of eligibility to all spring sport athletes, the number of available roster spots suddenly shrunk at nearly every program as many seniors opted to return and finish their careers with a full season. Michaux was told his next best option was going the junior college route, with the hopes that he would develop further and get his D1 opportunity in two years’ time. So that fall, he made his way to Blinn Junior College, a baseball player-only for the first time in his life.
“When Covid happened, they were like, ‘Dude, we just don’t have spots. You’re going to have to go to the JUCO level,’” Michaux remembers. “So I said, ‘Alright, let’s do it.’”
He made five appearances on the mound for the Buccaneers during his freshman campaign, but it wasn’t long before watching college football on TV started making him rethink leaving football in the past.
“After fall ball my sophomore year, over Christmas break, I was still watching a lot of football and still thought about it a lot,” Michaux said. “I thought I could go do that again. I was at Blinn through January, but in February, I kind of made up my mind that I was going to quit baseball and try to make a comeback in football. I threw my last bullpen at Blinn, and of course it was like the best bullpen I had thrown my entire time there. I remember my coach called me and said, ‘I’m so pumped for you. I can’t wait for this season, and you’re going to be a huge part of this.’ I was like, “Yeah, I need to talk to you tomorrow.’”
Michaux explained his change in heart and desire to give football another go, two years removed from his last time taking snaps. At the time, he had no destination in mind, and knew it would take serious commitment to return to his prior form as a quarterback. It took a leap of faith, especially after the progress made in pitching at Blinn.
“[My coach at Blinn] was so supportive of it and was really great to me,” Michaux added. “So I started training for football, and emailing coaches. I hit Coach [Barry] Lunney [Jr.] up, who was the UTSA offensive coordinator when I was being recruited out of high school. He said, ‘I know you’re not texting me to see how I’m doing. Are you thinking about playing football again?’ I told him yes, and he said, ‘Well I’m at Illinois now. This is perfect timing. We only have four quarterbacks here right now. Come take a visit.’ That was it. I took a visit there and walked on.”
He trained fervently as the 2022 season, his first at Illinois, drew closer. In about six months, he had gone from being a junior college pitcher in Texas to a quarterback on the roster of a Big 10 football program. Talk about a significant change in course.
But while it took time to regain some of his physical skill set on the football field, his IQ as a quarterback had been built up over countless years, starting from his time in middle school. Every day of high school, film study was part of his routine. He could break down defenses without much hesitation, and understood how to expose the opponent’s weaknesses by utilizing the offensive weapons around him. Being able to do those things as a quarterback wasn’t a suggestion in a Westlake program that prides itself on building quarterbacks; it was an expectation. And that foundation helped make the transition back to football a bit more seamless as he entered a redshirt year at Illinois.
“I went straight to JV my first two games as a freshman in high school,” Michaux remembered. “Then Sam Ehlinger got hurt, and there was another injury to a sophomore or junior kid. I was kind of an up-and-coming guy that they projected highly coming into high school, so by no means was I ready, but I think Coach Dodge saw it as an opportunity to start getting a younger kid ready to go.
“I would go watch film with him every lunch when I was a freshman. So I didn’t eat with any of my friends in the cafeteria. Coach Dodge would text me every third period, and say, ‘Bring your lunch up to my office. We’re going to watch an hour of film.’ And I always said, ‘Yes sir, I’ll be there.’ Watching film that early on, by the time I was fully on varsity as a sophomore, and then the backup as a junior, and starting at the end as a senior, I feel like it got me so prepared.
“I went into Illinois after a two-year hiatus from football, but the film study doesn’t leave you. It becomes second-hand nature when you do it for four years. Westlake was run like a college program. Knowing how to watch film vs watching film is such a big difference. You have so many guys that will say, ‘I went in and watched an hour of tape today.’ Okay, what did you look for? What were your keys? Did you go in with a purpose? Are you watching early downs vs third downs? I think Westlake did such a good job of preparing somebody for college football by teaching us how to watch film versus just watching it.”
It wasn’t a straight (or easy) road to Michaux’s high school football pinnacle of starting in the state title game as a senior. He spent two years on the sidelines as future NFL Draft pick Sam Ehlinger guided the Chaps, and as a junior he remained the backup before getting his first career start in Westlake’s state semifinal. But if his first three years were a lesson in patience, his senior year served as a test of both competitiveness and team-first ideals—all at the same time.
Dodge had three top-level quarterbacks at his disposal entering the fall of 2019: Michaux, Drew Willoughby (who would start for two years at D2 Saint Anselm College), and Cade Klubnik (who enters 2025 as Clemson’s starting QB). So rather than award the starting job to one, Dodge and his staff decided to split playing time amongst the trio, at least for the first part of the regular season.
“Those guys were great and that helped me grow too,” Michaux said recently. “Coach Dodge told us, ‘We’re going to play all of y’all and y’all need to root for each other and make each other better.’ It was a competitive thing, because obviously all of us wanted to be the starting quarterback once Week 5 or 6 came around. All I tried to do week in and week out was put myself in the best position possible, and play as well as I could.”
Ultimately, it paid off, as Michaux won the job, and led the Chaps through a monumental playoff run. He and the offense put up stellar numbers through that postseason, averaging 40.8 points per game in five wins leading into the 24-0 shutout of Denton Guyer in the state final. But the defense—guided by former UMHB linebacker and Westlake defensive coordinator Tony Salazar—had just as much firepower. In four of the Chaps’ seven playoff games, Westlake surrendered no more than a single touchdown.
“Being able to be Coach Dodge’s first class through and through, and being able to win a state championship there was one of the coolest things ever,” Michaux recalled. “For Coach Dodge too, I think it meant a lot to him to have his first class do that. And then on the other side of the ball, defense wins championships. Coach Salazar could’ve been a college defensive coordinator at any of those times, and instead he stayed true to Westlake. I love that. I’m really happy that he’s reaping the benefits now as the head coach. His ceiling is so high in coaching.”
Michaux will head to Salazar’s alma mater as the first Westlake alum in UMHB’s program since offensive lineman Kody Allen in 2017. From his days as a Central Texas prep standout to his more recent time in an Illinois uniform, he has seen the game from virtually every vantage point that a quarterback can. Along the way, those experiences shaped his understanding of the position, and seem to have made him a high-quality teammate as well.
“Every week, as a traveling quarterback, you’re prepared as if you’re going to go in,” Michaux said of his time at Illinois. “As a third-string, you’re two plays away. Watching film every week with the starting quarterback, seeing how they want to read [the opposing defense] is important. The starter at Illinois, Luke Altmyer, is a great player and somebody who took a lot of passion into watching film. That helped him slow it down a ton.
“And it’s just being on the sidelines too. At that level, you have a headset on, so I’m getting every play that’s put into the game, and me and the backup are on the sidelines going through the play as they’re running it. You’re not on the field making the plays, but you’re still a huge part of it with helping the quarterback, getting the reads, and doing the same stuff.
“Even in the bowl game this past year, knowing I was one play away the entire time, I really took it upon myself to prepare as if I was going to start. I felt very ready to go, and obviously getting those practice reps—a lot of them—over my three years there, really prepared me for whatever I was asked to do.”
With UMHB’s fall camp still yet to begin, there’s no indication on what Michaux’s role with The Cru will be in Week 1. But at the forefront of his mind is an excitement for what lays ahead, both in his own football journey and for his new team. “I’m super pumped,” Michaux noted. “I can’t wait for September 6th.”
What a great opportunity for him and UMHB!