LOS ANGELES — If the Pirate loved you, he would spare no praise. If the Pirate loved you, he would stroll past you in the halls of his football facility and call you a stud. An absolute stud. It was a broken record. You’re just a stud.
If the Pirate loved you, usually, it meant you were tough. Mike Leach’s programs, at Texas Tech and Washington State and Mississippi State before his death at 61, were built on toughness. On tough people. He gravitated toward them.
And Leach once called running back Jo’Quavious “Woody” Marks – as former Mississippi State running backs coach Eric Mele recalled – “tougher than boot leather.”
In a game against Alabama during Marks’ junior season, as former Mississippi State offensive line coach Mason Miller remembered, Marks blew up a rusher blocking on a corner blitz. Mississippi State called timeout. Marks returned to the huddle, taking off his helmet.
Miller did a double-take.
“What’s wrong with your nose?” Miller asked him, because the kid’s nose was crooked.
“I think I broke it,” Marks responded.
He was correct. He stuffed cotton swabs in his nostrils, and played the rest of the game.
“Mike always liked tough people,” Miller said. “Tough people do tough things. And I think Woody kind of, really embraced that.”
For four years, at Mississippi State, Woody Marks did the tough things even if they were things he never quite expected. A highly recruited back out of Atlanta, Georgia, he committed to the Bulldogs in 2019 for then-head coach Joe Moorhead’s run-heavy offense; a few months later, Moorhead was canned, replaced by Leach and an Air Raid scheme in which handoffs were afterthoughts.
Marks, a kid who has always assembled his sentences in the fewest words possible, did not complain. He stayed. He ran, a little. He blocked, a lot. He caught the most passes – as a running back – of anyone in Mississippi State history.
And when the time came this offseason to find a new program, wanting to prove he could be a true workhorse back in his final year of college eligibility, transfer Marks was drawn to USC and Lincoln Riley – a Leach disciple in a program healthy with Leach disciples. General Manager Dave Emerick spent two-plus years with Marks at Mississippi State. So did Director of Player Engagement Brittany Thackery.
“I think having that,” Riley said Thursday, “gave us even more reassurance that he was the right guy.”
Marks has rewarded the faith, and then some, just a few games into his USC career. As Big Ten defenses have sometimes grounded Riley’s evolved Air Raid with soft-zone coverages, the former Mississippi State back has become the heartbeat of USC’s offense. The stats have popped loud, with 468 yards on 5.8 yards per carry. The boot-leather toughness has popped louder.
A few weeks ago in Ann Arbor, with USC trailing Michigan by 10 points in the third quarter, quarterback Miller Moss was sacked and stripped. Michigan defensive lineman Kenneth Grant, motoring in all his 6-foot-3, 339-pound glory, scooped up the loose ball and charged up the field as Marks turned and pursued.
In one swoop, Marks, a head shorter and half a man smaller, hit Grant directly in his arms and ripped the ball back away as he tumbled to the turf.
“One of the best single-player efforts,” Moss said a few days later, “that I’ve ever seen on any individual play.”
Somewhere, in all certainty, it would have made the Pirate smile.
‘Once-in-a-lifetime kid’
Tameka Marks’ son was born with a little puff of hair that rested, snugly, on the crown of his head, and she thought to herself her baby looked like a lil’ woodpecker.
When he was a little older, Marks became fascinated with “Toy Story,” and Tameka bought her son a Woody cowboy costume. He wanted to wear it school. Every day. She let him, until the months went by and the fabric grew so thin it could barely stretch over his knees.
Jo’Quavious was hard to remember, and hard to pronounce, anyway. At 6 years old, Marks had an asthma attack, and Tameka brought him to the hospital. When her mother arrived, later, she suddenly realized she couldn’t remember her grandson’s birth name to see him.
Well, his name’s Woody, she tried to explain to hospital staffers. Woody Marks.
It was a name of blissful childhood innocence – pronounced “Woo-dee,” with a Southern twang – born from one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Atlanta. Lakewood Heights, as Marks’ former Carver High assistant Quinton Wesley put it, was “one of the areas you don’t make it out.”
Sirens wailed nightly. Gunshots fired nightly. Drugs traded hands nightly. One of Marks’ former middle school friends, who Wesley had as a student, recently posted a congratulatory message on social media for Marks from prison with a contraband phone, as Wesley described.
“He’s a once-in-a-lifetime kid, just to be real with you,” Wesley said of Marks. “You know what I’m saying? Like, he overcame a lot.”
Tameka raised her three children, Marks the youngest, as she was raised. Respect your elders, she told them. Respect everyone, regardless if they respect you. Go to school. Do what you’re told. Come home, and take care of your family.
He’s always been nothing but business, his coaches say. His problems lay elsewhere, growing up. That hospitalization for asthma when he was 6 wasn’t unique. Marks had two inhalers growing up, prone to bouts of strained breathing at any given moment he was simply sitting down, and he was seriously allergic to about six different types of grass.
And yet, for some reason, Marks never had a problem with any of it when he touched a football field. Doctors never figured out, to this day, what triggered his asthma.
“I was like, ‘Okay, so, I mean,’” Tameka recalled, “this is your profession.”
As Marks grew into a four-star running back at Atlanta’s Carver High, his mother brought dinner for his team every Friday night. Once, she was in the hospital for a week with sickness, got discharged on a Friday, and went and shivered in the bleachers that same night under a pile of blankets. Tameka didn’t miss her son’s games.
“He had a reason from day one,” Wesley said. “He had a purpose, from day one.”
A couple of years into his time at Mississippi State, Marks had tacked on 20 pounds, a workhorse in a complementary back’s role. And soon, running backs coach Mele decided on a new name besides Woody.
“I was like, ‘We need to get rid of that,’” Mele recalled, “and start calling him Iron Man.”
A Midnight Marauder-turned-Trojan
The offseasons at Mississippi State were famous for a late-night training program that Leach dubbed “Midnight Marauders.”
At the end of each session, Leach would call out individual players and hand them t-shirts according to a grading system. Players who “kicked ass,” as Mele put it, received a black T-shirt. Players who were decent got a gray shirt. Players who faltered were handed a pink T-shirt a size small.
From his very first Midnight Marauders workouts, Marks was a black T-shirt guy.
In high school, Tameka and Marks made the 4-hour drive from Atlanta to Mississippi State upward of 10 times, because she told her son that wherever he chose to go he’d stay. And the two researched Leach’s offense plenty, after the legendary head coach was named Morehead’s replacement in January 2020. Marks was committed to Mississippi State for the overall program. And so he stayed.
“He can be so loyal,” Wesley reflected, “to the point that it hurts him.”
He never received more than 121 carries in a single season. Marks could have left Mississippi, as Wesley said, a long time ago. But Leach loved him, and Marks was committed to finishing his degree as he grew as a pass-catcher, only deciding to move on after a tumultuous 2023 season following Leach’s death in December 2022.
After initially wanting to enter the NFL Draft, Marks decided to utilize a final year of eligibility. The goal: prove to everyone, as Carver High head coach Darren Myles said, that he could be a true lead back. And after evaluating a variety of schools in the transfer portal – Georgia, Washington, Ohio State – Marks was drawn to USC.
Then-running backs coach Kiel McDonald was on his way out the door, about to take a job under Jim Harbaugh with the NFL’s Chargers. But in a sort-of final gift to USC, McDonald visited Marks around five times while he was in the portal, pitching him that he could fill a role similar to former Oklahoma back Joe Mixon: a versatile rush-and-pass-catching threat in Riley’s early Sooners offenses.
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“I think there was kind of a feeling that if this guy could stay healthy,” Riley said Thursday, as Marks struggled with a hamstring injury during his senior season, “he could really do some good things and really flourish in our offense.”
Marks has flourished early in 2024, his stock growing nationally as he has established himself as a true bell-cow in USC’s offense, gashing Minnesota’s defense last week to the tune of 134 yards and a touchdown on 20 carries.
And yet, in a flash of the demeanor that once so endeared him to Leach and has now endeared him to Riley, Marks shrugged it all off Tuesday. He hadn’t proven anything yet, Marks affirmed.
“Not living up to 130 yards,” Marks said. “I think that’s below-average in our room. We try to go over 150.”
“So, we hold ourselves to a higher standard, and we gon’ get to that.”
USC running back Woody Marks meets with reporters during the Trojans’ preseason media day earlier this summer at Heritage Hall. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
