The 6 a.m. alarm never quit for Joshua McMillon that summer. This wasn’t supposed to be easy, he recognized, though this schedule was a brute.
Class from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Two hours in a lab after that, followed by a trip to the Alabama football complex.
“I had to work out by myself,” McMillon remembers, “because I was in class during the workout time.”
Every day for two months, this was the life because becoming the first starting Nick Saban-era football player to graduate from Alabama with an engineering degree was worth the sacrifice.
Part I of that feat came last December when the Memphis native crossed the stage to receive his mechanical engineering degree in Coleman Coliseum.
The football glory, it turned out, had to wait. In prime position to start last fall, McMillon tore his ACL in preseason camp just weeks before the opener. The NCAA then granted him a sixth year of eligibility after redshirting his freshman season, so he’ll have his shot at a primary role on the Crimson Tide defense this fall.
McMillon, now pursuing his master’s degree in marketing, certainly took the long route to this moment. The academic side was a beast, he can now say, despite arriving at Alabama with confidence in the classroom. School always came easy for McMillon, and the first few years of undergrad weren’t too bad either.
The further he progressed in the College of Engineering, the more taxed he felt. McMillon remembers sprinting from football practices to study sessions to keep pace with classmates not juggling the Crimson Tide’s complex playbook and this advanced field of study.
At times, he thought it might be too much.
“Look, Dad, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he remembers saying in phone calls home. “I think I need to change. Should I focus on football? Should I focus on school?”
Why not both?
“I just kept with the plan,” McMillon said, "stuck to it and he’s thanked me a million times and I’ve thanked him because without him being in my corner ...
“My mom, my aunt, my finance, everybody has been in my corner.”
That includes Chuck Karr, the dean of Alabama’s College of Engineering.
“Oh,” McMillion said, “me and Karr have a great relationship.”
They go back to a college fair at the Memphis Botanic Garden that McMillon attended as a high school junior. That was seven years ago.
Karr was there representing UA when McMillon’s mom approached him for an introduction the dean still recalls. She told him her son would be the next star linebacker at Alabama, a claim he’s heard before in conversations like this.
“And I end up walking up to him and he was like ‘Golly, she wasn’t wrong,’” McMillion remembers Karr saying.
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The dean remembers that 20 minute conversation when the young student asked about juggling aerospace engineering with playing for Nick Saban. He originally wanted to be an astronaut but a 6-foot-3, 241-pound frame doesn’t exactly fit in a Falcon 9. So, he went with mechanical engineering.
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for Josh McMillon because he probably had a thousand opportunities to move out of engineering into some other program,” Karr said. “But he was just adamant he was here to get an engineering degree and he has stuck with it and has been tenacious about it. And you just have to have a lot of respect for people who do that.”
McMillon isn’t the first to try.
Others, including former defensive lineman DeShawn Hand, gave engineering a go before changing majors. Hand famously picked Alabama over Michigan, citing the engineering program as a deciding factor for one of the nation’s top recruits in 2013. Now in the NFL, Hand graduated from Alabama in three and a half years with a business degree.
McMillon arrived in Tuscaloosa without the athletic fanfare of Hand. He was the nation’s No. 241 prospect (16th among outside linebackers) as a solid four-star in the 247Sports evaluation.
“He’s not a natural athlete where he has all of these Combine, jumping-off stats,” said his high school coach Rodney Saulsberry. “But he’s a very sound athlete who is able to get the job done. Sometimes it takes time for that to develop.”
A torn ACL his senior season at Whitehaven High stole some momentum before he enrolled at Alabama. He redshirted that 2015 season after arriving in the same recruiting class as Calvin Ridley, Da’Ron Payne and future roommate Minkah Fitzpatrick. All three are now entering their third NFL season while McMillon is ready for his shot.
He played reserve roles from 2016 to 2018 with future draft picks Reggie Ragland, Reuben Foster, Rashaan Evans, Shaun Dion Hamilton and Mack Wilson ahead of him on the depth chart at some point in his Alabama career. Wilson’s exit to the NFL left a spot open at middle linebacker for 2019 — the same fall semester in which he’d complete that engineering degree.
Instead, he tore up his knee Aug. 10 in a scrimmage. Dylan Moses would do the same a few weeks later, suddenly leaving Alabama without the experience and knowledge the two brought to a role that’s effectively the quarterback of the defense.
He could’ve taken that mechanical engineering degree and moved on to lucrative employment. Instead, McMillion made a decision he would later say was easy.
“It was just a bad taste left in my mouth, from the past year,” he said. “Going 11-2, I don’t want to end my college career on a bad note like that. I don’t think anyone who came to the University of Alabama would want to end like this.”
And he might not be done after this fall, either. The NCAA is granting an extra year of eligibility to fall sports athletes playing through the pandemic, and McMillon told AL.com he’s keeping all options open for what would be a seventh season with the program.
“I mean, I want to make the best of all of my opportunities I have,” he said. “It’s definitely being taken into consideration.”
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For this fall, Moses also returned in a boon for middle linebacker depth. Rising sophomores Christian Harris and Shane Lee were thrown to the fire after Moses and McMillon went down as the pair started almost every game of 2019.
It will be McMillon’s grasp of the defense that gets him on the field as defensive coordinator Pete Golding acknowledged last August.
“We’ve got guys who are more athletic than he is and he knows that,” Golding said before last season. “I told him that. But his ability to get guys lined up, make the calls, and then he’s smart enough based on the formation and a back set, tendencies that we’ll give him and that he studies, that he can anticipate things which allows him to perform at the line and make some plays that athletically maybe other people couldn’t just because he understands, obviously, what’s coming.”
That comes with being a member of two national championship teams and playing with a “countless number of first-rounders.”
It’s all coming together for McMillon six years after picking Alabama and resisting any temptation for change ever since.
He’s on the verge of doing something rarely if ever accomplished, but more importantly, McMillon has the degree that was the actual goal all along.
“His athletic career is a lot like his academic career,” said Karr, the engineering dean at Alabama. "I’m sure he could have turned tail and run somewhere else a thousand times over, but he stuck with it in football and it looks like it may well pay off. He stuck with it in engineering.
“It looks like it may well pay off.”
Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.
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