Oft-injured Boyd healthy, hopes to catch on with WSU
PULLMAN – Cody Boyd stops to think for a moment, but can’t quite recall what malady affected his first year on the field with Washington State.
Scanning his own media guide bio, he sees a recap that jogs the memory.
“Ohhhhh, that’s right …” he nods.
It’s been a long four years for Boyd at WSU. Considered one of the more athletic players on the team, the 6-foot-8 tight end has been hampered by a series of misfortunes that have left him on the sidelines more often than not.
Always an X-factor of sorts playing behind Troy Bienemann, Boyd now finds himself front and center as a fifth-year senior starting. If, that is, he can stay healthy.
“We’ve got to do a great job of getting him to the first football game,” first-year tight ends coach Greg Peterson says. “Whether that means restricting some of the things he does in practice, so be it. The second point is, he’s got to toughen up. He wants to have a viable role on offense with us, he’s got to be tough-minded and physical, which he can. And just say, ‘Hey, I’m staying out of that training room.’”
To say the least, that has not been the norm. After an event-free redshirt freshman year, Boyd has been, more or less, injured ever since. As a second-year freshman he started against UCLA, only to suffer a hip bruise in the third quarter. Playing for the WSU basketball team that winter, he aggravated a football-related shoulder injury, requiring labrum surgery.
As a sophomore Boyd struggled with a case of the butterfingers, only to make a long catch-and-run at Arizona the concluded with a hit that separated his shoulder, shelving him for another month. And one game after returning, he cracked a bone in his right foot, prompting more surgery.
Things should have been fine for Boyd after sitting out spring practices preceding his junior year, but two weeks before the end of summer workouts, that same right foot started flaring up. A second look at an MRI of the foot showed three holes in the heel bone, one of which was more than an inch deep.
That injury held him out of the first two games and a number of practices all year long. Another February trip to the operating room — and the injection of cadaver bone to fill the holes — seems to have fixed the problem.
And so it is that Boyd, long removed from that first year at WSU, is healthy again for the first time since it.
“I did every single workout all summer long,” he says. “Ran as much as possible, did all of the gassers, which is big for us.”
Boyd, of course, also played a key role in the Cougars’ Apple Cup win last fall, catching two third-down passes on the game-winning drive. His potential as a safety valve for quarterback Alex Brink is clear. Now, both Peterson and Boyd say, it’s just a matter of making potential a reality before time runs out on his WSU career.
“If something happens, it does, and I can’t really stop it,” Boyd says. “I’ve got to stay out of (the training room) as much as possible. I swing through there every now and then just to grab some ice but I try not to let them hang onto me for too long.”
Notes
Linebacker Cory Evans sat out practice with a groin pull. … At cornerback, junior college transfers Markus Dawes and Brian Williams are working with the second-team defense in passing drills behind Tyron Brackenridge, the one established starter, and senior Don Turner. … Peterson said tight end Jason Price is not “in the doghouse” because of his academic issues. But Price, still at home, can’t show up at WSU unless he does take care of a class or two first.